Bam! The sound echoed from within the giant corpse of the Great Sharaka from behind its clenched jaw of innumerable teeth. It repeated, followed by the sounds of glass shattering until cracks spread across the hard surfaces of the sharp teeth. Finally, a silver lance protruded out, shattering the teeth around it to give room for a figure clothed in black with a black helmet.
Oscar walked out of his newly made passage and out into the landscape of golden sand under a blazing sun. He held several of the Great Sharaka's long teeth in his hands, which he stored in his space pocket. Taking off his helmet, he looked on in disgust at the blood and saliva that covered him.
"Ugh, it smells foul," Oscar gagged and scrunched his nose in displeasure. "I never want to go inside a beast again."
He came forth, his feet squishing on the wet, red sand, and his nose caught the dense smell of blood that choked out the air. The dying throes of the Great Sharaka had spilled blood everywhere, turning the bright, beautiful golden land into a mess of scarlet blood and flesh. Oscar did not care about his gruesome actions and leaped up on top of the Great Sharaka.
The body was half-buried as the winds blew more sand every second, encasing the Great Sharaka in an ever-growing coffin of sand until it would ultimately become one with the desert. Oscar walked along the back, took out his bulwark, and hacked away at the top fin and some of its armor. He licked his lips in anticipation; these would be excellent materials for armaments.
"It's only been an hour since I arrived here," Oscar wiped the sweat from his brow and put on his helmet, followed by the raspy sound of his breathing clearing up the tubes. "It's a shame I can't harvest even one of you fully. If only I had more space pockets or one that had more space."
Around the Great Sharaka on which he stood were two others, similarly stripped of their top fins, pieces of armor, and some teeth, but their bodies had large chunks torn off, revealing the bones underneath. For some reason, once he had finished off his first shark, the others started to cannibalize the corpse.
However, this provided an excellent opportunity, as Oscar carefully evaded the hungry bites, got onto the next Great Sharaka, and slew the two in succession. He guessed that the beasts wanted to eat the core to grow stronger but to do it the instant their once companion died left a poor taste in his mouth.
"It's said that Exalt Beasts eventually grow an intelligence comparable to humans at a later realm, but would they maintain such savagery?" Oscar wondered as he leaped down and dried himself by submerging his body in a bath of golden sand which turned into a messy sludge. There was no use in further thought as he had never met one.
"Ahhh, they say that the fine sands of the desert are one of the best ways to clean yourself." Oscar rubbed the sand across his smooth black fabricator uniform, washing off the blood and unsavory fluids. The heat from the sand, diminished by his uniform, was soothing to his tense body. The sand worked quickly, and all the gunk was rinsed off his body.
After washing himself, he reached into his space pocket and pulled out Gol-4, the strange head of a golem. The golem's eyes started to emit a dim blue glow that shone brighter each second until its head finally shook, and its mechanical voice resounded.
"Oscar, where are we? Is this desert? How is that possible?" Gol-4 shot out a series of questions.
"I was hoping to ask you." Oscar stared around and started to walk. "We came across a Golddew Fig Tree, but to get to it, we were transported to this desert realm. Do you recognize this place?"
Gol-4 levitated and went a few paces forward, the gears in its head grinding as it turned left and right before snapping back to Oscar. "Strange. If you were teleported to a small realm within the secret realm of Ashen Grove, it should be a place close to it in the spatial domain."
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"Spatial domain…." Oscar continued to walk across the desert, riding his deer anima in case another shark attacked. "Could it be a long connection to a distant realm?"
"Unlikely, my dear lad. I don't believe the Forest Heart Clan would have spent the time, resources, and energy to create such a link, not to mention it's been thousands of years. A long-distance link would have wasted away and no longer work without active maintenance."
"Then, it has to be a realm near Ashen Grove, previously Stonehaven. The teleportation was instant and did not lack in power." Oscar said.
