CoESC Book 18-9.1: Discoveries and Return (Patreon)

The month of Julius was about thirty-one days, followed by Augustus, which was also thirty-one days, oddly enough. That Junius had thirty while the month before that, Maius, had thirty-one was just another oddity that Yuriko couldn’t quite know how to parse. At the very least, the Imperial calendar was divided into four Seasons, each with ninety-one days, and the Bresian calendar divided each Season into cycles of 30-31-30 days, showing at least a rational division. As far as she knew, Julius and Augustus were part of the same Season, that being Fire, since it was quite warm, just made things more annoying. That meant that one of the days outside of the three months would belong to a different Season, after all. 

For a plane that was supposedly artificially made, it certainly had random elements that were anything but orderly. 

Anywho, Yuriko spent most of Julius in the exclusion zone and the Nurev Mountains. It had taken her about another day to reach a point where she could actually see the natural boundary, mostly because the roads got progressively worse along the coastline. She came across another dozen abandoned villages and towns, though most of them had been burned to the ground. Unfortunately, fire wasn’t really a solution to clearing the infestation of those shambling mounds, though she was certain that walking corpses was the proper term.

She remembered Amalia’s mum ranting and raving about the things after her father died to them nearly a decade ago.  

So she set out to find the truth of the matter. Radiance caused burning chambers, so she just used Invisible Edge once. The bisected mound tried to pull itself together—and was actually succeeding—but it also gave her a view of the inside. And as she suspected, there was a body in between the layers of mud, sand, and grass roots. A nearly desiccated body, and definitely one without higher brain function, but their heart still pumped blood, or whatever fluid they used in its place, considering it wasn’t crimson, but a whitish, sometimes pinkish, mess. The grass roots were intertwined within the body, but the muscles weren’t central to how the creature moved. Perhaps it was better to say that the walking corpse was merely the…uh, skeleton, of the mound, and there was little doubt that they were inactive for a long time. Probably years, come to think of it. 

On her training progress, the solid thirty days had pushed her Radiant Physique to forty percent. It would have been higher if she used all of the Radiance she produced, but she needed Animus in forging Sword Seals as well as Satellite Swords. By the end of Julius, she had five Seals and three Satellites…slower progress than she expected, even more so when compared to her true body. Her 1st-Incarnation body has similar progress, but the true self already had a dozen swords in orbit around her Radiant core. Both were impressive in their own ways, mostly because it had only been six days in Shangria and Astoria compared to thirty here in Irisvaile. The dearth of energy was her significant bottleneck, as well as the fact that she needed to build a core to hold the orbit of the Satellite Swords. 

Her Astorian self built on her Swordlight Strand core rather than forge Sword Seals, and it proved similarly deficient in holding the satellites. Yuriko had to balance how much each sword pulled the core, and with three swords in orbit, they had to stay equidistant from each other to cancel out the pull. It would be easier if she had four satellites, but the core wasn’t stable enough to hold against it. She judged that she needed twice as many layers before she could hold a fourth sword. 

Still, the advantages of the Satellite Swords were immense. Each one held a reserve of Intent and Will beyond what she could hold normally, about a percent of the total across all of her incarnations. And unlike her actual body, for some reason, the Satellite Swords were able to restore Willpower depletion. It was slow, taking an hour to refill from near depletion, but that was better than the trickle she recovered due to the closed connection between her current self and her greater unity. 

And of course, the Satellite Swords acted exactly like sunblades at need. She no longer needed to manifest each sunblade just before using it, though it normally would not be much of a problem outside of Irisvaile. This swarmfodder plane was too gluttonous for any kind of energy!

A normal sunblade infused with Radiant energy—not that it was possible to make a sunblade without it in the first place—would last a minute or two if she didn’t hold and constrict the Radiance to the construct. A plain Animus construct actually lasted much longer than a sunblade, five minutes or so, before Irisvaile siphoned it clean. Anything infused with Willpower fought back, and could theoretically maintain itself forever…or that was the norm outside of here. 

A Satellite Sword, being infused with both Willpower and her personal Truth, could easily contest Irisvaile’s planar laws, but only at a price. Her Truth of the Sword was only at the Ennoia level, and couldn’t really fight against local law with any kind of effectiveness, leaving the bulk of the fighting to her Willpower. A Satellite Sword used as a Radiant Flying Sword could last an hour before complete depletion, but only if she didn’t use it to fight, which was more than ironic, considering that it was a sword meant for battle. A battle would halve its lifespan. An intense battle would drain it faster, and she got up to seven strikes at foes far beyond her current reach before she had to pull it back. It was a single strike from dissolution, and she wasn’t foolish enough to allow that when it only took an hour or so to replenish its reserves compared to several days' worth of effort to forge a new Satellite Sword. 

