Chapter 1379 (Patreon)

After digging the small cave for my latest short-term shelter, I didn’t just lay down the formation I needed to anchor my shadow steps. Instead, I conjured a comfortable chair, not as magnificent as my usual throne but more than just a seat, and laid down a slightly more expansive runic formation on the ground around it. The formation would serve as an anchor in the future and carried the correct symbols for its position, but it would also help me now. 

Once it was placed, I sat down on the seat and closed my eyes, letting my mind and body relax for a bit. Flying through the entire night wasn’t terribly exhausting, not with my system-improved body, but it came with a certain fatigue that I didn’t need right now. So, I simply sat there, dozing off a little to let my mind and body rest. I might even have fallen into actual sleep; it could be a little difficult to tell if I had slept or simply lost track of time. Either way, I was rather rested when I opened my eyes again, even if it was a lot later in the morning than I had intended.

After a few moments of contemplation, I let my eyes fall shut again, but this time the reason was quite different. Instead of relaxing and letting my mind drift, I was purposely projecting myself into the Astral River, letting the seemingly infinite power contained within flow around me. There was something humbling about the experience, the realisation that, no matter how powerful I became, the sheer vastness of the Astral would always dwarf me. Maybe even that, no matter how far I walked on my path, I would never reach an end.

In some ways, it might be a little disheartening. All the learning, all the understanding I achieved, all the information I gathered, it was all nothing but a drop in an infinite ocean. In other ways, the more I learned, and the more I recognised how much more there was to learn, the more excited I got. How boring would a world be if there was nothing to learn anymore? How depressing, how dreary and dull would such a world be if I couldn’t chase the horizon any longer, if I already knew what was hidden behind the next bend in the road and what was lurking on the far side of every hill? If I had explored the bowels of the earth, had plumbed the secrets of the deepest oceans and stood atop the highest mountains, only to realise that there was nothing more to do? Nothing more to find, nothing more to discover? 

I wouldn’t want to live in such a world, so knowing that the physical realm I was exploring was only one layer of reality was as comforting as it was humbling. If I ever ran out of secrets to explore, and the people around me failed to capture my attention, I could always delve deeper into the Astral River and explore its shores.

It might even open up a path to the stars of the physical world. After all, I already knew that I could transmit my mind through the Astral at speeds faster than anything I could achieve in the physical world. The limiting factor seemed to be my ability to direct myself, respond to stimuli and find what I was looking for. If I wasn’t limiting myself to the physical reality of Terra, how far would I be able to see? Would I be able to find Mundus, maybe visit a few people there?

For now, I didn’t have the strength, but given that the Grandmother had been able to project her mind to Terra and take control of a simulacrum, I felt fairly confident in achieving the same. Maybe even more, if I found a way to create a simulacrum at range, though that wasn’t the only challenge. However, that was something I could consider in the future, once I had achieved my local goals and cleared some items off my ever-expanding list. It was already far too long, and I didn’t think it would stop growing just because I focused on a different, incredibly challenging item on it. 

Shaking off those thoughts, I focused my mind into the Astral River. First, I oriented myself, using the anchors behind me. That gave me a fair idea regarding my trajectory, though I wasn’t able to readily identify distances. Hel, even my best chance to identify them didn’t work out, as the anchors behind me weren’t all the same distance from one another, not even close. Not that I should have expected them to be, as I hadn’t exactly kept a schedule for my nightly flights, meaning that I had occasionally started right at dusk and carried on until dawn forced me to the ground and on other nights, I had started some time after midnight and only travelled for a few hours. To say nothing of differences in terrain and wind forcing even more delays and messing with my speed. I probably should be rather proud that the line I used for orientation was relatively straight, though even there I hadn’t been all that clean. Now, focusing on the progression of anchors behind me, I could sense that a few were a little off that imaginary line, or maybe the line itself wasn’t as straight as I wanted it to be; the lack of reference points made it difficult to tell. 

Regardless, I now had a heading and started to expand my mind in that direction, feeling for familiar sensations. I was confident I would easily recognise the sensation a shrine of Lady Hecate would have in the Astral, especially one that I had created myself. Similarly, I was fairly certain I would be able to feel the charland, simply because it was such an anomaly, though the certainty there was less. There might be other areas as strange as it out there, or it might have fundamentally changed since I had been here the last time; I simply didn’t know. And I would only find out if I got there. 

So, I simply let my mind expand, careful to keep myself from brushing too close to the banks of the river and getting entangled by the physical reality intruding on the Astral. It was a delicate dance, to stay deep enough in the streams of power to conserve energy and keep my strength up, without letting myself get drawn too deep into the Astral, to the point that I wasn’t able to sense anything about the physical reality outside the River any longer. Or worse, to lose track of myself and drown in the Astral River. Just because I was powerful didn’t mean the Astral River was without its dangers. It was more welcoming than the Shadows, but I had no doubt that both realms were incredibly dangerous to those carelessly wandering too deep into them, who strayed too far from the anchoring reality of the physical world.

For a while, I simply let my mind drift along the river's currents, trying to get a feel for the physical world on its banks. But despite the time I spent drifting, I was unable to detect any of the signs I had hoped to find. So, I pulled back and sought to redirect my efforts, following slightly different currents, moving in a slightly different direction. I was still trying to use the line of anchors behind me to guide me, but I was deliberately shifting away from it, hoping that I’d be able to spot something. 

But despite repeated attempts, I failed to experience a recognisable sensation. Maybe the issue was that I was unable to recognise the shrine because it had been too long. Or because I hadn’t been as capable back then and failed to imprint Lady Hecate’s power properly into the Astral, creating a different signature than the one I was used to. I even considered the possibility that Lady Hecate’s signature had shifted over time, maybe due to the closer association between her power and the Mother’s image. That the shrines I was used to weren’t truly to Lady Hecate, but to the Mother, only using Lady Hecate as a stand-in until the Mother was capable of stepping up to the plate and taking care of her own faithful.

Or that I was just looking in the wrong direction, or maybe that I hadn’t travelled far enough, either in the Astral or in the physical plane. After all, I could only guess at the distance I had travelled through the air, mostly by estimating my speed and extrapolating from that. In the Astral River, on the other hand, I couldn’t even do that, not in the direction away from the anchors.

Eventually, I pulled my mind back into my body, letting the physical tension drain away as my mind was considering options. So far, I wasn’t quite sure what to do, not without some physical landmarks to check my progress against, but could I rely on those?

Would someone who happened upon Denver Springs think they were in Denver, or would they recognise it as Colorado Springs? Or would they instantly realise that something weird had happened?

For now, this hadn’t worked as I wanted it to.