After we had our talk with Anise, the three of us continued traveling.
Now that the surface seemed depopulated, we ran into fewer monsters than ever before. The black sun posed the biggest problem for our travels: we had to spend every other day resting. While I was immune to the effects of the black sun, due to the {Emptiness} skill I had picked up from {Endless Hunger of the Ocean}, and even got to refill my alteration essence faster while exposed to it, nobody else was immune to the black sun. And every day we had to spend waiting for the others to recover from the influence of the black sun, our food reserves went down.
Of course, I foraged where I could, sometimes with Sallia, and sometimes on my own. I could usually at least help us keep our food reserves from dropping to nothing. However, I was keenly aware of the fact that we might have a hard time returning if we didn’t find any food in the ruins we explored. After all, we would need to spend some time exploring the ruins themselves, and it wasn’t like we would stop needing food and water on the way back. If we factored in the couple of weeks most people had before they starved to death, my foraging, and Sallia’s ramen bowl, I estimated we could last about a month and a half total for the entire journey. Of course, it would be better if the journey was shorter. The shorter it was, the less risk there was of starvation.
However, the problem was that traveling around the wastes, trying to find a ruin, took time. And whatever was killing off massive chunks of the surface wildlife also seemed to be doing a number on the plants: apart from the moving patch of green that we had stumbled upon during our first day on the surface, it was hard to find other plants outside of caves sheltered from the black sun. I strongly suspected that the ‘plants’ generated by Felix’s weird plant core would probably try to grow a mold colony in our stomach or something, but it was an option for a last resort. However, I dearly hoped that we never needed to try it, because none of us felt great about the stuff produced by the plant core.
Of course, it wasn’t all bad. On days that we were forced to simply wait, we told Anise more detailed stories about our adventures so far. Felix told Anise all about his original world, and Sallia filled Anise in about her original life as a noblewoman who wanted to be a magic knight. My memories of my own first world were still incredibly hazy, comprised mostly of spotty mechanical knowledge, but I had plenty of stories from the islands that I could retell to her. Now that I no longer needed to ‘patch up’ the stories of ‘Murom the Great’ and make them understandable to people used to this world’s magic system and culture, I had a lot of fun telling Anise about how the rune magic system worked, what I had done with my runes last life, and about what Sallia and I were doing with our runes in this life.
Anise also spent a great deal of time practicing. None of us had any idea how to ‘earn’ an extreme affinity for an essence, if it was actually possible to do so, but that certainly didn’t stop us from making every suggestion we could think of to try to help Anise get there. I talked with Anise about the way I had observed Skills working for regular people, Sallia and Felix tried to figure out how Anise might try new and bizarre ways of thinking about Manifestation Essence based on the way she used her mixture of magic systems, and all three of us helped Anise train.
Unfortunately, there weren’t many results. Anise had always been a rather talented spellcaster. There was a reason she was a fourth-circle spellcaster and the three of us were still third-circle spellcasters, after all. Our suggestions sometimes gave Anise new ideas to try, since she wasn’t quite used to thinking of manifestation essence as… well, MANIFESTATION essence, instead of spellcasting essence. However, as far as I could tell, Anise’s actual strength wasn’t improving, and I hadn’t seen her form any new skills or get more mana when I examined her using my soul sight.
I tried not to feel hopeless when I saw Anise growing at the same speed as ever, but it was difficult. I really liked Anise. I didn’t want to say goodbye to her. I wanted her to join our group forever. The idea of losing her hurt. But at the same time, I needed to come to terms with the idea that she might not come with us when we returned to the Market. I just hoped she did anyway, because hoping seemed to be the only practical thing I could do.
Over a week and a half passed as we traveled through the wastes. We started out by locating where we had run into the adventuring party on the surface, and then we started heading in the direction we had roughly seen them come from. We also tried our best to guess where they might have made turns and directional changes along their journey, based on geographical barriers such as mountains and rivers that we ran into, but we were using more guesswork than educated guess most of the time. After all, it had been over a decade since we first ran into the adventurers. It would be a miracle if we could track their journey using Felix’s half-forgotten tracking skills from the islands at this point.
However, we were determined to at least find something on this journey. It may not be the ruin we were looking for, but if we went back to Silver City empty-handed, it would be a huge waste of time. And with the black sun growing ever stronger, time was something this planet as a whole was probably short on.
Of course, we would still return once we started really getting low on food. I was determined to find at least some sort of ancient ruin with useful information inside of it, but not so determined I would get my friends killed over it. I wanted to either find a way to slow down this world’s collapse, or reverse it entirely, but if it were easy, someone would have done it a long time ago. Everyone staying safe was the most important thing.
At the beginning of day 15 in the wastes, I felt something… interesting in the distance.
It was incredibly faint, but I could distinctly feel that it was familiar to me.
It was incredibly distant, and way to the side of our current planned path. However, I felt almost as if that strange feeling was calling to me.
“I feel something weird,” I said, tensing as I activated my soul sight. I knew just how strange some outsider creatures could be, and a ‘weird desire to head in a random direction’ definitely didn’t fill me with confidence. My immediate thought was that I might be getting influenced by some sort of mental attack, even if I could barely make out the effects.
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“What do you feel?” asked Anise, blinking in curiosity as she also scanned our surroundings. I noticed that she had started putting together a fourth circle spell, although she hadn’t put the finishing touches on it yet.
“I’m… not sure,” I said. “I feel almost like I’m pulled in a certain direction, but I’m not really sure why. It’s almost like something is calling for me, or as if I have some familiarity with something in the distance. But I can’t really put my finger on anything more concrete than that.”
