Chapter 1383 (Patreon)

With the additional information I had received from the suspicious people, I managed to adjust my plans. The big advantage was that I now had a second point to pin down on the maps, allowing me to put the directions within the Astral River into a slightly better context. Before, I had to guess, using somewhat unreliable discoveries on the ground, which I now knew had been moved by the altered geography. The maps, while not completely useless, were much less precise than they should have been. The Change had impacted more than just the areas I had discovered so far, just as I had expected. It was, after all, only logical that strange and impossible events happened everywhere, not just where I was present to experience and explore them. While I would likely never be able to discover all the oddities the Change had wrought, I was certainly seeing the myriad effects of those oddities. Well, at least some of the effects. 

Like the fact that, unless I was completely off-base with my measurements and estimations, that the world seemed to have grown. Or at least the land-area had grown, the distances involved. With Wind Magic, I was able to gauge my flight-speed relatively accurately, at least relative to other times I had been flying. I could tell whether I was flying faster than the day before, and I could differentiate between natural wind coming towards me and air-resistance I experienced because of my speed, allowing me to get a fair estimation of my speed compared to the ground. 

Those estimations, combined with a few somewhat known points of interest, allowed me to get a rough guess of my flight speed. It wasn’t a proper reading, there were far too many inaccuracies involved to be reliably accurate, but I was confident that I was in the right neighbourhood, and that was more than enough for me. Whether I was moving at thirty-five or fifty kilometres an hour, relative to the ground, wasn’t all that important, I simply took my current estimation of forty-two kilometres an hour and ran with it.

And quickly realised that there was either some funky Wind that didn’t register to my Wind Magic involved, meaning that I was inexplicably slowing down, no matter my altitude, or that the world had, indeed, become larger, as impossible as that sounded.

But that was exactly what my current understanding came down to. Well, at least that some of the world had grown, it didn’t appear to be a uniform and consistent effect. In some cases, locations I had discovered and marked down with pins on a large, though somewhat simplified, map back at Jademoon Tower were where they were expected to be. The relative distances between those places were consistent and as expected. In other cases, the distance between them was off, sometimes too short, but more often than not, it was too large. 

Meaning that something incredibly weird was going on, making me wonder if there was something similar to the Scorched Land happening here, only indiscoverable from above. That the world had pockets of reality that could only be accesses from specific points, though that didn’t quite fit with my observations, unless there was some sort of altitude-ceiling involved and I simply couldn’t see those places, instead I only saw some boring illusion of empty plains. It made little sense, but then, the entire thing made no sense, to the point that just trying to figure out what was going on was a consistent source of headaches for me. 

To make things even worse, the Astral River was differently altered. Or maybe it had never bothered to correspond to the geography from before the Change at all, which wouldn’t be surprising. Regardless, distances within the Astral River, and the shadows for that matter, hardly corresponded with reality, serving as a stark and obvious reminder why the anchor-points I was placing every day were so important. WIthout them, I wouldn’t be able to return, unless I spend a lot of time and effort learning the details of a location. And even then, when stepping through the shadows across a long distance, it remained easier to step into marked locations, compared to known ones. This was the reason that I generally stepped to Jademoon Tower first when returning to Maggie’s community. 

However, thanks to the new navigational information and a few experiments regarding distances, both within the Astral and outside of it, I was making progress in my search for my old home. Granted, it wasn’t logical progress but pretty much the opposite of it, I had ignored logic and simply acted stupid. 

With estimates of my flight speed in hand, I charted the location of my old home using the original maps and created scrying constructs there, using the Astral River as a medium. When that didn’t work, as I probably should have expected, I began estimating distances based on the distances between different anchor points, creating estimates based on logic, guesswork and even a bit of simple chaos, essentially making less and less educated guesses.

Annoyingly, it was one of those less-educated guesses that struck gold when I noticed a sharp, and yet distinctly familiar flavour within the streams of the Astral River. Somewhere nearby was an area of Wild Magic, or at least an area of powerful elemental influence, tinged with the disgusting taste I remembered from the Scorched Land. 

Once I had noticed the taste, I started to investigate. To seek out smaller streams of power within the Astral, to navigate and inch closer to the surface where reality had a stronger influence, and I could almost perceive an echo of it from within the Astral. Given just how difficult it was to project power through the Astral at such distances, I sought the surface as quickly as possible, unconcerned with the actual physical location, and created a scrying construct outside the Astral River. 

Doing so allowed me to see the actual world, not that I recognised anything or had an idea where the construct actually was, but that didn’t matter. The construct itself was merely a means to an end: the creation of a runic anchor. The anchor itself was incredibly difficult, even though I had made their construction as simple and uncomplicated as possible. Working across such a distance was exhausting; there were no two ways about it, even if I had created a throne for myself, allowing me to work as efficiently and comfortably as possible. 

But with the runic anchor created, I didn’t have to worry about losing this fascinating trace and could rest for a few hours, recuperating my strength and regenerating my mind. Once that was accomplished, I stepped into the shadows, focused on the new anchor and stepped back out on top of it. The anchor was already starting to fade when I did, the construction across the distance had obviously not been up to my usual standards, but now that I was there, I could investigate the surrounding area. 

Not that I recognised anything around me, not even from above. The world below me was covered in a mix of shrubs, trees and meadows. Some creeks were barely visible, mostly recognisable because the surrounding vegetation was subtly different, making them stand out a little. Not a lot, just enough to make me realise their presence. 

In addition, I could see numerous large animals in the open areas. Most of them looked like big, incredibly hairy cows, though they all strangely had horns, which made me a little wary. Their size, too, seemed to be larger than expected, but that might just be because I had little practical experience with cattle. In addition, I could see some smaller animals, maybe wild versions of sheep or goats, and I even spotted a few canines hunting said animals.

All in all, the area was about as wild as I should have expected from my journeys, but that wasn’t the important bit. Instead, the important part was to find a suitable spot to put down a small lair, construct an anchor point within, and then get back to exploring the Astral River. Now that I was much closer to the source of the issue, even if I wasn’t able to see the Scorched Land from the air, I should have a better chance to actually find it. And once I found the Scorched Land, finding the shrine I had built back there should be trivial, at least unless the Scorched Land had expanded a lot. 

Either way, I had taken a massive step forward, even if I would have to reconsider the label for the runic anchor I would create here. With the method employed to find this spot, especially the random guesswork involved, it wouldn’t do to act as if it were part of the sequence from Jademoon Tower. 

But maybe I could set up a new sequence focused on the shrine near the Scorched Land, or leave this one anchor out of any sequence and give it a unique label. It wasn’t as if anyone but me needed to understand that system just yet.