After two weeks on the steppes, the Flying Crabs and Henry reached a stretch of fertile forest. Nourishing these lands was a thirty-kilometre-wide river, inside whose waters swam the shadows of aquatic monsters waiting to swallow any creature or man who dared to cross.
Most players would have had to end the journey here, watching powerlessly as the Flying Crab flock bypassed the obstacle with ease through the sky. Henry, though, having more cheats than most, travelled along the riverbank until he found a bend in line with multiple river islands.
In preparation of crossing, he built several dozen light-weight vessels from riverside flax, which he stored in the extra inventory space of his ring. Then, equipping his Spelltomes and summoning a swarm of weapons controlled by The Pendant of a Thousand Minds, he braved the deadly waters.
The moment the hull touched the river's surface, the shadows in its midst began to converge upon him.
During the endless assault to follow, the lower-level monsters were skewered and stabbed by the weapon swarm. Their blood attracted leviathans beyond his power to slay, and these, he had to deal with in other, creative ways, dodging their attacks with movement spells and Nilkan Freerunning along their beaks and spines. Whenever a vessel was destroyed, he swapped to another. And at each island, he replenished his boat stock by hacking down the local vegetation while running circles around the amphibious monsters that continued to chase him on land.
In an emergency situation, his Legendary elemental cloaks from The Wolf Empress and Karnon were available for escaping. He held back from using them, though, since the transformation would sever the connection with his Flying Crab trackers.
Luckily, he was never forced to resort to this measure. The crossing was successful.
After the first river, he arrived at a second triple its width.
At first, he thought the previous ordeal could be avoided when he spotted the migrating herds crossing what he mistook for a bridge. Upon closer inspection, though, the structure turned out to be a colossal treant made of vines. It was lying in a planking position, its arms on one bank of the river, its toes on the other.
The migrating animals, to pay for safe passage along the treant's back, were giving tributes of precious gems and seeds. A temporary peace was maintained between the predators and prey, those who broke it being grabbed by vines and swallowed into the treant's mass.
Henry didn't bother going closer since the monsters in this world also experienced Bloodlust when he initially approached them. While he would be battling the colossus, the flock would no doubt outrange his tracer. Moreover, fighting the colossus would probably cause all the herds yet to cross to freeze to death in the coming winter. For a Floating Leaf, that would be an unforgivable affront to mother nature.
Repeating the tactic from before, he crossed downstream.
Beyond a third and final river, they returned to the plains for a few days more. Then, abruptly, the Flying Crab flock, now darkening the entire sky, did a hard pivot south. For the first time, they entered the rocky foothills of the vast mountain range that'd continued to be in Henry's periphery throughout the trip.
The herds vanished.
He wondered if they'd passed the tail end of the land migration. This theory, though, was quickly disproved by the manifestation of hundreds of oases of blood littered with the broken shells of Flying Crabs.
The culprits soon made their appearance, stomping from out of their cave dens in the hills, their footsteps shaking the earth.
They were jumbo-jet sized griffon-like creatures with four legs, an equal number of wings, and the heads of pelicans. These 'Pelican Griffons' had grown extremely obese on Flying Crab meat. Their bellies were so heavy that their wings could not support their weight for prolonged flight. They ran along the ground, analysing the flocks for an opportunity, and when one arose, they leapt into the sky to scoop up thousands of crabs in their Pelican-throat pouches, before landing with a deafening crash.
By his estimation, these Pelican Griffons were Tier-5, 5000-man monsters. This made them some of the most powerful entities on the planet - he couldn't summon monsters Tier-6 or above without collecting more pieces of The Syncretist's Armament.
The Flying Crabs managed to evade most of the Pelican Griffons' aerial manoeuvres. Around nightfall, though, when the flocks rested on the plains, now in tens of thousands of skyscraper piles, the true feast began.
Henry, digging a burrow beside the flock containing his tracer, pulled out his binoculars and watched the distant skyscrapers being toppled in the dusk.
Against the might of the Pelican Griffons, the crabs' exoskeletons provided no more resistance than air, their assailants shovelling down pouchful after pouchful. The crabs' only salvations were their devourers pausing on occasion to digest or bicker with each other and the other crab piles being eaten in their stead. It was a defence by sheer numbers.
The next morning, he noted the absence of certain songs from the sky and the species who'd once sung them.
How depressing, he thought. If only they'd distributed themselves—he cut the Misaligned thought short and resumed his Floating Leaf observations.
On the second night, he awoke to the shaking of his burrow, a shower of dirt raining down on his face. Having slept in every cheat item he could equip, he leapt out to confront the Pelican Griffon about to eat his flock, forcing its attention onto himself by invoking its Bloodlust.
His level was simply too far below the monster to inflict meaningful damage. Thus, he spent the majority of the battle performing evasive manoeuvres. He sprinted away in his Cheetah form, danced through waves of its summoned minions, and dove into underground tunnels he'd prepared for escaping its AOE shockwave spells.
