It was utterly unsurprising that attempting to search an entire planet for “anything that looks odd” was boring, frustrating, and full of false alarms. Serenity spent several days trying to figure out what “normal” was.
A loud, buzzing taste to the mana accompanied by the sour taste of stale Affinities was the nearby city. Serenity had to ask Senkovar when he felt the mana, but with a little effort he was able to lead Senkovar to what he was feeling and find out what it was.
A siren’s song of joy and pain was a dungeon break. Serenity didn’t have to ask for help on that one; instead, the dungeon wanted reassurance; it didn’t know what happened to its weasel-rats once they escaped. Serenity had to reassure it that they weren’t simply destroyed when they left. It didn’t seem to mind the fact that they’d be hunted down once they were outside; it simply hated the idea of the creatures dying without having the chance to fight.
From the quiet hum of a snow-covered mountain to the staccato yell of a large storm, Serenity had to learn everything that affected the flow of mana through the world. It wasn’t easy; without Aide’s assistance, it would have been a task that would take years. The murmur of a slow river and the stagnant hiss of a corrupted pool of mana weren’t all that different, even though the causes were not at all alike; without Aide’s help, Serenity knew he’d miss a great deal of detail.
It was all too obvious that Senkovar expected to do most of the actual work and that he brought Serenity along more for training than for his help. At the same time, something didn’t quite seem right about that; if it was just for training, why did they spend the time on Berinath? Yes, it would have taken Serenity longer to get up to speed on Eitchen, but if he wasn’t doing any of the work, it would still be worth saving the time they’d spent on Berinath. Searching Eitchen properly was going to take months.
By the end of the third day, it was clear that Serenity’s suspicions about the Eight were at least partly true: without any effort on his part or any use of the siphon, the eight legacy orbs were all brighter than they had been. They’d absorbed less in that three days than they would get from Serenity pouring half his Essence pool into them, but it happened passively.
That evening, Serenity fulfilled his promise to Immiki. With the initial results, she was willing to allow Serenity to attach the siphon to see if it increased their draw from the ley lines, but that wasn’t the main portion of their talk. As it turned out, the siphon made no difference at all; it wasn’t made to gather the more diffuse energy of the nexus.
Most of the time was spent with Immiki talking about the past and Serenity listening. The conversation made Serenity think about Amani Valles, the inventor from A’Atla who was trapped in her own invention until Serenity rescued her. They’d had several similar conversations, even though the topics were different. Serenity suspected that Amani would get along well with Immiki. Perhaps he’d suggest a vacation trip to Amani at some point. He doubted it would be soon; she seemed unlikely to want to leave Earth so soon after being reunited with the wolf-man she knew as Calu.
At the end of the talk, Serenity extracted a promise from Immiki to look for anything that might indicate damage to Eitchen and let him or Senkovar know. He knew she couldn’t spend much time manifested, but after her tales, he knew that she had secrets she’d scattered across the planet’s surface.
Before she started building the legacy orbs, back in the day when there were things on the planet that could threaten her original, Immiki was a planner and a schemer. She’d created hundreds, maybe thousands, of different useful things from tiny sensors to full bases and left them all over Eitchen. They were a large part of Immiki’s legend before she gathered the Eight and of how the Eight maintained their legends until the war happened and Immiki destroyed one of them to create the Cavern.
Serenity didn’t actually expect any of those long-hidden resources to find what they were looking for, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask. It would certainly be convenient if it did.
The next time Serenity called on Immiki, he made certain that both Rissa and Jenna were there. Rissa enjoyed the stories as much as Serenity did, and while Jenna probably didn’t fully understand them, the illusions, both visual and sonic, Immiki could manage kept Jenna just as interested as her parents. It became a nightly routine to get together and watch Immiki tell Jenna a story.
Over the next two weeks, Serenity grew more and more skilled at the sort of search World Shaman Senkovar wanted him to perform. He also became more and more certain that Senkovar wasn’t performing the same sort of search. In a reverse of what Serenity thought was going on, Senkovar seemed to be covering more area than Serenity and assigning Serenity to do detailed sweeps of subsections.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
Serenity was almost confident enough in what was happening to ask about it when Senkovar assigned Serenity a section of the planet far beyond the Cavern, in an area Serenity knew he’d heard tales about. The landscape was nothing like the lush forests that Immiki described; instead, it was a plain filled with poor soil. There was a city right where many of Immiki’s early adventures took place, but it wasn’t the ancient metropolis Immiki described; instead, it was a sand-filled ruin with only a handful of families left.