Sallia frowned. “I don’t feel anything,” she said, shuffling around as she tried a few different postures, as if trying to see if that somehow influenced whether she felt the strange pull or not.
Felix also shrugged. “I feel absolutely nothing. Hmm… is it related to your keyword?”
After a moment, I realized what he meant. If Anise, Sallia, and Felix didn’t feel anything when they were interacting with the strange thing in the distance, but I did, there were a few possibilities. If it was an outside creature, maybe it only had the ability to influence one person at a time. However, if it was only able to target one person, and I only felt a very minor tug, the creature probably wasn’t very strong. In that case, it was probably just free Achievement. I wouldn’t mind dropping a few weaker creatures when I had the opportunity to do so in order to get more Achievement and possibly getting a useful Skill.
Of course, the other possibility was that my keywords were somehow resonating with an idea. For example, if there was an actual ‘ocean’ in the distance, I had no idea how my keywords would react. I hadn’t felt any sort of ‘pull’ or ‘connection’ to other bodies of water, or insane asylums, but perhaps that was just because the connection hadn’t been strong enough in the past? Sallia didn’t remember feeling any sort of unique connection to ‘swords’ ‘training’ or ‘absorption,’ but that was because Sallia was already excellent at ‘connecting’ to her sword. I doubted that her sword-related Ability was the best example of how one might normally react to a keyword. And since there was a lot we didn’t know about keywords, I felt Felix’s guess was at least plausible.
“If that’s the case, we could try checking it out,” said Sallia, after thinking for a few moments. “I don’t mind killing off a few weaker outsider creatures. Doing so could get us a little Achievement, and if we’re really desperate, we could probably eat a little meat before getting sick, too.”
Felix and Anise also nodded.
“Then let’s start heading in that direction,” I said, after some hesitation. As long as it wasn’t a powerful enemy, there might be some value in seeing an ocean in this world. There would probably be new and interesting creatures that lived there, and it might also be more shielded from the black sun. If it was a weak outsider creature, it was easy Achievement. Either way, it was beneficial for us.
And so, the four of us started heading in the direction I sensed calling for me.
After a day of walking, I started to realize that we were wrong. What I was sensing wasn’t something like a keyword resonating with my abilities.
Instead, it was something more fundamental. To be precise, it was something that Sallia, Felix, and I had interacted with several times already - in fact, we saw it every time we were born or died, and I had even formed an attunement with it in this life.
It was the ocean of souls.
I blinked.
I had noticed that I could sense other objects and ideas connected to the ocean of souls when we had used the healing cube, over a decade ago. However, somehow, it hadn’t occurred to me that I would probably be able to sense whatever actual facility had manufactured the cube as well, as long as it was a facility deeply connected to the ocean of souls.
I also started to feel increasingly thankful that I could sense the facility when we got within range of it. We had been going in almost entirely the wrong direction earlier, and probably would have been forced to return to Silver City empty-handed if we had kept going in our original direction. However, now that I knew exactly where our destination was and how far away it was, I felt relieved. We should have enough time and supplies to make it there and back, if just barely. We could always lose some days exploring the facility in the worst-case scenario.
Along the way, Felix also made careful maps of our travels in order to ensure that we didn’t get lost on the way back.
After another three days of walking, the influence of the ocean of souls started to get so strong that it was nearly unbearable. I could feel its connection with me getting deeper and deeper by the second, and I also started to sense something… other.
It wasn’t the ocean of souls, but for some reason, it reminded me of the ocean of souls. However, even though it was similar to the ocean of souls, it was also entirely different. It felt strangely foul in my mind, as if it was stale, or twisted.
Or as if it was something completely alien to my senses. Something that my mind was fundamentally unable to comprehend, and which was so utterly different from me that it might as well have been an entirely different set of laws of reality.
It wasn’t something I had ever clearly felt before now, but once I came in contact with a massive source of the strange, alien energy, I realized that I had spent most of my life feeling it, to some extent. It was present everywhere, although it was most noticeable on the surface and least noticeable in our underground cities.
It was the dimension the black sun and the outsiders came from.
The facility we were walking towards wasn’t just connected to the ocean of souls, it was also connected to the black sun. I couldn’t help but wonder if that was a coincidence, or if it spoke to some deep nature about how dimensions worked or something. It was hard to say. But I was also a bit glad.
If we got really lucky, and things went very well, we might be able to actually do something about my worries for the future of this world.
It took us another day of walking before we found our destination.
Sallia was the first to spot it, since her runes enhanced her eyesight so much. She helped the rest of us keep an eye out for it as we started getting closer and closer, until eventually, all of us spotted what we were looking for.
In the distance, a giant, ruined palace lay like the bones of a giant. It had clearly once been mighty, and had likely been a mixture of pure white stone and golden carvings and engravings, highlighting the opulence and power the facility had once held. It was surrounded by miles upon miles of ruined fields, smaller facilities, and rubble. The taste of twisted dimensional space grew thicker and thicker the closer we got, until I was half-sure that it wasn’t some fake, illusory sensation created by my fifth rune’s ability. It was real, like lead on my tongue, weighing me down and making me vividly aware of every single speck of distorted space in our surroundings.
I realized that I had been foolish to think that a dimensional facility related to the ocean of souls would be simple. What we were trying to raid wasn’t just a regular facility: it was practically a ruined palace, surrounded by several smaller facilities. It was practically a small city on its own. And in the center of the ruined palace, I could sense something there.
A direct connection to the ocean of souls, fully present in reality, even though none of us were dead.