At no point could he allow himself to be hit. Against 5000-man monsters, even the beefiest tanks of the appropriate level would be instakilled by a single direct strike - tanks at this scale of combat were always protected by dozens or hundreds of layers of spell-shields from their healer teams operating in rotation. Alone, he had no such luxury.
However, the mechanics of this obese, non-Sentient beast were significantly simpler, significantly more predictable than what Henry'd been training against for the past few years. Without a poison to introduce errors into his actions, without the need to act weak in case of watching eyes, he dodged with the relentless perfection of a machine.
At dawn, when his flock finally awoke and took flight, he made his own escape.
The hills of the Pelican Griffons lasted for ten days.
According to conventional climatography, the terrain after this should have become desertous with how far south they'd travelled. Instead, however, the air felt tropically humid. Soon, the landscape was overtaken by a glowing grass that absorbed Nature Energy in a process similar to photosynthesis.
As the flock drew ever closer to the equator, this grass began to grow taller and lusher, to speciate into more complicated types. The humidity, he found, was the product of a giant bamboo version of the grass that poured water vapour into the air, which it'd been generating with the absorbed Nature Energy.
One morning, while entering a jungle of this bamboo, he was swarmed by a 300-strong pack of velociraptors with scythes for arms and feathers of wind. They ran as fast as his Cheetah form. Bafflingly, despite him having The Leggings of a Thousand Leaps to multiply his Stamina pool by 16, his Stamina was depleted before theirs.
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Their supernatural speed carried over to their attacks and reflexes. He fought a hard battle with them for half a day, employing every trick and cheat, Canopywalking through the bamboo, rapid switching Spelltomes, Ninefisting them. However, as the attention of more and more packs was drawn by their scuffle, he was eventually overwhelmed. In a moment of otherwise certain death, he used his Cloak of Wind and Stone to transform into a breeze and escape.
His connection with the tracer severed, he attempted to pursue the flock with his sight on them through the canopy. But his elemental form was much slower than the stallion, and the raptors continuously caught him.
After 50 days of travel, covering roughly the distance by foot from Southeast Asia to Europe, his part in the great migration had come to its end.
Curious about the raptors that'd bested him, he built a hunting camp and began to explore the region.
The raptors were merely a Wind-elemental variation of the jungle's inhabitants. There were was a wide assortment of dinosaur-form monsters with Elemental-magic fused into their bodies, including T-Rexes with lightning for legs and Pterosaurus of ice. These 'Elementosaurs', as he named them, seemed to possess a power exceeding what should be possible according to the game's balance mechanisms.
With this broken might, they slaughtered any animal that entered their territories. Peculiarly, though, they didn't consume their victims. In fact, he never saw them eat - they always retreated into the jungle at dusk.
Butchering their carcasses, he was surprised at the stark dissimilarity of their anatomy to the planet's other terrestrial species. Internally, they were about as closely related as humans and squids. The most intriguing feature was an extra pear-shaped organ in their gut. Its function, he suspected, was to extract Nature Energy from an as-of-yet undiscovered species of the Nature Energy grass. This should also be the ultimate source of their incredible power. His hypothesis was corroborated when he managed to isolate a Tier-0 juvenile for
The jungle was massive. To the east, it grew up to the fume-emitting mountains, while in the west, it stretched beyond sight. Based on the herds migrating in the opposite direction, he guessed that it extended all the way to the sea or another high-level zone, forming an impassable barrier for land travel.
Despite his desires to continue investigating the mysteries of this zone, he refrained because doing so would be stepping beyond the scope of the Floating Leaf, the scout. Collecting a few eggs and tufts of grass, he turned around and began the long journey back for the next phase of training.
For the next three months, he'd designated a multi-zone region for exploring immediately across from his island. It included both the marshes and the hemiborieal forest from the start of the migration, and covered about 133,000 square kilometres, a similar area to Greece or Louisana.
His return journey brought him back into the freezing fingers of winter. The hills of the Pelican Griffons were deserted, the obese monsters having holed up in caves. The three rivers had frozen over; from the widest poked out the treant colossus' frost-matted head, its snores causing the snow to slip from the branches of the surrounding forest.
Before even completing the return trip, he realised the dire mistake of selecting this season to begin the next phase of his Floating Leaf training.
The Odayakans had never needed to contemplate this problem because they lived in a tropical zone that thrived throughout the year. Here, though, there was winter, and it was a deep winter, a winter as silent as death. As every animal retreated to its den to hibernate, as every plant withered, as every feature of the land was hidden under blankets of white snow, the depth and variety of scouting tasks with which he could occupy himself became drastically more limited.
Here, he could have delayed his training or tracked back again to the Elementosaur territory, which would still be balmy and alive. And if he'd been practising any other martial art, he would have made such logical adjustments. Alas, for a Floating Leaf, these moments were considered a miraculous blessing. When duties were removed, the practitioner could concentrate on the few remaining more intensely, sharpening one's tolerance for boredom and moving oneself closer towards the ideal of Alignment.
