“Hey, Ember, how close am I to getting out of the forest?” Ember was what I had started calling the little spirit that now lived inside me. Technically, he was in my soul. Since we left, I’d spent much of the last week asking questions. There was little else to do than walk to my vague destination, and it helped that I didn’t have to actually speak aloud in order to talk to Ember, so long as he was still in my soul.

“Actually, if you continue on at your current pace, you should get there by the end of the afternoon,” Ember said in response.

Since he had just answered it, I knew that a minute was taken off of my lifespan. Apparently, your soul naturally depleted its own supply of mana to keep someone alive. And when your soul no longer had any mana to keep it going, then you died. Apparently, it was actually much more likely for you to die before that ever happened, unless you were in a very isolated place like the village I grew up in.

“Oh really? I thought you said I still had a few days left just yesterday,” I said.

“By the typical, human pace. You, however, are able to traverse this place much faster than they would be able to.”

I shrugged, though I wasn’t sure if Ember could actually see that or not. I suspected that he could see things through me in much the same way that I saw through past chiefs when I used the Branch of Wisdom to go through memories.

“Just wondering, but how many questions have I asked you?” I asked after a few moments of silence. It was more like me thinking at Ember, rather than telepathically speaking.

“I won’t even make you give up a minute for that information. You’ve asked 384 so far.”

I’d yet to agree to pay the price of anything that was worth more than a minute. That meant that in a week, I’d managed to ask enough questions that I would now live about 6 hours less than I would have before. I was fine with spending up to a year on questions worth a minute of my life, but seriously doubted I would ever actually use up an entire year. That was over half a million questions, and pretty much all the questions worth a minute were things I could find out on my own. I mostly used it to find out where I was, or identify plants and animals. Rare species were worth more than a minute though. There was one wolf-like creature that I saw from a distance which had bright green fur. I asked Ember about it, and he (he sounded more like a boy than a girl, even though I was positive that spirits didn’t have genders) refused to tell me unless I was fine with giving up an entire month. While that wasn’t a long amount of time, there were quite a lot of rare plants and animals here. If I spent the time accumulating knowledge of them all, I’d be losing years in a matter of days.

Regardless, my travels had been going smoothly. As I headed towards the outer parts of the forest, I kept my distance from anything that seemed dangerous. The further out I went, the more I saw creatures that I knew I didn’t want to run into. Things had been like this for a week, but my last day wasn’t destined to be the same.

The trees out here were far less dense, now that I was getting closer to the outskirts. Ember told me that there were rolling grasslands outside, but I still wasn’t far out enough to see those yet. Each tree seemed to be dozens of feet away from any other, but they still apparently reached out to the next few miles. I’d stopped paying too much attention to my surroundings, considering how difficult it would have been for anything to hide out here. I moved faster than I had during any other point of my journey, wanting to see the outside world as soon as I could. Ember told me that my current pace would get me out of the forest in just minutes, and that piece of knowledge only made me much more eager.

Sending mana throughout my body, my muscles soon became empowered, and I felt I could easily run the rest of the way. My mana wouldn’t run out, and I was convinced that I wouldn’t find anything this far out.

“Did you hear that?” Ember asked. It was weird for him to be the one asking a question, so I immediately was on alert.

“Hear what?”

“It was faint, but something let out a loud roar, I think. We’re far away though, so I don’t think it’s close,” Ember said.

“Alright, well just tell me if you hear it again and it sounds like it’s closer;” I said after a moment.

We were close to leaving the only place I’d known all my life. I’d seen the plains in the first chief’s memories, but I wanted to see the world with my own eyes. My excitement only made me careless, though. Just a couple seconds later, I heard the loud cry of a beast. I felt it, even, as the vibrations from its roar rumbled through my body.

“Did you hear that?” Ember asked again.

I didn’t respond to Ember’s sarcastic question, and instead turned my head in the direction the sound came from, which just so happened to be right behind me, because of course it was.

“What… What is that?” I asked, dumbfounded.

I was being chased by something that looked like a cross between a bear and a fish. While a normal bear would be covered in fur, this thing had cyan scales covering its body. It still had four legs, but each of them had webbed toes. From its back, I also noticed a tail with fins. The more I looked, the less I was sure how something like this was even possible. There were plenty of strange animals in the forest, but this was different.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Anyone in this world could gain access to mana. Humans, elves, animals, even plants, if they were lucky enough. Animals that did have access to it were called “enlightened” by the people of my village. Normally, they would grow bigger,and sometimes even glow. Never had I heard of anything that looked like a mixture of two animals that were nothing alike.

“Ember?” I asked, after he didn’t respond a couple of seconds later. I was currently running as fast as I possibly could, but the bear-fish thing was gaining on me.

“I’m not sure,” was all Ember said back to me.

“Aren’t you supposed to be a spirit of knowledge? How do you not know?” I quickly became upset. If I knew nothing about it, nor what might give me an edge on the creature, then I only had two real options: run, or fight.

The problem with running was that I was already doing it, and that wasn’t working. The beast was catching up to me, and fast. The problem with fighting was that I was sure this thing wouldn’t be nearly as easy to kill as the deer near the village. Unfortunately, I had no other option. It would catch up eventually, and I would have to try my best to survive. For now though, I took the bow that I had, and drew an arrow. This bear-fish was running straight at me, so I didn’t doubt my chances of hitting it. I just had to hope that it wasn’t conserving any extra speed, or else I might die before I could even make it out of the forest.

