Thankfully, between Sense Directionality, Analyze Space, and my ability to teleport up into the air and hold myself there to survey, I was able to make my way back to the trail and keep hiking. With my pain suppression spells, hiking was bearable, if annoying.

I tried to distract myself with calculations. I was about a third of the way into the month, if I was counting my days right, and based on my senses, I’d managed to get about forty miles.

I was suddenly very grateful for the fact that I’d decided to go at eight miles a day, rather than six, because if I’d stuck to the slower pace, the days of rest waiting out the snowstorm would have sent me horrifically off schedule.

As it was, with twenty days left, I’d need to keep a six mile a day minimum to make it. That wouldn’t have been a problem before, but with my feet in the condition that they were in…

I shook my head and redid my math. I had nine days, since Doctor-thing had put a fresh coat of palliate-blacksalt on my feet, and while it may be painful for me to walk on my blisters right now, I didn’t have to worry about them bursting and the constant wear causing an infection.

I needed to maximize the amount of time on my feet during this nine day period. If I could push to a ten mile day, instead of the eight that I’d been doing before, that would give me a bit of time against any potential snowstorms that popped up, and would mean the last stretch of the journey, when my feet were no longer protected from harm, would only be twenty-ish miles.

A ten mile day would be hard, and it would be extremely painful, but… I thought it might just be doable.

Hopefully.

I picked up the pace until, with an aching pulse in my feet, I was matching the ten miles a day hiking pace along the trail, crunching over the fresh snow, and occasionally having to catch myself with Immovable Lock as I pushed myself further and further.

Even with the forced march, a small part of my mind was still marveling at the beauty of the world around me. With the freshly fallen snow, the entire mountain felt like I was riding on the back of some ancient, mythical sheep, wandering the world on a mountain of wool.

The sun was bright, reflecting off of the snow so sharply that it actually hurt my eyes, and as the day drew on, I was forced to hold my hands around my eyes to shield them, suddenly wishing I had sunglasses.

I was sure there was an ungated spell, or maybe a potion, that would be able to achieve the same effect, but whatever it was, I didn’t know it, nor did I understand spell construction well enough to actually attempt to construct one on the fly.

I kept my mana senses spread out wide around me as I walked, but most of what I found were simple prey animals, looking for food after the snowstorm. At one point, I spotted an arctic fox that was digging up some berries, and waved to it without thinking. The fox yipped, then went back to digging.

I paused and considered that, then shrugged and moved on.

That night, when I set up my wards, made camp, and bunked down for the night, my entire body was sore, and I felt tired and frustrated to the point where I wouldn’t have trusted my ability to have a pleasant conversation with others. Undoing my pack with only one hand was hard, way harder than I’d expected, and I didn’t look forward to having to deal with it in the morning.

That morning, when I woke up, my entire body was throbbing with aches and pains. I’d improved my cardio a lot with the Foxstep spell, but apparently not enough to allow me to push myself while doing high elevation winter hiking.

I drew out the spell to reduce pain, and with a lot of frustration, managed to get my pack back together, then headed out on my hike.

The day was a touch more eventful, as I was forced to repeat the trick of letting an aura bear tear through a copy of myself, and then hide. This time, Edgar’s mana lingered longer in the air, as if punishing me for using the same trick twice in a row. With his power driving the bear to search around, and I was forced to teleport into the branches of a tree in order to avoid detection.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Once the bear had wandered off, I started moving, hastening my pace to make up for the lost couple of minutes, even though the aching in my feet caused it to become a hobble.

A few more animals attacked me that day, and I wondered if Edgar was able to spend more time herding the animals now, since I was sure that a few people would have dropped out already.

As I set up camp that night, I resolved that I definitely needed to get some form of healing spell in the future, or at least a plant that could heal me in a more direct manner. I didn’t need it to be perfect, but I needed something that could help me in cases like this. I doubted I’d usually be so far away from Kene and Dusk, and unable to brew potions, but it was best to have some sort of plan for emergencies.

It didn’t even need to be true healing, like what Kene could do, knitting muscles back together. I could settle for regeneration. Sure, that wouldn’t have fixed my arm, but it would have at least fixed my feet.

Primes, it didn’t even need to be high levels of regeneration. Just… something?

I was attacked four times that night, and as I pushed my walking the following day, the weariness was starting to set in. None of the coyotes that had attacked had been anything resembling a threat, but they’d still woken me up, and I was getting grumpy.

By the fifth day of my nine day period, I was convinced that this was a special sort of torment, designed by some long dead magi with the express purpose of making people suffer. The palliate-blacksalt might not have allowed my feet to get worse, but without rest, they weren’t getting any better either.

If it hadn’t been for the fact that burn blisters could take weeks to heal completely, I would have taken a day off just to let them rest and recover. But even though my Magister’s Body did help speed my recovery rate some, with the excess life energy flowing through me, I doubted it would be enough to allow even the remaining four days of rest to heal them completely. More than that, I was worried about what would happen if I stopped while the skies were clear.

No, I could rest when this accursed trial was over.

As noon approached that day, I heard a slight shifting in the cliff off to my left, a flickering in my spatial sense, and I turned, just in time to see a massive slab of ice hurtling towards me. I yelped and teleported to the side, only for my feet to be swept out from under me. I caught myself in midair with my Immovable Lock, only for a chunk of compressed snow the size of a large dog to slam into my chest. My Immovable Lock sucked on my mana greedily, forcing me to stay in place, but the pressure of the snow was mounting as more began to pile onto me.

I heard my ribs begin to creak, I let the locking spell go, teleporting upwards and out of the way of the massive avalanche. I teleported to the side as more snow began to accumulate, burying the path in a mountain of winter.

I stared with a somewhat horrified amount of fascination as trees that had likely stood since before I was born were torn out of the ground and slammed down with a resonating crash, stones that were the size of my entire body began to tumble down, caught in the massive tidal wave of ice and snow.

I shivered. If something like this happened while I was asleep… Would it even trigger my wards? I thought so, but I didn’t understand enough about the construction or design of the warding spell to say.

If they did, then I’d probably be able to survive, teleporting upwards to watch, much as I was now.

If they didn’t… I would die.

It was a somewhat terrifying reminder that no matter how much one prepared, how much power on held, there were things in the world that simply went beyond what humanity could manage.

Could Meadow or Orykson or Ikki have stopped the landslide? I didn’t know. None of them had ice magic. I expected that Orykson could have simply teleported out of the way, and Ikki…

I didn’t know how Ikki would survive, nor Meadow. Could they?

Even if they could, I didn’t think any of them would have been able to stop it.

And even if someone with ice magic was at their level, and was actually able to prevent an avalanche, could they prevent a hurricane? A rockslide? A volcanic eruption?

I doubted it. One person might be able to stop a few of those, but they couldn’t stop all of them. Ddeaer was simply too vast.

Or maybe I was wrong. Maybe personal power really was able to control every facet of the world, stop every natural disaster in its tracks.

But if that were the case, why were there still natural disasters?

Even as I hung in the air, watching and ruminating, the avalanche slowed, then stopped. The entire spectacle had taken a bit less than a minute, and destroyed at least three acres of land.

I sighed and teleported downwards, then I rubbed my ribs slightly.

They were going to bruise from where the pressure of the first moments of the avalanche had struck me, I could already tell.

Wonderful. Because that’s what I needed. More aches and pains.

I shook my head and turned, leaving the landslide behind me, as I continued my resolute march onwards.