And why should he have feared? He'd coped with this hippy nature observation thus so far. And during his fight with The Wolf Empress, he'd endured six months in a more monotonous winter landscape. Half that time in the snow again should be a cakewalk.
And so he stayed.
But he'd underestimated the depths of the snow and the true boredom it would bring. Against The Empress, he'd had intermittent periods of stimulation from books, music, and the battle itself. Now, it was just him and the snow, and the snow was no place for a young Leaf.
Every awful minute of that winter, every excruciating second, he was forced to Stretch his duties to absurd degrees.
Without foliage or fruits, there were still plenty of ways to distinguish a tree. There was the colour of the bark, the height, the density of the leafless branches, the number of axe blows to fell one based on its width, the seconds a log takes to burn with a given volume...
Limitless, too, were the variety of landscape protuberances. Hills, mountains, crags, rises, ridges, hillocks, and knolls? No. Discard the categories. Each protuberance is unique. It varies by height, width, altitude, angles of its slopes, number of trees that call it home, thickness of the snow resting on top of it, percentage representation of each species of tree growing on it...
And the same was true of the valleys and the flats and the frozen marshes - each was a wealth of excitement.
Hunting wild game? There was literally none.
But there was snow. It is common knowledge that snowflakes are fascinatingly unique, but what of the uniqueness of clumps of snow in branches? The variable velocities of snow falling? The changes in the depth of snow through the hours of the snowstorm? The volume of the streams of snowmelt as one used heating magic to uncover the secrets within an 'interesting' snow-hump only to find yet another boulder or log embedded in the snow? What about those?
So bland was the land that his mind began to populate it with rainbows and friends, monsters and nemeses. And they were all lovely. An imagined twig snapped by Rose's stalking foot behind him, the phantom of an uncultured pleb reading the latest work of his mortal enemy Silver Wolf, even these were transformed into welcoming beacons in the mind-maddening snow.
However, just as he abstained from every other Misaligned activity, he also abstained from the excitement of these hallucinations. Having mastered such things while training in pitch-black caves for Tunnelling Cowmole Claw, he dispelled the illusions as they came. Again and again, he retrained his focus onto the real, onto the snow.
No fantasies, no wayward thoughts, no unproductive actions, only a Floating Leaf in the snow.
As he Stretched and Stretched, his sense of time stretched, too, so that the hours felt like weeks, and the weeks felt like snow. His mind, exhausted by its constant efforts to extract something from the nothing of the snow, regularly gave up, and he collapsed where he stood in the snow, and he fell asleep in the snow, yet not even his dreams could provide relief, for they were also snow.
Certain days weren't bad.
He still had the location of the resources he'd mapped out when travelling through here briefly during autumn with the Flying Crabs. When his daily exploration brought him in range of these sensory treasures, he pounced upon them with the ferocity of a desert wanderer upon a canteen of sparkling water, guzzling up the sights with abandon, not caring that his bladder might explode.
However, the Floating Leaf elders had, in all their cruel wisdom, defined hard limits on Stretching one's duties over others to linger at a single site. The Leaf is a scout, it was a written, not a researcher. At some point, it must mark the spot on the map as complete and surrender itself back to the wind on which it floats, back to the featureless snow.
The snow...
The snow......
The snow..........
The snow!
But nothing is eternal, not even the snow. Eventually, spring showed up to strip away the blanket of white and prod the land back into colourful life.
And the next winter, a madman, obsessed with the pursuit of Alignment, he repeated this ordeal but made it harder by assigning himself to a smaller snowy territory of 21,000 square kilometres, the size of El Salvador.
The winter after that, he did it in a snowy region the size of Lost Angeles – not the metro but the much tinier city proper, which a person could walk across in a day.
Riverbank Cabin.
Amidst the scintillating, living heat of summer, the Leaf finally floated back to its island home.
Sailing up the river to his farmstead, Henry passed a school of Dragonfish that had endured the winters, too.
"Good for you," he said, his own voice foreign in his ears as he uttered the first words that weren't spell-incantations in 33 months. "Good for you."
The unnecessary repetition tasted as sweet on his tongue as the richest fruit.
The dome shielding his farm was undisturbed except for a young forest digging its roots into the surface soil. Beginning with felling this forest's trees, he started the long project of restoring his home to its previous order.
The resources he'd scouted could be utilised in countless upgrades to the farm facilities, and his inventory was stuffed with fascinating seeds and eggs. But he did not think of any of these. Such ideas would not have a place in his disciplined mind until the exact time of his choosing.
Ultimately, he'd failed to reach the summit of Floating Leaf, whose elders could sit on a rock and entertain themselves in perpetuity with the second-by-second fluctuations of the environment. What progress he had made, though, could bear him through most mortal ordeals, including the training to come. With his ability to Stretch his focus at will, to tolerate hallucination-inducing boredom, the pace at which he learned the subsequent martial arts should rise exponentially.