"An astute conclusion, but the question remains. What realm is this?" Gol-4 gazed around. "Perhaps there was a desert realm, but that part is not in my already garbled-up memory."
"Any way to make you recall?" Oscar asked.
"Perhaps a boost from that ataerstone of yours can help jog the artificial core in me and repair some of the damaged bits." Gol-4 made a series of noises to mimic laughter, but it came off as off-putting with its stagnant mechanical voice.
"Never," Oscar tossed Gol-4 up and down with his hands as punishment.
"Ok, ok. Enough playing around. Unless you got a map of the most recent setup of the spatial domain around here, I suggest we keep searching for clues."
The spatial domain was the setup of the small and secret realms and worlds, with Oscar's world as the largest and in the center. It wasn't a physical setup but more like different layers existing together and sometimes overlapping. Certain parts of Oscar's world were closer to some of these small realms, such as Drauwin Island, which overlapped with Ashen Grove and held a strong connection that an entranceway naturally formed.
Powerful Exalts could control these entrances and use them for their purposes, such as trials and safe havens. It was possible to create teleportation formations and portals to other realms even if the places didn't overlap, but that required a large amount of Ein and setup, such as the Tundra World for Oscar's Inner Hall Exam.
Realms, like Ashen Grove, were fixed in their spot on the spatial domain, remaining still and stable. But others freely moved around in the spatial domain. Entrances to them could form wherever next they overlapped with the main world before moving away to somewhere else.
Trying to create a stable teleportation connection to these realms was not ideal. With this knowledge, Oscar knew this wasn't a moving realm, but Gol-4 debunked it as a distant stable realm. He concluded it could either be a stable realm that overlapped with Ashen Grove at this point or a stable realm that wasn't too far away that a teleportation link could still work at a distance.
"Either one of those conclusions still suggests the Divine Stone Clan had to have known about it. After all, they mapped the realms close to Stonehaven, where they held their clan members." Gol-4 said.
"But you don't have the map." Oscar sighed.
"No, I don't. Quite regrettable to have chunks of my memory gone. But there must be something here." Gol-4's blue eyes shone.
"The trial is for two days, and the on the third, I need to run for the cactus tree." Oscar scoffed. "I won't have enough time."
"Oh, come on. You have two whole days and a wide desert to explore. I'm sure you're also worried about your friends. Let's pick them up on the way." Gol-4 raised his voice in excitement, swaying his head on Oscar's hand.
Oscar exhaled loudly, blowing sand out of his tubes. "Every time I follow your suggestion, I run into something I'd rather not go through. Recall everything that happened in Tectusen?"
"I fail to see how that relates. In the end, we all made it out."
"That's the problem with you. You fail to remember all the troubles we went through." Oscar said.
"Can't be called a trial if you're not fighting with your all and going through unfavorable odds. I wonder if anyone ever made a trial with sunshine and rainbows on a nice boat ride through a gentle river with a beauty by your side, eating a table of delicacies." Gol-4 chided.
"Now, why do you have that line of thinking as a golem?" Oscar narrowed his eyes. "Are you really a golem? I never thought a golem from a treasury would think about pleasurable things. As a matter of fact, you've been acting off ever since you came off that stone slab."
"That makes no sense. I am a golem with a wide array of knowledge. I am simply reciting what may attract your attention." Gol-4 spoke in a deep voice, but to Oscar, it seemed like a flimsy attempt to hide something.
"Whatever you're hiding. It better not be dangerous to me." Oscar brought Gol-4 face to face with him.
"I'm not hiding anything; if I were, it would not threaten my helper," Gol-4 stated.
"So you are–" Oscar stopped and looked around. He had traveled some distance now, but something was strange. Even within the everchanging dunes, there were still factors that never changed.
"Those corpses. I can still see them because the sands haven't covered them completely, but why haven't we moved further away?" Oscar looked down at the desert and at the Great Sharakas. At a certain point, the distance between him and the sharks never increased, as if he was stuck in place.
"Something's wrong!" Gol-4 shouted.