We rest for about twenty minutes, as both of us are dead tired after our sprint through the forest and undead killing spree. I sit down next to Daniel on the opposite side of the clearing from the stinking corpses. I can still smell them, but I’m getting used to it, so it’s not too bad. Getting used to the smell of rotting corpses was not on my list of things to do this week, but this last week has been anything but predictable. This is my life now, whether I like it or not, and to even have a chance at seeing my old life again, I must push forward as long as I have the strength to do so. I decide to check my status, as it’s been a while since I’ve looked at it.
[Ray Alder] lvl 13
Race
[Human]
Active Skills
[Space Control] lvl 9
[Mana Shaping] lvl 8
Passive Skills
[Mana Sense] lvl 8
Traits
[Adaptive Affinity]
[Beast mana-heart]
Affinities
[Space]
The extra levels recently have done wonders for fixing my mana capacity issue. My body gets reinforced with more mana for each level I gain, causing me to be able to better withstand the pressure of having too much mana in my body. I feel that it would take all day of me not using mana, and probably a good part of the night before I would have to deal with it by burning or using a skill. My skills are also leveling up nicely. It seems like they level up when I push them to their limits or try to do something new with them, which makes sense, I guess.
Now I need to make an important decision: to keep cultivating my [Beast mana-heart] now that I will be leveling more, or to wait until I know more about it. Maybe someone in Barad has more info. I doubt Peros would recruit me right after giving me a ticking time bomb. So it should be safe. As much as it feels wrong and stupid to basically experiment on myself with this, the thought of having more mana brings a small smile to my face. I start to cultivate the small crystal growing in my heart with just a little bit of mana, making sure to keep most of it in reserve, just in case.
“What are you so happy about?” Daniel asks with a small smile of his own.
“Just looking over my recent progress, it feels good to get stronger.”
Merrick grunts and adds, “Damn straight.”
All I get from Daniel is a nod before he goes back to what he was doing, making small modifications to his hammer. The metal flows like water when he puts his hands near it, moving to fill out any damage and repair the spike he was using to puncture their skulls. I take out my sword and pull it into my lap, examining the blade. It’s pretty banged up along the edge near the end, and the tip broke off at some point.
“Can you fix this? I fucked it up pretty good on those zombie skulls.” I ask while holding the handle of my sword towards the metal mage.
He puts his warhammer to the side and places my blade across his lap, digging in his pocket for something. He places a nickel-sized piece of shiny metal on the blade near the tip and holds both hands on the blade near that spot. After about thirty seconds or so, he hands me back my sword. It’s in pristine condition, just as good as when Rayke gave it to me, sharp and deadly. I thank Daniel and sheathe it, taking out one of the other items Rayke gave to me, the crystal.
It looks mostly the same as it did when I gave it to him, a small, rough, red gem about the size of my thumbnail, but now it has a small hole on one side. My intuition tells me that I need to use mana to access whatever is stored on here, and the hole seems like an obvious place to start. I guide a thin stream of my mana into the hole, gradually pushing it deeper into the crystal. The mana flows through one central pathway that is “encoded” with the information Rayke put on here. It feels like reading, but with my mana instead of my eyes. It’s confusing at first, but as the mana passes through certain paths and nodes, more knowledge is revealed to me, teaching me the very basics of magic items. It’s filled with different lessons and training methods tailored for a space affinity enchanter all along the main channel that runs through the gem. There is too much for me to even look over before Merrick interrupts our break, guiding us deeper into the forest.
I put the crystal away, knowing it would keep me too distracted to pay attention to my surroundings and activate my spatial senses out to twenty feet. I continue the cultivation of my heart, swirling mana around it while constantly trying to push it deeper and deeper. I feel it get slightly bigger and denser as I feed it more mana. Not enough to cause me any problems yet, just enough to push my body a little bit.
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We follow Merrick through the forest for another five hours or so, stopping just after midday at a line of trees with sand on the other side. Just past the trees, maybe fifteen to twenty feet, the dirt and grass stop, and sand begins. It looks like someone just cut out the middle of this forest and popped a desert in its place. It’s a very abrupt change. The edge of the forest continues to the left and right, probably in a big circle, but I can’t see the other side to know for sure, as there is a giant stone wall in the way. The wall has to be close to a mile deep into the desert and is clearly the wall of some city. It’s hard to tell its size from here, but it clearly wraps around the city and rises several stories into the air.
“Now that I know you two can handle yourselves when in danger, the real training begins.” Merrick says with a mischievous smile while digging in his backpack for something. He pulls out the box containing the communication amulets and takes them out, holding two in his hand for a second before giving them to us. I feel him activate his void on them, doing something nefarious, probably.
I run my mana through the item, trying to put what little knowledge I have to the test. I immediately see what Merrick did to it. He voided out an entire section of the mana pathways and nodes. Nearly half of what was there is now just a gaping hole. Where the pathways used to be, my mana just leaks out and dissipates when I power the item. I try my best to just run my mana through the working portions, hoping the item still works.
“What did you do to this? Half of the inside is missing. Will it even work?” I say, and at nearly the same time, both Daniel and Merrick’s amulets repeat my words about as clear as a walkie-talkie.
“Ooh, radios.” Daniel mutters, slipping the amulet around his neck and under his armor. I do the same.
“What’s a radio?” Merrick asks with genuine curiosity on his face, which he usually has when asking about Earth-related topics.