So, the three orbiting around her Sword Seal core were her trump cards in case she had to kill someone from a distance. 

And, this world…this plane contained more danger than she initially thought. Her children notwithstanding, she was certain that they hadn’t been brought here unguarded. If her suspicions were correct, then the one who created them out of spilt blood and things she’d rather not dwell on, wanted them for certainly nefarious reasons, but needed them to be old enough for that purpose too. She was also certain that they would have preferred it if she were the one they had instead of her kids, so she couldn’t go there without a plan or an attempt at subterfuge, which was harder than she expected, since her tie to Radiance practically deplored hiding. 

It was an observable fact, and her greater self had corroborated those findings. It was actually harder to notice for the rest of her since the true body and the 1st-incarnation body were already full of Radiance. Now, the more her body was converted with Radiant Physique, the more she found the idea of…well, keeping her head down and lying low, unbearable. Especially on this plane, so bereft of Radiance. She could feel the need to burst and saturate the atmosphere with Radiance…but doing so would be more than foolish since it would invite not just attention, but possibly retaliation. Someone had taken the trouble to build a plane that was cut off from the Radiant Sun and the Luminous Moon after all. 

Most of the month had been spent exploring the mountain range. She looked for another path, a pass, a tunnel, or something else that could let her cross to Nurevia unhindered by border guards. 

Well…she sorta enjoyed the trip, if she was to be honest with herself. It was different from her memories of her delve in Shangria, considering that she and her companions spent most of those days hunting down monsters. The biomes were beautiful in a stark kind of way, and Nurev was almost the same. Once she actually reached the snow line, anyway. The trek up from the foothills was through rather humid forests, and about half of the terrain was actually infested by the walking corpse spores. 

Ah, that was the source of the things, she thought. Enhanced Sight and determined investigation eventually revealed it to her. Now if only she knew where the things came from…or rather, where their origins lay. They obviously came from the shambling mounds, as well as any actual walking corpse. The first time she saw the latter was about a longstride above ocean level, in a little cottage nestled into a cul-de-sac. The corpse might have belonged to a woodsman or simply to a vacationing family. She had encountered several cabins along the mountainside, though never far from roads. 

Anyway, the walking corpse was actually more agile than the name might suggest, considering the thing jumped at her from on top of a small cliff. Her perception aura caught them, and she managed to swerve out of the way. She then used a Satellite Sword to bisect them, which resulted in a fire and subsequent spore-smoke. 

They produced less smoke than the mound, but probably because there was less flammable matter in them. The amount of spores, she really couldn’t count, and she didn’t make the mistake of letting them touch her again. The spores were easier to eliminate before they began to sink into her flesh, and coating her skin with Radiance for a few seconds to eliminate the spores didn’t consume more than the reaction produced. Unfortunately, since the reaction was out in the open, Irisvaile took its slice of pie, which meant she still had a deficit anyway. 

She managed to find a path across the Nurev mountains, though it took several weeks to do so. The roads didn’t actually go through the mountain range, but led to pockets of habitation scattered across the mountainsides. The boundary was at least a hundred longstrides thick, but that only meant there were around two to three peaks before she reached the other side. The valleys in between weren’t always habitable, and more often than not, she was blocked by canyons and ravines, or sheer cliff faces. If she could fly…

Well, if she could, then she didn’t have to do this song and dance across the mountains. She would have flown directly across the inner ocean instead. 

Well, her route actually took her several hundred longstrides west, then along a pass that was roughly four longstrides above ocean level, which was a couple of longstrides below the nearest peak. It then went down into a valley that was thick with evergreen trees and half buried in snow, still along the snow line. There were wild animals there, of the ursine and feline variety. Wolves, too, and giant herbivores with antlers akin to branches of a tree that were just as aggressive. Good eating. 

Returning to Rakkisgrad would probably take her three or four days, maybe a week if she took it easy. Her mountain bike wouldn’t have made it all the way, however, considering it was a bit more beat up than she expected. Mending was a handy spell, and she also engraved runescript lines for durability along the frame and the wheel rims. The rubber tyre somehow resisted enchantment, but not the mending spell, and she had to cast it every evening to make sure she wouldn’t get a blowout. Anyway, she headed south on the twenty-third, hopefully giving her enough leeway to reach Rakkisgrad before the Bellemer magi left to cross the ocean. 

And unlike her trek north, it was when she attempted to reenter Westenland that she actually faced resistance. On the twenty-fifth, a military patrol found her, and they certainly weren’t happy.