More than anything, they looked like mutated monkeys. The group of six monkeys had long hair, enough that they almost looked more like a mobile mop than an animal, but most of it was silky. It was obvious that they groomed regularly. Serenity wasn’t certain how they managed that, because the first difference between them and normal monkeys should have made grooming each other difficult: they had bone spurs for claws instead of hands. They were cruel looking and Serenity knew just how dangerous a claw like that could be.

They were clearly demon beasts if Serenity used Andarit’s definition.

The demon monkeys seemed relatively large; depending on the monkey, they were somewhere between two and four feet long (before the tails). Tails was the correct word; each of them had a set of tails coming out of their spine. The lowest was where a tail usually would be, then they were spaced out along the spine. The largest of the monkeys had six tails, while the smallest had only three.

Other than the tails, the primary difference between these demon monkeys and ordinary monkeys was that these were clearly predatory carnivores. The group of six demon monkeys was gathered around a dead deer. As far as Serenity could tell, it was an ordinary deer; at the minimum, there were no obvious non-cervidae features. It had been killed by the monkeys; the slashes on its flanks and neck were clearly from demon monkey claws or something like them.

The deer wasn’t the first ordinary beast Serenity had seen on his trip. He’d seen several rabbits, a single fox and once, in the distance, a goat. They had all been skittish, staying well away from Serenity; the demon monkeys gave him a large clue as to why that was. They didn’t look all that much different than he did, after all, even though he had wings instead of multiple tails and was taller. It only made sense the prey animals would be cautious.

Now that he knew there were “demon beasts” in the trees, Serenity decided he could be a little less careful than he’d originally feared he might need to be; even if there were actual demons nearby, they didn’t control everything nearby.

Serenity moved cautiously away from the demon monkeys. Their presence might have been reassuring in one sense, but he still didn’t really want to fight them. He doubted he was entirely missed, but no demon monkeys followed him.

They must not be worried about something his size being a predator and they already had their prey for the day. Serenity knew he could have killed them but there was no reason to.

Serenity continued into the trees; they grew closer and closer together, quickly becoming dense enough that Serenity could consider it a forest instead of a lot of trees in a grassland. He’d made it to the point marked on the map as the Forest of Lost Regrets. Serenity didn’t know why that was the name given to it; all Duke Lowpeak could tell him was that the name was centuries old. It sounded like the kind of place that should have legends and probably a dungeon preserving the stories, but whatever tales it once held were lost.

Demon beasts weren’t uncommon in the forest. Most of them were small; flaming squirrels were actually the most common thing Serenity saw. He suspected that was partly because they didn’t bother to hide; after all, what wanted to eat something that was literally on fire?

There were far more animals in the forest than demon beasts. If Serenity stopped moving for a minute, something would almost always emerge and start moving around. Some of the animals, especially the birds, were relatively brave. They stayed away from Serenity but continued with their normal habits otherwise.

The trees grew taller and taller through the day; with their dense canopy, it was even easier to walk. The tree cover was dense enough that there was very little on growing at the floor of the forest, so the only real hazards were the roots themselves. Even in daytime it was fairly dim, but Serenity could easily see where everything was.

The big exception was wherever there was water. Small creeks were often heavily vegetated to the point where they looked almost like hedges, but larger streams provided enough of an opening for sunlight to reach the forest floor that they were surrounded by even more greenery.

Naturally, that was where Serenity almost ran afoul of a vine that turned out to be a camouflaged “demon” snake. It looked exactly like any number of other vines wrapped around trees that he’d passed over the previous hour until it moved.

It didn’t move like a vine at all.

Aide highlighted it to bring it to Serenity’s attention the moment it passed outside the standard movement of the forest; despite the snake’s speed and the assistance of gravity, its first strike completely missed Serenity. He was already more than a foot away from his initial position and the snake wasn’t able to correct enough once it was falling.

Serenity knew there was a decent chance that the snake was an ambush predator and would simply give up on him if he ran, and it might not even be able to hurt him anyway, but his reflexes were still too used to killing anything that attacked him. The snake was well within the range of Serenity’s aura and Death Field seemed very similar to one of the Final Reaper’s commonly used Skills, Death Zone. It snapped on, targeting only the snake, faster than Serenity’s conscious thought.

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The demon snake was dying within moments after it hit the ground. Serenity could have stopped his attack, but there wasn’t any reason to. This was the first chance he’d had to use Death Field, so he let it run until the snake was actually dead.

