I had my doubts, but it turned out that Wi had some kind of ability to make everything on her person lighter in order to be able to fly. That included anything or anyone she carried.

It kind of made sense if I thought about it. There was no way normal physics would ever allow her to lift her own body weight with such small wings. There had to be some magical physics intervening.

That odd ability became less effective with heavier things, though, so she couldn’t lift a car or anything like that. In fact, she struggled a little with Elyssa and Mom since they were adults unlike the rest of us.

While Wi carried all of us over one by one, Mom practiced her own flight and ended up somewhat getting a hang of it. Not enough to risk jumping across the chasm herself, though, so Wi had to carry her as well.

“Alright, the demons won’t be able to get across, but we still need to go a bit further away from the chasm to lose them completely,” Casey instructed.

“Isn’t this still gonna spark a war if they find out we were through here though?”

“No, not quite. They’ll tighten their defensive line a little, but will ultimately keep waiting. They’ll figure that if a human scouting party is weak enough to be taken out by a Mana Gorger, there’s nothing to worry about.”

It was a little odd playing mind games with people – or demons – we hadn’t even seen. Faking our deaths and covering our tracks made me feel like we were criminals on the run. It made me a bit nervous… but also a little excited.

That aside, the other side of the chasm was a completely different place. Geographically speaking, we were at the outskirts of the mountain range we had been heading towards. We had intended to go through the forest as much as possible before entering the mountain range, but it couldn’t be helped.

“Be careful of the golem crabs,” Casey warned as we made our way through the rocky terrain. “They look like regular rocks, but will sprout legs and jump you if you get too close.”

Everyone stared at her.

“Riiight… So how do we tell them apart from normal rocks…?” Frank asked, side-eyeing every flat rock near us.

“Their coloring and pattern is slightly different from normal rocks. Let me see…” Casey said as she frowned and looked around. Her gaze stopped on a random rock that looked like any other and she pointed at it. “That one over there. That’s one of the golem crabs.”

I squinted, trying to see the difference.

I couldn’t tell.

“It… uh, looks exactly the same,” Frank said, echoing my thoughts.

“Yeah…”

“No, it’s not!” Casey protested. “Look, the shade of gray is different and the subtle line across it is a plain giveaway.”

I squinted harder before giving up and exchanging a helpless look with Frank.

“Perhaps telling them apart is part of your godly powers, then?” Elyssa mused. Casey was about to protest, but then Elyssa continued. “I too cannot tell the difference… and something is telling me that Emily and Wi can’t either.”

Casey looked at the rest of us and I simply gave her an awkward shrug. She sigh-groaned as her bunny ears flopped down.

“Okay… Stay close to me then. I’ll point them out to you.”

We set out once again with Casey guiding us even more closely. Due to the nature of the golem crabs, we had to advance slower than we had through the forest.

At some point, a golem blocked our path and there were no good ways to go around without disturbing it, so we had to fight it. Luckily, it was nowhere near as threatening as the Mana Gorger. Unluckily, it was way tougher than even those.

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The opening full-powered laser beam from Elyssa barely even scratched it and and as soon as it sprouted legs, we knew we were in for a long fight. Luckily, these things were deaf, apparently, so our battle didn’t attract any other golem crabs.

Mom acted as our front-line tank, while I ran around it and looked for the weak spot Casey had told us about. In the meantime, our three mages fired their magic at it to keep it pressured.

Once we found the weak spot – apparently, its stomach, even though it was on its side – we focused all our attacks on it.

Unfortunately, it kept hopping around and spinning, making our attacks miss more often than not. In the end, Frank put down the backpack and grabbed the damn thing from behind while Mom caught it from the front. As the two held it down, the rest of us continuously attacked its weak spot over and over until it finally died.

“Bleeding rocks with spider legs has got to be the most unsettling thing ever…” Frank murmured, glancing back at the defeated golem crab.

I hummed in agreement.

“It’s a crab. It has ten legs,” Casey tried to argue, but her heart wasn’t in it.

“That’s even worse.” Frank shuddered.

We moved on from it to not waste anymore time. Just one of them had taken nearly half an hour, and with us having to slow down so much already, we weren’t going to make it to the lab today.

Unfortunately, we encountered several more golems that blocked our path in very inconvenient ways and had to resort to fighting them. It certainly didn’t help that the uneven terrain steadily became mountainous. We were having a hard time getting anywhere.

At some point, the sun set, and we collectively agreed to stop for the day and set up our camp. Omniscient goddess or not, nobody wanted Casey to miss a crab and accidentally step on it.

“I wonder how the ecosystem works with these things,” Mom mused as she nibbled on the jerky we had packed as rations. “If they almost never move, then what do they even eat? How do they eat? What do they get their energy from?”

“Well, it’s mostly from the insects that land near them. It’s not much, but they have very efficient metabolism and actually tend to use mana to move anyway. They are similar to the Mana Gorgers like that, except the Mana Gorgers have their internal organs optimized for turning mana into energy and–”

I was never into biology much, but listening to these explanations was intriguing. Apparently, Casey had come up with a lot of these creatures and how they acted, but the… portals, or whatever was doing it, had filled in a lot of fascinating details. Granted, most of the strange things were explained away by the animals using mana, but it was still fascinating.

“So like… where does mana come from?” Frank asked. “If everything is powered by mana, something has to keep making more mana or the world would run out, right?”

Casey stopped, frowned, and stared at the ground.

“It… comes from below, from the world’s core. It’s how the plantlife remains healthy and plentiful even though there are so many creatures who can easily lay mass devastation to forests.”

“So… Is the world’s core just an infinite source of energy?”

“No, it…” She grimaced as her eyes grew wide. “It draws in the souls of the deceased and feeds on them.”

What.

Souls?

Feeds on them?!

“Their memories, experiences, personalities, and everything else get consumed and turned into mana, which turns the souls back into blank slates that can be reborn again as completely different people.”

“Uhm… That’s…”

“I… I didn’t… come up with that… But… it makes sense when you account for everything else…” Casey slowly said, the horror in her expression intensifying. “The… souls of people accumulate this energy over the course of their lives. The older and more experienced a person is, the more it feeds the world’s core… It… It defies the laws of thermodynamics. Everything is in a perfect equilibrium. The world can’t run out of mana.”

Once again. everyone stared. Wi’s already wide eyes were saucers and her complexion was getting very pale.

“The natives here don’t really know about the laws of thermodynamics, so nobody knows about this.” She glanced at Wi. “And nobody should know about this. Most religions believe that souls go to a peaceful place after death… But the process of having everything stripped from your soul is excruciating–”

Wi abruptly stood up without a word, her expression looking very ill, and marched her way to one of the tents we had set up.

Yeah… That… wasn’t a surprising reaction.

Nobody seemed to want to say anything and we finished our dinner in silence before heading to our tents. I shared my tent with Casey, Mom was with Elyssa, and Wi was with Frank.

As I lay there, trying not to think about the horrifying truth about this world, I realized that this was the first time I’d slept inside one of the portal worlds. Unless briefly dying counted as sleeping at least…

Naturally, thinking about that immediately reminded me of the whole soul-eating world core thing and I felt a chill go down my spine.

I had died in this world. Would my soul have gotten eaten by the world if I hadn’t worn the amulet? Or worse, had it done something to me anyway? An equivalent of licking my soul before I had been brought back by the amulet?

I shuddered and did my best to stay the heck away from thoughts like these. I closed my eyes, and despite all the nightmare fuel staying rent-free in my head, I was tired enough to quickly fall asleep.