Chapter 1380 (Patreon)

AN: Apologies for posting the wrong chapter. This is the right one.

It was surprisingly difficult to find suitable landmarks to navigate. Or maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised; after all, it wasn’t as if I had any real idea what the world looked like from above. I knew how certain areas looked from the ground at a particular angle, which would, for example, let me identify the silhouette of a mountain range if I looked at it from the right spot. But to identify that same mountain range if I wasn’t looking at it from the ground, and at the correct angle? That was an entirely different challenge, as most mountains looked relatively similar, at least if they were covered in forest. Which they mostly were, at least after the change was done with the world. 

Similarly, I might recognise the banks of a river or creek near my home, but only because I knew the man-made alterations to the landscape in the area. Identifying the river itself was quite impossible, at least from above. I had never tried to study maps for the land’s contours; hel, I had barely studied maps at all. That’s what electronic navigation had been for most of my life, allowing people to navigate without having to pore over maps and navigate by landmarks. 

Now, the joke was on me. Any man-made landmarks I might have used for navigation were gone. Roads had been broken apart and swallowed by the earth, with plants reclaiming the previously paved areas at impossible speeds. Bridges had fallen, railroads had corroded and returned to the earth; it was all gone. Buildings had crumbled into ruins, with climbing vines and plants covering the remains, turning famous landmarks into piles of unrecognisable rubble covered in greenery. Whether the rubble under a particular patch of greenery was the remains of a wonder of the modern world and a marvel of architecture, or of some brutalist construction that caused depression at a hundred paces, was impossible to tell. 

No, relying on the remnants of modern civilisation was impossible, simply because those remnants were gone. At most, I might be able to find a street-sign, or something along those lines, but those were rare. And they weren’t all that useful. Just because I knew that somewhere in the area had been State Highway 136 didn’t mean I had any idea where that was. I had rarely gone driving in the first place, let alone travel long distances by car. And the few times I did, mostly back when my parents were still with me, I hadn’t really paid attention to the route names or signs. 

That left town names as the only possibility, but given that it looked like the process that swallowed civilisation had devoured larger towns first, even that wasn’t as useful as one might think. Finding the remains of isolated farms was trivial; some of them had barely decayed at all, while the remains of small towns were fairly obvious, too. But larger cities? Their remains had become almost unrecognisable, as I had realised when I checked out a forest near my route and realised that I was looking at the remains of Topeka. Which told me I was somewhere in Central Kansas, but beyond that, I was fairly clueless. Geography, at least these details, had never interested me. Some of the books we had stashed away would likely help, allowing me to study maps from before the change, but whether those remained relevant was a bit of a question. 

Still, I had to try, so I looked those old maps over on occasion, only to realise just how useless they were. The world had changed too much, or maybe the Change had delighted in pressing the randomiser on certain easily identifiable features of the world, shuffling them around seemingly at random. It wasn’t the first time I had noticed road signs far from where they should have been, but it certainly drove home that finding my old home would remain a challenge.

In some cases, it was quite amusing. For example, in one area, I came across a couple of road signs that were identical. Not just similar, but exactly the same, including the listed distances and the markings; it was all identical. Unless this were some very strange test-driving area, or maybe the remnants of a sign-making shop, this made no sense at all. Though even a sign-making shop wouldn’t have two dozen exactly the same, location-specific signs in stock. 

Stop-signs, sure, but why would a shop need two dozen signs that told you that you were at mile eighteen on the I-42 and had to continue on six miles to reach Heaven and nine to reach Hell? Given the names, I wondered if these had been part of some joke, but, if so, I didn’t get it. But, sadly, it didn’t help me, unless Kansas, or maybe Nebraska or Missouri by now if I wasn’t in Kansas any longer, had towns named Heaven and Hell. I only remembered a joke about a town named Hell in Michigan, mostly because it regularly froze over, but that was about it. Regardless, the strange signs didn’t help me, so I merely placed down an anchor and made a note to come back in the future, if I ever felt like it. 

Eventually, I realised that I could just look for people down on the ground. They would hopefully know where they were living, which would allow me to get a better idea of my own route. Finding the small settlements was harder than one would expect. Sure, I was high up and looking down at the world, but the easiest and most obvious sign of human civilisation, namely light pollution, was just gone. No artificial lights meant I was looking for slightly more symmetric structures on the ground, in the dark. Sure, my eyes were able to pierce the darkness much better than human eyes could, but even my eyes had limits. And one of those limits was that I couldn’t readily identify the relatively crude buildings people had taken to construct since the change from above. 

My luck turned when I finally saw a flickering light in the dark. Quite literally the end of the tunnel, and it certainly wasn’t a train running towards me. Instead, it was a campfire, lit by a small group of people who were, well, camping around it. They were all quite close to it, curled up in thick furs and blankets, with one person awake, staring into the night. 

The group was obviously some sort of hunting or gathering party, or maybe patrolling the forest for a nearby community. Maybe even a group of marauders, raiding nearby communities, but I doubted that was the case. Thieves and raiders needed a certain level of population to sustain themselves. Without enough people to steal from, they would be forced to move on, and these people didn’t look like they were carrying enough to be nomadic raiders or something like that. No, I was fairly certain they were a hunting party, which meant they should know where we were, giving me a better idea of the direction I had to travel.

After fully descending, I didn’t immediately approach these people. Not only would their reaction instinctively be wary and vigilant, but they would also be incredibly annoyed that I had woken them up. I certainly wouldn’t want to be woken up in the middle of the night just because someone wanted to ask for directions. 

So, I operated with an abundance of caution and a bit of curiosity, and made myself comfortable in a somewhat nearby tree. Not close enough to let them notice me, certainly not with my stealth abilities, but close enough to let me observe. Not just visually with my eyes, but also with my magical senses. I even considered using the Observe-ability, but given its double-edged nature, I decided against it. Sure, I was fairly confident I could hide the ability’s effect, but fairly was far from completely. Spooking them or worse wouldn’t help me any, especially not as the Observe-ability wouldn’t tell me anything I couldn’t detect with care, caution and slow observation. It certainly would take longer, but I had an entire night before me, giving me ample time to figure out what I was looking at. And whether they would be a danger to me, if it came to that.

With that in mind, I settled in, letting my senses expand as I observed these people. Carefully studying their bodies, subtly prodding their minds, especially those of the sleeping people, and even examining their souls, all for the purpose of understanding. It had no connection with my own, unbridled curiosity about this small group of people who seemed to be part of a larger community somewhere nearby. At least that was the impression I got from the sleeping minds I probed and the dreams I spied upon. It was quite interesting, though a little too intimate, if that made sense. Or maybe too horny, at least for one of the guys. That one seemed to have a bit of a one-track subconscious mind.