Zoe wasn’t sure how to feel about the class, the mana regeneration was incredible and she’d only just reached the edge of what would be reasonable for her mana regeneration given her mana capacity. But the class just didn’t seem to fit her, at least not at a glance. Did she want to stick with it for possible decades to get her next class?
She shrugged. What did it matter, really, at the end of the day? Another ten, twenty years of time spent gardening at home wouldn’t be all that bad in the worst case. The stats from the class were adequate enough. Thirty eight at the fifth tier wasn’t quite on the level of her Cosmic Mystic giving her fifty, but with another two hundred levels would add up to quite a respectable sum regardless.
The bonuses were excellent, a magical power boost that wasn’t relegated to a specific element was quite welcome since it would apply to all of her other classes as well, she imagined. A tripling of her health was more than welcome and almost brought her to six digits, which was a comfortable sight to see.
Elemental Shaman was fine, she decided. There were better options available, Zoe knew, if she wanted to spend hours upon hours — or maybe even days, poking through the enormous class selection to find the ideal one. She could go through every option with hefty requirements, take the class, note down what it offered and pick the ideal class.
Let alone days, the process might even take weeks. And for what? For a class a little stronger than the one she already had? If Nature’s Assistance lasted for a while then that alone was enough of a draw to keep the class. Giving her friends bowling balls of life was so much better than any mana capacity or powerful offensive skills could ever give her.
And besides, the class had a new element for her. Decay, she assumed given the Nature’s Decay skill. Rot or maybe death would fit, too, but Decay seemed to fit the most. Maybe she’d break the component out from the skill and get the core skill itself one day to see what it truly was.
Or maybe she could just give somebody else a resistance, she supposed. There were bound to be others who enjoyed collecting resistances and feats, Zoe was never one to think herself truly unique. The world was vast, and filled with more people than she could even fathom. That she would be the only person capable of collecting resistances was an arrogant and shameful thought, in her mind.
The only question then, was what to do now that she had a class she was okay with for a while. She could make her way back home and start up the garden she’d been thinking about for longer than she was willing to admit, with a class almost purpose built for such a purpose. Or she could continue exploring the world with her now much stronger mana regeneration letting her travel several times faster than before.
Zoe smiled. The answer was obvious she thought as she teleported into the sky and caught herself in a suit of earth. She looked around at the vast forest below and Cosmic Stepped as far as she could to the west. In less than a second, her mana was filled back up and she teleported again.
She continued Cosmic Stepping through the sky for several minutes following the road as best she could, ending up hundreds of kilometers away from Darpi, floating above a vast sea of trees below her with nothing in sight but forested hills. Zoe kept travelling through the skies until she saw something new. The forest of trees thinned and gave way to rocky, craggy terrain that soon transitioned into a vast desert filled with brownish red sand. Towering dunes covered everything that Zoe could see.
Clumps of sand broke off and fell down the dunes as bugs and animals carved their way through the sand. Zoe continued teleporting across the desert for a few minutes, past small patches of green with trees flourishing around natural springs of water that burst from the desert until she found something that caught her attention.
On one of her Cosmic Steps past a distant dune, she appeared above what seemed to be a small village nestled in a valley. Zoe teleported back and drifted down to the road to walk up to the front where one of the palest people she’d ever met stood guard outside a black stone wall that surrounded the village.
“’Ello there, what are ya fer?” The guard asked with a thick accent. Her dark black, thin hair fell to her shoulders and rested on brown leather pauldrons. Zoe’s Identify showed her as a dark red level one twenty two mage.
“Oh hi, I’m just here travelling. Anything fun to do around here?” Zoe asked.
“Fun, eh?” The woman picked at her teeth with a sharp nail, flicking whatever was stuck to the sand next to her. “Not in so much as ya might wish fer. Whatcha after?”
“Something, I dunno. Interesting. Any dungeons nearby, maybe? Play any sports here, got some cool games? Just anything neat, I guess." Zoe asked.
