Chapter 1374 (Patreon)

After discovering the winged lizards, I continued my journey east. Night after night, I kept flying, setting up small shelters with runic anchors near dawn before stepping through the shadows so I could deal with other things. I had no wish to fly during the day, as constant sun exposure remained a serious challenge, though I could handle intermittent exposure fairly well by now. However, if I were to try flying on a cloudless day, I had a feeling I would imitate Icarus, not something I ever want to experience. So, I only took to the sky for longer journeys when the sun was hidden behind the horizon. 

During that second night, I also realised something else. I needed a set-up for the shelters, some method that allowed me to distinguish the runic anchors, or I might get into trouble. For now, with only a very limited number of anchors, things were manageable, but it also limited me. So far, I only had anchors in my towers, the prison I had built, the one at the Temple of the First Dragon, and, lastly, those near the giants and now the winged lizards. But if I kept expanding, not just from Jademoon Tower, but maybe from other places, like the Nexus Tower or maybe some position down south, I would quickly run into trouble trying to keep things straight in my head. 

Even notes would only have limited utility, as anything too arcane was increasingly difficult to describe in words, simply because the vocabulary was a little limited. Adapting words with similar meanings from other terminology worked to a degree, as did inventing new words for my own personal use, but that had limits. Those limits were especially important if I ever wanted to share the network I was building with my daughter, simply because she perceived magic differently than I. Trying to communicate the specific flavour or scent associated with a rune anchor would give both of us a serious headache. Not something I wanted or needed. 

Because of that, I spent the night developing a designation system. The idea was that I would add a single string of characters- not even runes, but simply old, elven letters I had come across on Mundus- to every rune anchor. The elven characters worked fairly well with the runes, much like the connecting patterns I had learned on Mundus, adding connectivity between the different runes without hindering their function; they merely enhanced it. With the connecting patterns, that increased the efficiency of the runic formation by a measurable amount- not orders of magnitude, but enough to be noticeable. The characters I was using now didn’t do that; they merely added a unique and easily recognisable twist to each anchor, something I could write down and, hopefully, communicate to others with relative ease. They might need a bit of training to recognise the characters and learn to feel them through the Astral River, but I had little doubt that it was possible. Maybe not particularly easy, but certainly possible. 

While I wasn’t sure how future-proof I needed my system to be, I decided to go with a combination of easily expandable without making it overly complicated. Given that I was planning to set these shelters up in lines away from central points, like my towers and similar structures, I started each designation with two characters for the origin, then one for the spoke, followed by three to indicate the position on the spoke, giving me a lot of possible combinations. If a line of runic anchors was ever long enough to need more than that, it was also long enough that setting up a new hard-point, something like my towers, would be worthwhile. If I ever got that far, which I doubted given the distance I could easily cover within a day of travel. I would likely run out of continent before I ran out of anchor designations. 

Either way, the system I had designed would hopefully work for a long, long time, so I could readily add these identifiers to new runic anchors, allowing me to spread my influence without worries. I might even figure out a way to allow others, beyond my daughter, to access it, though I had no real idea how. Maybe there was a way to tack it onto the whole Mother, or maybe Pale Lady, thing, create it as a divinely granted ability, but that was a bit of a stretch. Given that I had no idea how that would work, or if I even had the ability to interface with my divine aspects that way, I considered it for a minute or two while flying over the seemingly endless prairie. It was quite impressive how quickly the old signs of civilisation, the fields, roads and towns, had been completely buried by nature. 

Though it also made me worry about the people who had lived here. How many of those had survived, or rather, how few? If an area like the Denver, Colorado Springs area, with its large population and relatively easy access to freshwater through rivers coming down from the mountain, only had a survival rate of a few per cent, how bad was it out here? Did anyone survive?

Over the next few days, I received an answer to that question. There were a few survivors, or at least I had seen smoke and some signs of civilised activity in the distance. Nothing significant enough to catch my interest, at least nothing that pushed me into leaving my chosen path. It looked like the people here had clustered around local water sources, like creeks, lakes and similar places, but whether they made permanent homes there or lived a nomadic lifestyle, I had no idea. I might investigate at some point, but for now, I just didn’t have enough interest in meeting new people to venture off my chosen path. Maybe I could send one of my daughters this way, though I wasn’t sure it would be a good idea.

Luna was quite good with people, at least if the people were cooperative, but not so adept at making the right initial impression, while Lia was, well… Lia had her strengths when it came to meeting new people, but given that she occasionally regarded people as food or prey, the initial impression could be just as problematic. Completely hit-or-miss, with a high chance of hitting the people if they worshipped Sunna. She might even expand that to hitting anyone who worshipped a solar deity, or maybe even any deity at all, unless she already knew the people involved. 

Since she had discovered that the blood of people worshipping Sunna was quite spicy, she had been a little too curious. Maybe too curious for her own good, but I wasn’t about to judge, just because she wanted to sample a wider variety of blood. Mine remained her primary source of magic, but the time between feedings had grown longer and longer over the last few weeks, ever since she started to actively snack on the people she was investigating. Or maybe calling her actions stalking would be more appropriate. 

Regardless, sending either of them on their own might be foolish, though sending both wouldn’t be much better. Maybe getting Maggie, or one of the other communities in the area around Jademoon Tower, to send a few people might be the best idea. My daughters could go along if they wanted, but a few baseline humans were probably the best for the first contact. Unless the people here weren’t human either. Given my observation of the Sasquatsh, who had once been Shattered, I wasn’t willing to place any bets on the race of any local, bipedal population.

Other than the few, distant signs of civilised activity, I mostly saw fairly large groups of herbivores. I had no idea whether I primarily saw them because they didn’t have any natural predators, and wouldn’t until natural evolution and the change imposed by the system returned enough to fill that niche, or because it was a lot easier to see herds numbering in the thousands compared to the beasts preying on those herds.

Not that it truly mattered; I wasn’t overly interested in the herds here. The prairie was vast, and the change had restored enough greenery for the resurgent herds to spread for some time before nature was too far out of balance. Though, given past performance, I wasn’t too worried about that; the system seemed to be based on a relatively balanced spread. 

Which might be why the number of humans had been reduced so much, to cull them back to a manageable number, giving other races, like the giants, a chance to catch their footing instead of having them compete against billions of people.

Now, with the dominant species of the planet no longer so dominant and nature having received a massive shot in the arm from the system, the competition between species would be fierce once more. After all, only the fittest, those who adapted best to their circumstances, would survive. Only that magic made that a lot more interesting than it had ever been.