The expansion of my grove seems to have hit a bit of wall, in the form of a massive desert. Anything I try to grow there just dies, it seems to be caused by some sort of poison. Just standing at the edge of this desert quickly makes me violently ill, faster than I can heal. Stepping away from it a little bit allows me to quickly recover though.

I remember hearing about this desert before. At the time I had scoffed at the idea of a mere desert stopping my expansion and forgotten about it, but I don’t think this is any mere desert. So I set about trying to figure out what was going on with it, which turned out to be pretty easy as all I had to do was ask the scholars.

Apparently, this is the result of one of their purges, this one a successful attempt to stop the spread of an infectious disease that had resisted all other methods of containment and eradication. This all happened about twenty-five years ago, and, like all major incidents at around that time, my dad and his friends were involved somehow. Probably evacuating the uninfected or something like that.

The desert is really long but not very wide. I can see the far side pretty clearly, but I can’t see the left or right sides from where I stand. Most people get around it by either teleporting across, or if that isn’t an option, by just walking around it. Though some people have successfully crossed by flying over it if they get high enough. Even true immortals avoid crossing this place, though some have done so successfully in the past.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Not that anyone really needs to cross it all that often. City to city teleportation makes trips like that irrelevant for most, and if you really need to get across and can’t use the city teleporters for some reason then there are some people that could teleport you to the other side for a bit of money. The vast majority of them only know enough to get the job done, but they are supposedly competent enough to be reliable for that.

Of course, neither of those are options for me. I could go around it, but that would take forever and feels too much like admitting defeat for my liking. I’ll have to ask around a bit more about it, see if anyone has fixed similar problems in the past, how they fixed it, and other things like that.

I’ll start that process tomorrow.

As for what I actually did today, I spent my time building houses. It wasn’t too difficult. In the morning I talked to the person in charge to figure out what exactly they needed, she went over things like how the houses need to be designed and where to actually put them with me. By the end of the day, I had eased the strain quite a bit, and created areas where they could easily expand too.

Other than that I spent my downtime with Azrezel. He has had some success, in that he got an undead to show emotion, apparently they can appreciate a good joke. It is far from perfect, but considering the fact that he has only spent a couple of days on this, it would be weird if it was perfect. It was really cute to watch him telling jokes to his undead and is probably not something I would have thought of.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.