The guard nodded. “Dune ridin’.”
“Dune riding?" Zoe asked.
“Find yerself a fine dune, ‘op on a board, slide ‘er down. Best if ya got a way back up though. Down’s real easy like, but getting up.” The guard laughed. “Oft make a fool yerself, y’know?”
“Alright, cool. What do y’all eat here, anyway? Never been to a desert before, actually. They’ve always just kinda been this death zone of heat and suffering in my mind, but they’re really pretty, huh?" Zoe asked.
“Death zone of ‘eat and sufferin’s right about there, ya. We eat what we got. Tortoise, some birds. Lots o’ lizards. Good vegetables. Ol’ Kingsly’s got a farm he runs below the sands. Tried farmin meself once, but can’t do it. Takes so long fer the junk to grow without a class, y’know? Put seeds in me garden and a week later, still couldn’t eat em.” She shook her head.
Zoe nodded. “Right. Am I allowed in the village or are y’all closed off?”
The guard shrugged “Not gonna stop ya meself, don’t think ya’d be stopped anyway. Was you who was up there, ain’t it?” She pointed up in the sky. “Few minutes ago and all that?”
Zoe nodded. “Yeah. I didn’t see your village and I was just travelling west, sorry about that.”
“No skin off me back.” The woman said.
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“Where’s the nearest big city, do you know?” Zoe asked.
The woman pointed off to the north. “Sandborough’s a ways north.”
“Sandborough?" Zoe asked.
“Yup. Sandborough.” The woman said.
“As in, sand? Sand city?” Zoe asked.
“Sandborough is sandborough, whatcha fer?” The guard asked.
Zoe nodded. “Right. Okay. Cool. Thanks a bunch. Do y’all uh, need anything by the way? Got a raving lizard on the loose or something? Just feel like I might as well ask before I leave.”
“Nothin’ I know. Might be somebody needin’ somethin’ but not fer me.” The guard said.
“Okay. I’m gonna go check out this sandborough then, thanks a bunch.” Zoe said.
“Aye.” The guard nodded. “May the sands treat you fair.”
Zoe looked to the north and teleported to the sky, and looked around for the tallest dune she could find. There was a suitable one far to the east, and in a few Cosmic Steps she arrived at the dune’s top. For the last Cosmic Step she even had to teleport up a few hundred meters just to reach the very top of it since it towered over the nearby ones by almost a full kilometer.
The drop down was steep, and her footing was about as unstable as it got. Each step she took at the peak of the dune sent clumps of sand down the dune which snowballed as they disrupted more sand as they fell. Being so far up on such unstable footing would have terrified her before she could fly, or had such a massive pool of health. If she fell, it would be several kilometers of tumbling down the hot sands, smashing into small rocks and whatever poisonous animals called the dune their home.
But as she was, the dune seemed more exciting than anything else. Zoe summoned a smooth plank of wood and held it out above the dune then hopped on it and let the plank fall to the sands. It scraped along the hot sands and smoke began to rise as the friction combined with the sand’s natural heat began to scorch the bottom of her plank.
Keeping on the plank was difficult, Zoe found. She created more wood that stretched up the plank to wrap around her legs and keep her on it. As she slid down the dune, Zoe used her Wind skill to push on herself from behind and move the air out of the way from in front of her. She continued accelerating for a moment and as she slid down the dune, before her wooden plank smashed into a small rock that poked out of the sands and sent her tumbling forward.
Zoe pulled on the wood attached to her legs and expanded it to cover the rest of her body, catching herself as she fell in a suit of wood. The appeal to dune riding was obvious, though when she could fly, the adrenaline from falling down a dune on nothing more than a plank was lost. Flying through the air and plummeting to the ground was far more entertaining for her.
She turned her attention northwards again and continued teleporting through the sky until she found Sandborough — a name she still couldn’t help but giggle to herself about. Wouldn’t every city in the desert be a sand borough?
