“Well, I would say that satisfies the conditions of my employment quite soundly.” Ria leaned heavily on my side as we stood outside the building. She’d almost made it back to the wagon, however while she could remain awake longer than before, physical activity drained her much faster. So in my place Tagalong Girl was ferrying our belongings out of Lorn and Harlod’s house.

“Thank you for your assistance.” Harold led the conversation, after noticing his wife’s hesitation. “Especially with scavenging the other houses, we’ll be able to fix things up nicely before winter sets in, and if needed sell the excess.”

“I needed to keep busy somehow. Do your best.” With a quick nod of my head, I helped Ria into the back of the cart and ordered Sparky to move out.

An expedient farewell, for those we don’t mind never seeing again. They weren’t exactly bad people, but unable to teach Tagalong Girl the lessons she needed, it was better for us to depart quickly. After all, many days of travel remained before we could reach… Well, I didn’t know where exactly, just that our destination needed to be much farther away.

Heading north, soon grass rose up around as we moved past the hamlet’s fields and back into shrublands. Idly considering a cluster of several woodier bushes, I attempted to work out the hydrology of the area. Once more a gigantic cluster of clouds appeared on the western horizon.

Fall was considered to be the ‘rainy’ season, but I would think that meant rain every day. From what I’d torn up during encampments, the surface roots were much denser, which usually was for the purpose of soil retention while inundated with water. Many of the plants also felt like succulents with waxy exteriors—

And following that thought I put all musings on botany aside. I recalled the habitats of several species when learning alchemy, and their textures didn’t track.

I wish I knew how this world actually worked.

Instead, I worked on using to vaporize all the insects flying around us. The practice aimed to improve my multi-casting, intuitive precision, as well as channeling negative energy through my spells. Again, something that would not have been possible in Underworld of Armok, but since it was more of a unique attribute that I could infuse into my mana, I wanted to try infusing more spells.

Propulsion aside, needed no particular components and so I’d intuitively been able to shove negative energy into it. However had a duration and needed to be controlled. Low, frankly useless, quantities of negative energy could be infused, but the more packed into the spell shape, the more the decay seemed to affect the shape itself, collapsing what I presumed to be a concept, and not something with any inherent meaning. All in all, there was plenty to keep me occupied while I recited various stories to Tagalong Girl.

From Ritz’s recollection of their adventure in Terdri, a long river cut across the region, west to east, and if we were to make our way to Medean we’d need to find one of the few bridges, or ford it. Since Lorn’s village was already north of that walled city, we would be less than a day out from a crossing.

Continuing north, I noted a greater density and size of insects. Sparky slowed down and trotted to a stop.

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“Eyes off, watch the west.”

To the west, a strange shrub stood, resembling a twisted tree, a king among its lesser brethren. In other words, nothing important, which was the point.

Using my magic Shunpo(using several s as a foothold) I accelerated off to the East silently as Tagalong Girl looked away. As evidenced recently, she remained unable to look afar with her magic vision, but even at a distance I could make out a baleful black aura in .

With several sets of overlapping senses, it becomes difficult to be surprised. Although I approached rapidly before landing adjacent to the body, I could still gather enough information to set myself down without disturbing anything. Curiously enough, aside from decomposers near the soft tissue, the woman seemed undamaged. From the flowering of chia-like plants, it had been there for at least three weeks, but then again using the strands of magic seemed at least as dense as my own. Various plants seemed to be forcefully sprouting from a gourd she carried, some sort of miracle elixir perhaps, sadly wasted because…

Hmm, actually it would seem her eyes had actually dehydrated some, a result of a long period of falling? The scene was all in all too curious. Taking her hand, it possessed the density of regular flesh, yet attempting to crush one of the fingers it resisted with preternatural toughness.

In the end, I didn’t want to spend more than a few moments this far away from Tagalong Girl and Ria. What if another strangely sourced corpse fell from the sky on top of them? So I was finally confronted by a longstanding object of my procrastination. Sorting out my Inventory so I could take the body with me.

I say that, but there were many things that I simply couldn’t leave behind: Clavi, Hans, the rest of the hand spiders and skeletons, my money, the starter gear from Underworld, all my alchemy gear, and the few reagents I had, the various weaponry I’d collected(I considered ditching the clubs, but given my penchant for blunt weapons I decided against it), logs and other larger sorts of timber were hard to acquire on the plains so I kept them, various foods(I couldn’t bring myself to simply throw out that singular eel Pan gave me), as well as a multitude of semi-magical treasure that I’d looted from the goblin treasury.

All that really was up for debate were rags, or various body parts.

In the end, I jettisoned a little over a hundred of the worst quality pelvic bones. Oh, what a travesty, the pelvis is one of the strongest and largest bones there is, what myriad of uses it could have provided my future skeletal amalgams… of course in being the lowest quality of bone, their structural integrity was the most compromised, and most aesthetically unpleasant, so they were banished. did its best to keep the small mound of bones from clattering about and being a suspicion.

After making sure no slithery worms and creepy beetles developed any intriguing mutations, I carefully vaporized them with negative energy before properly cleaning the body with . After double checking for pouches and pockets for anything intriguing, I removed the chia-pet clothing and tossed her into Inventory.

Yet another spot of intrigue to delve into, but there was hardly any time when travelling with Tagalong Girl. If only we could settle down somewhere, I could have a moment to excavate a secret laboratory and static surroundings could put me more at ease— that was still a long way off. If not out of Derriad in its entirety, we needed to be much closer to the edge before the Church loosened its grip on the region’s culture.

My new specimen would just have to sit tight. Of course it made me feel antsy, but there was nothing to be done about it. Nothing that didn’t ruin the current path at least.

I silently launched back towards the cart. Three minutes had yet to pass, so Tagalong Girl still earnestly looked west with no fatigue. Silently and still casting a to snap some twigs to secure her attention, I attempted to set myself back down in the cart without drawing her attention.

Perhaps wasn’t meant for air travel, but before my pants brushed against the seat, she started to turn her head. Of course by the time she looked around, all Tagalong Girl caught was my bright and smiling face.

“Excellent! Quite well done, your senses are improving.”

“M?” She let out a stifled noise of confusion, but didn’t need to elaborate.

“I thought you wouldn’t catch my movements, you may not have turned around fast enough, but you did notice me. That too is a measure of how far you’ve come. This sort of incremental progress is exactly what you should look forward to.”

Perhaps I went a little overboard on the praise compared to usual, but she did seem to have a few bouts of lackluster confidence and moments of feeling adrift lately. Without a numerical stat table, this might be the best reassurance I could give Tagalong Girl at the moment.

Ever the quiet one, she couldn’t compose a thought she wished to say out loud to me, so we returned to our silent journey.

Haa~, well, we’ll be approaching the river soon. Hopefully something interesting will be afoot in Medean. I’m certainly not holding my breath for answers from this world.