Serenity was fascinated by the way Death Field worked. It used Death mana and was very similar in its general construction, including its aura-linked nature, to the Final Reaper’s old Death Zone Skill, but the way it then applied the damage was subtly different. Instead of forcibly overwhelming the enemy, killing it by inches, Death Field created an area where Death was by far the dominant Affinity.

In and of itself, an area having a dominant Affinity wasn’t a problem in the short term. It wouldn’t be good for anything living to stay in a Death-dominated area, but it could be tolerated for some time. That was why Tzintkra’s surface was abandoned yet still explored.

The Death Field Skill wasn’t that simple, however. It gave all of the mana and essence within the area a significant Death Affinity, even the mana and essence within the snake. Normally that wasn’t possible because anything controlled an area around “itself”. Even objects had a sense of stability that made it harder to change them. Creatures were even worse, even before Resistances and mana control.

The thing was, Death Field didn’t try to repurpose or shift any of the existing mana or essence directly. It simply added Death in a way that Serenity had always thought wasn’t allowed.

It was a way that seemed oddly intuitive; Serenity knew that his Incarnate was the reason he could do that. It wasn’t the way he’d built the spell that had gained him the Skill and the Path. Instead, it seemed to be something more of a silent set of instructions from the Voice on how to use his Incarnate and how it differed from an Aspect.

He’d been using his Incarnate as though it were simply a more powerful Aspect since that was what he knew but the Voice was telling him that while it could be used that way, that wasn’t all it was.

Serenity remembered similar Skills after he’d first gained an Aspect that seemed to give silent instruction on how to use it if you bothered to look. They’d helped him understand the information he’d been able to find about Aspects, but for his Incarnate Serenity feared he’d have to work it all out from the Skills and practice now that he knew it was truly different from an Aspect.

Serenity had moved on while he was thinking, more or less on autopilot. He was past the stream and into another patch of forest when he began to notice something strange about the local mana. For once, it wasn’t Death mana; instead, it was Time mana. It seemed to be stronger to his left, towards the geographic center of the forest.

Serenity was curious what that meant, but he didn’t actually need to head to the center of the forest to efficiently reach Mornmot. His path would take him well into the forest, but he should miss the actual center by more than a mile.

What he knew about the forest told him that the Time mana, whatever it was, had been there for a long time; Lost Regrets sounded a lot like something Time-related and he knew from Duke Lowpeak that the name predated the evacuation from Mornmot to Lowpeak.

It was somewhat difficult to overcome his curiosity, but he didn’t need to know. Investigating would only slow him down on the way to meeting up with Rissa and whatever it was had been where it was for over a century. It would be just fine to leave it alone. He could come back later if he actually cared.

He probably wouldn’t. There were so many other things he actually needed to do; the mystery of Time mana hiding in a forest wasn’t even remotely relevant.

He had to keep reminding himself of that and reminding himself that Rissa was waiting as he ran deeper into the forest. The Time mana became more and more common. It was by far the dominant local mana type when Serenity began to see wisps of motion between the trees. They weren’t solid, but he saw flashes of people and animals.

None of them seemed at all familiar to him, so he was probably seeing the past of the area. It was strange; the forest didn’t show any obvious signs of human habitation, but what he was seeing wasn’t hunters or forest animals; instead, the most common animal was sheep. This had to be the past before the forest was here.

He was clearly too close to whatever the source of the Time mana was; if he continued on his current path, there was a chance he’d have to deal with it no matter what it was. If he was lucky, he’d just see some scenes and be able to walk by them, but if he was unlucky it would try to trap him. It all depended on what was there and Serenity had very few clues to go on.

The one thing he did know was that while he’d seen normal animals a few times, the snake was the last demon beast he’d seen. Even the flaming squirrels were missing. Ordinary animals seemed if anything even more common and less frightful than they had before he crossed the stream.

It gave Serenity the impression that the demon beasts didn’t often come this deep into the forest; if they did, they didn’t stay. That wasn’t a positive sign. The Time effect almost had to be dangerous, but if so why was it dangerous to the demon beasts and not the ordinary animals?

More importantly, which would it count Serenity as?

Serenity pulled up the map overlay. It wasn’t as accurate as he’d have liked, since it depended on the map he’d gotten from Duke Lowpeak, but it was still a good starting point.

The map confirmed Serenity’s memory. Even though he was most of a day’s travel into the forest, he’d covered less than a quarter of the distance he’d planned to travel through the forest. If he followed the planned route, he’d get a lot closer to the center of the forest than where he was now. On the other hand, going wide enough around the forest to stay in the outer forest would add several days to his travel time; it wouldn’t be as bad as following the roads, but it was still exactly why he’d decided to cut through the forest in the first place.