There was no road leading from the village to Sandborough, so her plan was that hopefully it would be too large to miss. And to her surprise, her plan ended up working. In the distance, set in the middle of the desert like a stamp that forced its way in was a sprawling city. Black stone walls surrounded the city — or at least tried to, as more black buildings continued to expand beyond the walls.
Zoe drifted down to the road leading out through a valley to the west and walked up to the only gate she saw from above. The gate was wide open, with guards standing at either side that didn’t seem interested in stopping her so she walked in. The brownish red sands inside were packed so dense they almost felt like concrete beneath her feet as she walked down the street.
The buildings were all made of the same black stone that the walls were, creating a very dark and not so welcoming environment, Zoe found. The people who walked down the street with her were all incredibly pale, almost even matching Zoe’s vampyric skin. Most had thin black hair and yellow eyes, though Zoe saw quite a few with brown hair and green eyes.
She wandered through the city for a while, stopping at buildings that seemed interesting to her. A few different restaurants that served interesting looking food, though their desserts looked more interesting than the meals themselves. Zoe stocked up on a few cactus desserts, some kind of cream and cactus juice mixture that was light and refreshing.
There were many furniture stores, though none of the furniture they sold looked quite as nice as the stuff for sale in Darpi. It was all made out of either the same black stone the rest of the city was made out of, or a hard wood with a slight green hued to it. The black stone itself seemed nice, but the things made from it weren’t all that exciting.
After about a day of wandering through the city, Zoe teleported far to the north and continued travelling through the desert. She passed several more villages nestled in between the dunes and stopped when she noticed one mound moving through the sand. When she got closer, she noticed that it wasn’t sand but a swarm of hares that camouflaged with the brownish red sand so well even her eyes could barely pick them out from a hundred meters away.
Thousands of the little hares hopped along the desert sands, followed by a massive cloud of sand that trailed behind them. Adorable, Zoe thought as she followed along behind them. Up until they pillaged an oasis, leaving behind nothing but a drained, sputtering spring and a few husks of trees and continued on to whatever they would devastate next.
Zoe shook her head as she watched it, and then continued travelling north. Soon the desert turned to vast fields of flowers and grass with nary a tree in sight. A few more Cosmic Steps further north, and a deep blue ocean revealed itself on the horizon. Yellow sands stretched on to the west and east as far as she could see and the salty ocean smell buffeted her sense of smell as she descended to the beach.
She stripped to her underwear and hopped into the salt water for a swim. Swarms of fish fled as she leapt in, hiding beneath rocks and colourful coral that populated the sea floor. Crustaceans skittered along the ocean floor, snapping their claws at her as they dug into the sand to hide.
Floating on her back on the gentle waves, Zoe thought about where she was. She went west from Flester for quite some distance, and then north for who even knows how long. How fast was she even travelling, anyway?
Two kilometers every second or so meant she was travelling almost seven thousand kilometers in a single hour? That was enough to get around the entire Earth in a matter of a few hours back home, though she wondered if anybody even know how large Abyllan even was. Maybe she was on the other side of the planet from Flester, though it seemed unlikely. She hadn’t even crossed to another continent yet, though maybe she just threaded the needle and skipped across the longest stretch of contiguous land on a tiny planet by chance.
Maybe Abyllan wasn’t even mostly water like Earth was, maybe it was just one big continent and water was scarce. Life would survive even without much water thanks to magic, so what did it matter if the planet was arid. Maybe life didn’t even start on Abyllan, maybe some ancient civilization populated it years and years prior.
Or maybe Abyllan was so large that she’d not even seen much of it yet. Maybe she hadn’t even made it out of the Injellar kingdom yet — though she doubted that much at least.
There was so much about the world that she still didn’t know. A desert full of its own culture, an ocean filled with its own mysteries to discover. Could she one day learn to breath under water? Would there be dungeons on the ocean floor, deep in the volcanic trenches? Would there be civilizations living beneath the water? Would they have gills, or breath through some kind of magic?