"Can you guess how those who entered the Misty Plains died?" Luo Wei shook her head. "There are plenty of people smarter than us, and those who dare to venture out to sea are always well-prepared. Yet they still perished in the mist, which ans there’s sothing even more terrifying lurking within."
Everyone who sets sail knows how easy it is to get lost at sea. They prepare barrels of compasses, but in the end, not a single one returns with a compass in hand.
"I agree with Miss Luo Wei. The Misty Plains are definitely not that simple," Hol said.
Hol speculated, "I suspect the mist might be poisonous. Inhaling too much could cause unconsciousness. It’s only because we stayed for a short ti that we weren’t affected."
When they were on Jormungandr's nose, they had fallen asleep in such a dangerous situation, which was indeed peculiar.
Moreover, the first to wake up was Luo Wei, whose body was the weakest among them. Hol strongly suspected that the stronger one's physique, the more they were suppressed in the anti-magic zone.
"I’ve got it! We can build a glider!" Luo Wei stroked her chin for a while before suddenly coming up with an idea.
When magic falls short, science steps in.
While she couldn’t sustain long flights, a glider could make up for that shortcoming. However, building one would take quite so ti.
If they could find magnetite nearby, they could also make a few compasses. Whether they would work or not, it was worth trying.
With a clear goal in mind, the three of them got to work imdiately.
Chopping wood, weaving vines, hunting, crafting magnets, cutting coats to make glider wings...
By the end of the afternoon, all three of them looked much more primitive.
Luo Wei was slightly better off, retaining an undershirt and long skirt. Hol and Theodore, on the other hand, had sacrificed all their clothes, transforming completely into two wild n clad in grass skirts.
As night fell, they used palm leaves and branches to build a tent by the fire. Curling up inside the makeshift shelter, they drifted off to sleep.
The fire crackled as damp branches popped and hissed. Inside the tent, the youths closed their eyes, their breathing gradually becoming steady and even.
Waves gently lapped against the rocks and sand, like the deep tones of a cello, drawing out a soothing lody in the tranquil night, lulling them to sleep.
"Hol?"
"Theodore?"
In the middle of the night, Luo Wei called out softly, then quietly crawled out of the tent.
The fire was dying down. She added a handful of wood, glanced back to confirm that Hol and Theodore were sound asleep, and then spread her wings, flying toward the interior of the continent.
With three hundred pounds less weight to carry, Luo Wei flew swiftly.
In five hours, she covered over 700 kiloters, seeing rolling mountains, vast prival forests, endless grasslands, low plains, and hills.
She had no idea how large the Fog Empire was, but within this 700-kiloter range, she hadn’t seen a single sign of human habitation.
The Fog Empire seed like an untouched land, lying dormant before her eyes.
Luo Wei landed in a forest on the edge of an alluvial plain. Amidst the desolate wild grass and sprawling vines, she discovered a crumbling altar.
The bricks and stones of the altar had weathered over ti, with plants growing wildly in the cracks. A massive fir tree, requiring two people to encircle it, had burst through the stone slabs at the center of the altar. Its towering canopy, over forty ters high, almost reached the clouds.
Luo Wei ran her fingers over the tree bark’s texture. This tree had been growing here for at least three hundred years.
She searched around the altar and gradually found many traces of human presence: animal bones, fragnts of pottery, rusty arrowheads, charcoal marks, and the decayed floorboards of treehouses...
Long ago, soone had lived here.
Of course, they might not have been human. It could have been other intelligent beings, like elves.
Haisya had said that no humans had ever appeared in that sea area; they had only encountered an elderly elf.
That sea was calm, rich in marine resources, with wide, flat beaches and forests devoid of large predators. It was baffling that no humans lived there.
Luo Wei leaned more toward the idea that this continent had never had humans at all.
This land had originally belonged to elves, who lived here for generations. Preferring forest life, they hadn’t built cities.
After the Tree of Life withered, they lost their source of vitality. Gradually, they vanished from this continent, their traces covered by rampant vegetation, their civilization fading into the river of history.
Luo Wei cleared the stone slabs around the fir tree’s altar, using a dagger to carve the patterns she had morized before entering the Magic Beast Mountains.
She didn’t know if she could restore the teleportation magic runes, but she wasn’t willing to give up the chance to claim such a vast land.
Sweat dripped from her forehead onto the cold stone slabs. Luo Wei gritted her teeth, gripping the dagger tightly as she etched half-finger-wide grooves into the hard stone surface.
She couldn’t replicate the teleportation runes of a Holy Magister exactly, but Luo Wei had a strong spatial understanding. Having studied advanced geotry in her past life, she found breaking down the runes straightforward.
The only difficult part was that her magical power wasn’t enough to complete the rune.
Luo Wei released one hand, quickly pulling out six magic stones she always carried, absorbing the high-concentration magical elents within to replenish her energy.
A surge of magical elents flooded her body, making her feel as if her ridians were about to burst. Every inch of her skin and every vein throbbed with pain, as if they were about to split open.
Finally, the simplified rune was complete. Exhausted, Luo Wei collapsed onto the ground, staring dazedly at the moonlight filtering through the fir tree’s branches.
After resting for half an hour, she mustered the strength to get up, placing the six slightly dimd magic stones into the rune’s center to provide power.
On her way back, she planned to drop small teleportation runes at intervals along the route to serve as relay points for the main rune. Then she would carve a large one in her room at Siria Magic Academy to complete the transoceanic teleportation.
She wasn’t sure if her half-baked skills would work.
Rationally, Luo Wei told herself this was pointless and would only waste six magic stones.
But a voice in her heart urged her to try—what if it worked?
Filled with conflicting thoughts, she flew back to the beach and quietly slipped back into the tent.
Exhausted from a night of work, Luo Wei fell into a deep sleep as soon as she lay down.
In her dream, a giant serpent coiled into a circle before her, spinning endlessly.
She watched until she beca dizzy, eventually seeing the serpent’s coil as a clock, its ticking hands irritating her. She reached out to adjust it.
With a loud "dong," she heard her heartbeat echo from a distant place. A towering tree rose from the ground, its white buds blooming into flowers, releasing countless winged, fantastical creatures.
These beautiful little spirits held hands, circling the tree and singing. But one day, the tree withered, and the spirits fell to its roots, aging and dying.
So spirits severed their nurturing buds and consud them, turning into dark elves with white hair and dark skin. They retreated underground, falling into a deep slumber, eventually transforming into statues.
Luo Wei found herself among these statues. As she touched the pointed ear of one elf, she suddenly noticed a faint breath at his nose.
She stepped back and saw the elf open his black eyes, despair flashing across his face. He pulled an iron arrow from his quiver and aid it at his own chest.
Luo Wei’s pupils contracted, and she instinctively grabbed his hand.
"""
Reviews
All reviews (0)