“Like these, but made without magic.” Daniel responds.
Merrick nods, ignoring my earlier questions, and puts on his own amulet, pointing to the walled city right after. “That is where we will begin the next phase of training, where you will be forged into something slightly sturdier. Now your first task is to get to the city alive and secure a building that you can use as a base of operations. A little advice: pick somewhere near the wall. The closer you get to the center of the city, the worse the death mana gets.” He turns around and walks back into the forest after that, clearly leaving us alone to complete this next task.
Daniel has a huge grin, showing his teeth, and I nearly sigh, but don’t, as it’s my own damn fault that I’m here right now. I look towards the city, examining the path we have to take to get to the open city gate on our side.
The desert is mostly flat, and only a few things move in between us and the wall in the distance. There are maybe a dozen moving figures. Most of them look like goblins or people and are almost certainly undead. There also appear to be a few animals, mostly deer from what I can see, and one that is clearly not. It’s very obviously a bear, walking from the edge of the forest into the city. It’s about half a mile away from us, making it hard to tell its exact size, but it has to be the largest bear I’ve ever seen. Like eating you in one big bite.
I turn to the man next to me. “You see that?”
“Yup,”
“It’s clearly heading for the city.”
“Yup,”
“So are we.”
“Yup,”
“Fuck me.”
“Yup.”
We sit at the edge of the forest for around an hour, watching the bear walk into the city for the first half and hoping it goes deeper into the city for the second half. We come up with a quick plan for making it to the gate, and we run as fast as we can across the sand. The path to the gate has only a few undead in the way, and we should easily be able to kill them.
It’s about a mile to the city walls, and the run takes us about ten minutes as the sand slows us down, but it also causes the undead in the area to be even easier to kill, as they often fall over while moving to chase us. As we near the gate, the scale of the walls fully hits me. They are massive, made of a flat, smooth gray stone, like they rose straight out of the earth. Easily seventy feet tall or more, with small towers dotting the top of them, adding another twenty feet to the height. The entrance is also breathtaking. A massive tunnel that extends thirty feet up and runs all the way through the wall, which is about fifty feet thick. What the hell was this wall made to defend against? Even after the city is long dead and uninhabited, it still stands, unblemished and pristine.
We stop just outside the tunnel, killing any undead that have noticed us before we enter. It's best not to get surrounded. I go first into the tunnel, keeping my spatial senses at fifty feet, my current limit for being useful. Any more than that and I have to sit still to process the amount of information my skill gives me. Fifty feet is still difficult, but I have learned to deal with it. The tunnel leads onto a wide road, almost thirty feet across, that continues straight ahead towards the center of the city and is totally devoid of anything, living or dead. My best guess tells me that this is a main road of the city, probably leading to whatever structure the old ruler used. Rulers of cities always make their base at the center. It’s like a law or something.
Halfway through the tunnel, on the left, is a plain metal door with spots of age and rust all over it. I scan behind it, finding only a hallway that stretches further than my skill allows me to see. I stop at the door and try to open it but find it’s locked, or maybe rusted shut. I decide to quickly move on, but Daniel stops me with a hand on my shoulder.
“Wait a sec, I think I can get it open with [Metal Manipulation].”
Daniel puts his hand on the door above the handle and closes his eyes. I hear the sound of metal grinding against metal for a few seconds before a loud thunk. With a push, the rusty hinges scream out as the door slowly swings open, revealing the pitch-black hallway hiding behind. Daniel takes out a small clear crystal from his bag, about the size of a pea, and hands it to me.
“It’s a light stone. Feed mana into it, and it lights up.”
I feed mana into it, and for some reason it surprises me when it works. It’s just a few channels and nodes, with a small amount of storage capacity built in. It gives off a decent amount of light, comparable to a flashlight, but in all directions.
“Can I keep this?” I ask, hoping to study it later.
“Sure, I have a whole bag of them.”
I lead us through the tunnel, as my spatial senses reach further than the light does. It’s incredibly dusty and has the smell of a place left abandoned for many years, which adds up. We pass by a couple doors, most of them open and full of nothing. It’s clear they used to be barracks and storage rooms, maybe armories or something, but now all they have is the remains of rotting wood and a few undead. We move for a while along the inside of the wall, passing empty room after empty room, until one door hides something else: a staircase up. The staircase is long and gradual, taking us a few minutes of climbing before the light of day is visible near the top.
The top of the wall near us is clear, so I emerge out of the staircase and into the light, coming up about fifty feet from one of the towers. As soon as I reach the top of the wall, I am met with one of the most breathtaking views I have ever seen.
The city is absolutely massive, at least five miles across to the other side of the wall, forming a massive circle with four gates equally spaced. Buildings of all shapes and sizes cover the available ground, making the city a massive labyrinth of alleyways and small paths. Nothing looks planned out except for the four main roads leading from the gates to the center of the city. They are perfectly uniform and clear of all buildings, cutting the city into four equal quadrants. At the center of the city is a massive black spire jutting out of the ground like a spear reaching for the heavens. Daniel joins me at the top, and we both stand there, observing the city for a while before he speaks.
“We should find somewhere to set up a base. Let’s check out this tower.”
My stomach grumbles a little bit, and I realize I haven't eaten since before the undead goblin horde attacked us. I follow Daniel towards the tower door, hoping we can stay here. It has a nice view.