I released the arrow, and it was set on a path straight for the bear’s left eye. Then, it blinked, and the arrow was deflected harmlessly. Of all things, its eyelid had been able to block it. If that arrow had been shot at myself, there was no area on my body it wouldn’t impale. It suddenly sank in just how much trouble I was really in, so I started to try to come up with a plan, loosing a few more arrows in the meantime, though none of them did any damage.

If my bow didn’t work, I was sure that my knife and spear wouldn’t either. Really, there was no point in testing it out either, considering I had no idea how strong the beast was either. For all I knew, one swipe with its weird claws might be able to take my head off.

“Ember, any ideas? Kind of struggling here, and I sure could use a few ideas from a spirit of knowledge right now!” The bear-fish was only around ten feet away now. I’d have to turn and do something soon.

Ember stayed silent for a few precious moments, only speaking when the bear was five feet away. “Shoot some mana at it!” He suddenly shouted in my mind.

External mana was pretty useless to me, for the time being. All I could do was send a blast of unaspected mana at something, which didn’t really do too much damage to anything. In fact, it was even more useless than my bow in this situation, but I didn’t have many other options.

I turned as quickly as I could, my arm outstretched in the direction of the bear-fish. It was only a few feet away by now. As I prepared to send out the mana, the Branch did something. I recognized it as the Branch’s ability to teach something at a much faster rate, but the transformation of information was so seamless that I barely even noticed at first. Still, when mana began to gather around my palm, I knew something was different as soon as it began.

In a fraction of a second, dark energy seemed to form into a small ball in my palm, before exploding out in a wave. It reminded me a lot of Laya’s memory, just much, much weaker. When she used the technique, it had covered an entire battlefield. When I did, it just shot out a couple feet in front of me. Regardless, that seemed to be enough.

The bear-fish hadn’t even realized what happened to it until it was entirely too late. A dark, almost shadowy substance sprung forth, briefly making contact with its face as the creature’s sharp teeth were only an inch away from my hand. Then, the bear-fish simply fell. I knew it was dead after seeing Laya’s memories, but the sight of it all was still a bit horrifying. One moment, this beast had been alive and well, likely anticipating a meal. The next, its lifeless body lay motionlessly on the ground. I collapsed to my knees as well, the adrenaline from the situation wearing off at the same time I ran out of the mana in my body’s reserves. I hadn’t been hurt, but I had still nearly died. Being so close to death had been terrifying.

“Strange. I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Ember said as he appeared in front of me. I noticed that he seemed to have grown a bit bigger since I last saw his body, or rather the flame that passed for a body.

“That doesn’t even make sense. Aren’t you supposed to know everything?” I asked.

“No, not everything. I’m not omniscient, I can just gather knowledge very easily. Though, considering I was born in this forest, it’s strange that something can exist inside it that I do not know about,” Ember didn’t speak any more, and I took his silence as him being lost in thought. For now, I decided to just let him be.

I moved away from the bear-fish, quickly hiding behind the thickest tree that I could find close to myself. I was out of mana, and if anything else attacked me, chances were I was dead. On the bright side, it would only take a couple hours for my body to naturally convert the ambient mana in the atmosphere to mana that I could then use myself.

Thankfully, nothing else happened during the time I spent recuperating. For the majority of the time, I thought about the chase. I’d really come close to death. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if the entire event could have been avoided or not. It wasn’t like I was especially trying to stay hidden or quiet. I wasn’t sure how the bear-fish spotted me at first, but I knew that my recklessness wasn’t helping regardless. I was so excited to finally see the outside world that I had almost gotten myself killed because of it. The encounter had been a surprise, but the beast was still simple. It was going to chase me down and eat me, most likely.

I just needed to be more careful when I left the forest. There were humans out there, and they wouldn’t be nearly as predictable as a hungry animal. If I got on someone’s bad side, I doubted they would just run at me and allow me to use a technique to kill them. That line of thinking had made two things clear.

First, I needed to get stronger. That was easier said than done. For one, I had absolutely no clue how to go about that. I knew that learning new techniques would help, but I doubted I’d be able to learn even one very easily. The price to have Ember teach me something was just way too steep. Even the weakest ones were worth decades of life. There were other ways I knew of to achieve this goal, but they would take a long time. I needed to be able to protect myself now, though there just wasn’t anything I could really do about that.

Second, I needed to be much more cautious. I had no clue how I would be treated if I eventually made contact with anyone else, which was more likely than not. For all I knew, I could either be killed on the spot just for being a different race. I tried my best not to make assumptions though, as they would just cloud my judgment. The only thing I really knew about humans was that they were chaotic and brutish. Even then, I had only heard stories, so I could never be sure until I met one. Overall, the second goal was much easier than the first. I couldn’t allow myself to throw out caution simply because I was excited about something.

Getting up, I looked around the area one last time, confirming that nothing dangerous was in the vicinity. Then, I continued walking. This time, I stayed vigilant. I wouldn’t let anything else catch me by surprise. For that, I was a bit thankful for the bear-fish creature’s attack. I’d always known that I could die if something or someone really wanted me dead, but there was a difference in knowledge learned and experience gained. I now knew just how easy it was to be killed. If that beast caught up to me, I was sure I would have been killed. I was just happy I’d been able to learn that and then keep on living anyway.

A while later, Ember had told me that I was more or less at the entrance of the forest, so I climbed the nearest tree to get a good look. Behind me, the forest canopy seemed to continue on forever. Even from here, I couldn’t see Mother Tree’s gigantic trunk. In front of me, an endless sea of grassy hills stretched out into the horizon.

In front of me was an entirely new world.