Chapter 1391 (Patreon)

It took me a few more days after discovering what lurked within my Soul to find the Charland. Finding it was a little anticlimactic because the area's boundary remained as weird as it had always been. Visually, there was a heat haze, and beyond it, everything became seriously fuzzy, allowing me to recognise it without wandering in. Additionally, the Astral Power in the area was noxious enough to make me uncomfortable just from being nearby, making me wonder whether I actually wanted to go in or would be better off staying outside. While moving into the area might allow me to learn something new, it wasn’t the objective of my trip.

So, instead of going in, I kept moving along the boundary, avoiding it entirely. Well, mostly. I avoided moving into the area, but I made sure to stretch my magical senses as much as possible, trying to analyse the natural distortion of space that gave the Charland their arcane characteristics. I wanted to find out how the whole expanded space worked; it was incredibly fascinating. Back when we had been here before, the Charlands had an interior area roughly a hundred time their exterior volume, and from what I could feel now, that hadn’t changed much. If anything, it almost felt as if the space inside was even more distorted, causing some rather weird issues for my experiments. 

For example, I used a tendril made of conjured Ice to intrude into the Charlands, only to find the boundary behaved much like a solid surface. At least when faced with constructs. Walking into the Charlands was possible, though the air and atmosphere inside made me turn around immediately, feeling sick to my stomach. It was even more noxious than I remembered, or maybe I was simply more sensitive now, possibly due to my increased Intuition and perception. 

So I started experimenting while I kept hiking along the boundary. If I tried to simply push the tendril through the boundary, it didn’t work, no matter how much force I used. By the end of the experiment, I had to change the entire setup, replacing the tendril with a solid pole of Hard Ice, inscribed with runes to further strengthen it. The thing was as hard as steel, maybe the strongest material I had created, other than the Nexus Tower. The Tower was even stronger, thanks to the constant reinforcement from the Astral Power of the Nexus, but the pole I had made was incredibly durable. Then, I created a solid foundation, anchoring the pole to a large area, even driving some anchors into the bedrock below. It wasn’t going anywhere, other than into the Charland. Once it was anchored, I tried to push it forward again, using the entire contraption and even activating Overflow to give me more power.

And it didn’t work; I only managed to break the pole. The boundary of the Charland was completely solid to this form of penetration. Out of curiosity, I then exchanged the broken pole for a freshly cut tree. I even channelled some highly bastardised Blood Magic into the tree, trying to keep it alive, no matter how incredibly inefficient and wasteful it was to use Blood Magic on a living being without blood. In fact, it was so inefficient that I needed Overflow just to channel enough power, and I wouldn’t be able to maintain it for more than a few minutes, but that was enough time to push the tree against the boundary. 

And again, it didn’t work, teaching me even more about the boundary, especially at the top of the tree, where it was crushed against the boundary, still counted as ‘living’, at least in the perception of Blood Magic. Maybe the issue was intent, meaning I wouldn’t be able to shove or carry a living being across the boundary. Or the issue might be that a tree wasn’t supposed to be able to enter, but then, what about some sort of animated flora? Or even somebody who used wood as part of their armament? An archer without their bow and arrows, or a spearman without their spear, would be rather limited. 

The next test, and the big surprise, came when I used Ice again, trying something else. This time, I simply placed the Ice against the boundary, not trying to actively push in. Instead, I started conjuring new Ice directly at the boundary, trying to get into the Charland like that. 

To my surprise, doing it this way actually worked, and not in the way I had imagined. The Ice within the Charland was connected to the outside, but it was just as unable to leave the area as the Ice outside was unable to enter. That created a small issue and a rather amusing phenomenon. The boundary acted much like a solid object into which someone had driven an anchor, allowing me to anchor Ice in seemingly thin air. And it was a seriously solid anchor; the conjured Ice broke before the anchor did. Now, it was only normal Ice, nothing like the pole I had conjured earlier, but still, it was easily as hard as low-quality steel. Far less malleable, sure, but it wasn’t bad in terms of hardness. 

This effect fiercely piqued my curiosity, and I began testing what I could do with it, even abandoning my hike around the Charlands to find the Shrine. Instead, I conjured yet another pole, anchoring it within the boundary before building from there. More pole, leading higher into the air like a staircase anchored in the empty air, it looked utterly surreal, and yet it somehow worked. I had the faint sensation that reality itself was getting a headache from my antics, especially when I started expanding the anchored poles and connecting them to distribute the load. At that point, all of a sudden and within a disturbingly short time, the anchors started to fail. Not all at once; they failed sequentially. While I had placed the last anchor about thirty minutes after the first, it fell only about a minute after the issue arose. In other words, despite the anchors being of identical construction, one held for about an hour, maybe an hour and fifteen minutes, and the other lasted only thirty, maybe forty-five, minutes. On the other hand, they all failed within five minutes once I started putting them under heavy load. That, to my eyes, couldn’t be a coincidence, but given that the sun would rise soon, I didn’t linger to continue testing. 

Instead, I dropped back to the ground and continued on, planning to test the peculiar effect and any other effects the boundary might have after reaching the shrine and placing a marker there. 

I briefly considered flying across the boundary, but given that it seemed to have some rather interesting effects, I quickly discarded the idea. The last thing I wanted was to run into a solid object while in flight, or worse, go through the barrier but have my wings shorn off. I might be able to survive a fall, even if I reached terminal velocity, but I wasn’t eager to test that.

By the time dawn was rolling around, I had moved around two of the Charland’s corners, which showed me that the area had expanded a little on the outside, though not by much. Maybe a hundred metres extra, though given that I didn’t have any way to accurately measure distances, and didn’t have one back then, I was only guessing. But it looked like it. 

Eventually, I felt the shrine in the distance, though it was a lot closer than I expected. I felt I should have been able to sense the divine energy of Lady Hecate much sooner, from farther away, but it looked like the Charland was interfering with my senses; the stench was overpowering. 

To my surprise, the Shrine wasn’t the only building in the area I was heading into. Somebody had set up more buildings around it, crude structures made of wood, mud and stone, far less impressive than the Shrine I had built almost two years ago. 

Even from afar, I could see people in the area, though I couldn’t tell whether they were human or something else; their presence intrigued me. For a moment, I considered sneaking up on them, trying to learn as much as possible about them before showing myself.

Given my previous experiences, I nodded to myself, looking around for a good spot to hide, only to realise these people had already spotted me. At least one of them was looking in my direction, so I used my perception-traits to sharpen my sight, allowing me to focus on that person as if I were using a scope. Thanks to that, I realised the person who didn’t look entirely human was staring at me, his lips moving, his arm rising to point at me.

No, hiding wouldn’t work any longer. I was spotted, and now I had to decide what my approach should be. Though I was quite curious what these people were, because their skin was far too red to be human, making them look somewhat demonic.