Chapter 1404 (Patreon)

“Say, Anise, would you be willing to play tour-guide?” I asked after exchanging a bit of small talk with Anise, after visiting the Shrine to take yet another look at the library crystal. Studying Crystal Rune Mastery independently was quite nice, and I had gained a few points in the skill recently, but I wanted to speed things up, and my best bet for that was to keep using the library crystal. But, in the interest of a balanced, mental diet, I decided to take a bit of time off and explore something else. Like the nearby Charland, a place I hadn’t really ventured in since we dealt with that weird crystal at its core. And, if I was being honest with myself, I had little interest in venturing that far into the area again, but I was curious what the locals had figured out. If they had done any exploring, that is, maybe they simply looked at the dangerous, oftentimes burning, monsters within and decided to head in a different direction. 

“What would you like to see?” she asked in return, looking just a little worried, maybe concerned that their community wouldn’t stand up to my scrutiny. 

“Well, the big thing is the Charland,” I grinned, noticing her face pale just a little, “My family and I explored some of it when we were here, but we didn’t have the time, leisure or, really, the interest to explore the entire thing; the area is simply too large. We just ventured to the Charland’s central area, killed a couple of big beasts on the way and then scurried back out. I’m curious how much more there is to the area, especially when it comes to the extraordinarily weird boundary.” I paused, thinking of my recent experiments. 

“Anything you could share about that would be greatly appreciated. If you share sufficiently interesting information, I’m willing to reward you,” I added, thinking of one of my spatial bags as suitable compensation, if she could share information on the strange spatial boundary here.

That boundary might let me create similar boundaries of my own, and that would let me keep a nice, freezingly cold area right in the middle of a desert; I just had to figure out how that worked. A hot desert, that is, if I wanted to have a cold area in the heart of Antarctica, that would be rather easy, and I wouldn’t need such boundaries.

“I’ve never been there,” Anise admitted, looking a little concerned. “I know that a few guys go in there, but they are always careful and stay close to the edge. It’s just too dangerous in there,” she explained, though I felt her reasoning was weak. How could one advance on the Path without risks? Any of the Paths, be it martial, arcane or divine, needed risks, and even the societal path, the least risky of them all in my opinion, had some risks involved. Just risks of a different sort, at least as far as I understood, but that was a Path I had barely interacted with at all. It just wasn’t for me. 

But then, my understanding of the Paths and the way I was interacting with them came from Road to Purgatory. Back then, it was a game, and the actual risk involved was minor. The worst that could have happened, at least in my mind, would have been some lost time. Nothing more, nothing less, an annoyance in the grand scheme of things. To Anise, and everyone who wasn’t a legacy, the Paths were part of a ruthless and rather brutal competition that had torn them from their comfortable lives in an advanced society.Maybe it was understandable that they avoided risks and only advanced on the Paths as far as they had to to secure their survival, instead of pushing forward to fulfil their own goals. How many people would be willing to endure near constant risk to their lives and even seek out those risks, all for a distant hope and a vague promise?

Was I the crazy one here, continuously risking my life, if I could settle down somewhere and essentially live like a King? Or maybe like a Queen, or some other potentate. It wouldn’t even be complicated; there were groups out there working hard to endure, and some would eagerly trade their submission for my protection.

“Could you introduce me to them? I’m sure they would happily take me along and show me around if I make it worth their while,” I suggested, pausing for a moment. “Though, maybe make sure that they are aware that trying to scam me, or worse, would be met with severe and brutal retribution. Some people see a lone woman and think they can take advantage. They are wrong,” I warned, letting my entire power flare out at the end, causing her to stagger for a moment. I hadn’t even tried to intimidate her, but the sheer volume had apparently been enough to make my point. 

“I’ll talk to them,” she promised, looking exceedingly pale and very eager to leave my presence as quickly as possible. “Why don’t you stay here?” she then asked, glancing at the statue guarding the Altar behind me, making it obvious that the connection would likely add to the intimidation. 

“Certainly, and thank you,” I replied, already turning my focus from her to the library crystal. 

The crystal was just as complex as it always had been. Sure, my newly formed skill helped me a little, but the thing remained beyond me. Out of curiosity, I triggered the crystal’s function to share and store information and watched a spark of divine power travel through the magical formation within it, lighting up different parts. 

Given that there was little I could glean from just that, I decided to try my new skill once more and funnelled a trickle of power and my entire attention to the Pattern Divination. For a moment, nothing happened, and then I was suffused with a flood of information. Despite my high Intelligence, I couldn't keep track of every strand of knowledge, let alone keep them sequentially organised.

Sure, I managed to learn a lot of details, but it was too much. Sure, it was interesting to learn how the divine light interacted with the different materials the crystal was composed of. But given that the expression ‘Divine Light’ came with its own, seemingly infinite strand of information I could only glimpse the barest details of, and it was similar with the crystal’s material, it wasn’t actually helpful.

It was obvious I needed to limit the scope of my divination if I wanted coherent information, as I couldn't cope with the volume. Maybe if I started to work the divination on individual runes, copied from the crystal, I could expand my Crystal Rune Mastery relatively quickly. Another possibility was to create a Runic Formation, then use the skill to analyse it, hopefully allowing me to learn more about how Rune Magic manipulates reality. 

Pulling back from the crystal, I conjured myself a seat out of Ice, and another simple Ice cube. Given that Ice was fundamentally a crystal made out of water, I felt that there should be a correlation between Ice Runes, Water Runes and Crystal Runes. Logically, Ice Runes should be Water Runes combined with Crystal Runes, but that obviously wasn’t the case here. Especially not given that my Water and Crystal Runes were written in a different alphabet, as I had learned those here on Terra, while my Ice Runes used the runic alphabet inherent to Mundus.

To test around a bit, I tried to overlap the fundamental Water Rune with the fundamental Crystal Rune, curious if my high affinity for Ice would allow me to recognise if there was a relation to the unknown potential Ice Rune written in the Terran runic alphabet.

For a few seconds, the two runes simply hung in the air before me, as I tried to twist the Astral Power they were made of in an attempt to combine them. However, all I received for my trouble was a shower of sparks as the Crystal Rune shattered, alongside a spray of water, when the Water Rune did the same moments later. Neither had been charged with a lot of power, so the results weren’t spectacular, but this might not be the way to go. 

Just as I was about to consider another experiment, my musing was disrupted when the Shrine’s door opened. Glancing over, I could see Anise in the lead, followed by a guy I might have seen before, though I wouldn’t be willing to bet on it. He simply looked like a rather average guy, not terribly tall, not overly muscular, just short-haired, lightly tanned and clad in the usual, simple armour made from a mix of scavenged materials from before the change and whatever else the people here could find. 

Rising, I got ready to meet the leader of the people with whom I would hopefully travel into the Charland.