Serenity knew exactly what he was looking at. This was the result of using too much of the power of the land. It would recover in time, but it would never be as good as it would have been if it hadn’t been drained. The war that resulted in the Cavern might well be the immediate cause; it would certainly explain why the Eight felt they had to completely destroy the only overland path to their home. It couldn’t be the only reason, however; the damage felt long term and severe. Chances were that whatever happened in the war was only an expansion of preexisting practices.
The more Serenity looked, the worse the situation was. The vegetation was suffering; after his experience on Berinath, Serenity could say that essentially everything was wrong for it, but the magical atmosphere was the worst. There were no large animals other than people in the region; other than humans, the largest animal he could see was a dog about the size of a beagle, and it wasn’t in good shape. There weren’t even many rodents, which said the problem was severe.
There was only one dungeon in the area and it was a very young one, Tier One and inexperienced. When he passed by, it tried to grab him like a lifeline. It wasn’t coherent enough to use words, but it was able to tell him that it had seen two other dungeons in its short lifespan. They also hadn’t passed Tier One before something killed them.
Given the lack of dangerous animals other than humans, Serenity assumed he knew exactly what killed the other two dungeons. Greed seemed the most likely cause, though desperation was a close second. Killing their dungeons was like a farmer eating his seed corn; it was a terrible idea but that didn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Serenity gave the young dungeon what advice he could, everything from what sort of things it might want to give as rewards to better ways to protect its core. If he could, he’d push it into being an instanced dungeon; instanced dungeons were harder to kill, though it certainly wasn’t impossible. If the dungeon survived, the best thing he was able to provide was the concept of what a healthy human was like; from what the dungeon sent, it hadn’t seen one yet and it had a somewhat warped idea of humans. The dungeon was the best hope of the people of that area in the long term, so he hoped the youngster would survive.
Despite the quiet horror of that area, it wasn’t the sign of a World Eater, so Serenity moved on. The residue of a war fought between people who could individually destroy massive areas was common, but outside the drained area that mostly meant that the older infrastructure was damaged or destroyed, not the land itself. Most people simply weren’t capable of doing that sort of damage.
Serenity knew how and could do it, even at his Tier, but he wouldn’t. Never again.
It took a couple more days to confront Senkovar. When he did, the answer he got was shocking: Senkovar considered Serenity to be more capable of quickly interpreting the local conditions than Senkovar was, despite his long experience. Senkovar could tease out more information than Serenity but it took him longer. When they had a planet to cover, speed was important.
Senkovar, on the other hand, knew what damage from World Eaters looked like, so he could pick out areas that might be damaged. The drained area was the closest he’d seen, but Serenity’s analysis and explanation convinced Senkovar that it wasn’t from the World Eaters; it was simply too old.
Serenity gave those symptoms to Immiki. She was able to find several other areas that had similar damage, but they were all well into the process of healing from it. The areas were all either smaller or hadn’t been drained as severely for as long.
Immiki was horrified at the condition of her world. She’d known there was damage from the war, but she hadn’t expected it to last so long. When she saw the ruins of her hometown, her horror finally made her willing to talk about the war; it was not a pretty story. Pilenza was once a city where humans and anemoi lived side by side, but only humans lived there now.
That wasn’t because of the war; instead, it was because Pilenza discovered a new way to gain magic for very little effort. It took them decades to realize that the anemoi had trouble reproducing in the drained lands; when they did, powerful Pilenza started to conquer other lands. Whether it was to have new land for the anemoi to live on or to be able to draw power from places that had not yet been drained didn’t matter; those places fought back.
Time after time, Pilenza won its battles. At the same time, each battle won was a loss for the war effort; Pilenza was only defeated when its army finally reached too far after too many victories. As soon as Pilenza stopped expanding, it started to collapse and the collapse was far faster than the growth.
Worst of all, at least for Immiki, was that the very enchantments that started it all were her fault. They were based on the enchantments she created for the siphon. She never said that this influenced her decision to destroy a siphon when she found out it was permanently harming her adherents, but even Serenity could guess that much.
Seven weeks and three days after they started the survey, World Shaman Senkovar Et’Tart declared it “complete enough.” He was satisfied that the World Eaters hadn’t yet arrived on Eitchen. It was a good verdict in some ways, but it also meant that they were no closer to a solution.