"Aster," I sigh as Ryan and I enter the living room. "Don't get into other people's stuff."
The pup's lying on the floor right now, an empty jar of grape jelly beside him. The wolf lets out a sad and low-energy woof before a page of the tome he's looking through flips a couple of times to show him another picture of the wolf form of the big boss of the Celestials.
"I'll replace that," I tell Ryan. "He's not mine, but he probably wouldn't be following me around if I hadn't come across him and cleaned him up."
"It's fine," Ryan says. "You can clean his mouth again if you want."
I pick Aster up to clean his mouth at the sink; the pup should learn how to eat without getting his food past where his tongue can reach. That aside, shouldn't a creature with nigh-unlimited power be able to pull the jelly off with his magic?
"There we go," I say as I dry off Aster's maw. "You should really be cleaner when you eat, buddy."
"Woof…"
"I think that's enough of looking at your friend," I tell him, only to immediately be sent more communication from him. "I would think that still counts as a friend, Aster. He cleans you up, climbs on you… wait. Is he the one who gave you item information as a note?"
"Woof," Aster nods.
"What did he say?" Ryan asks, and I glance at him. "Not about the Celestial big boss being the one who changed his description, that was obvious. The other bit?"
"Oh," I say. "I think the rough translation is… 'he's not my friend, he's my king'. Well, it was more 'not friend, king' in image and emotion form with a few memories added in. Several of which were of the big boss cleaning him or him climbing around on the big guy."
Aster's tail wags a little.
"So the big boy is their king, then," Ryan looks at Aster. "And he's just… gone?"
Aster sends another message this time, and Ryan's expressions suggests he received them. It seems the King of the Celestials vanished a very, very, very long time ago and none of the Celestials know why. At least, Aster doesn't think any of them know the reason.
"Could he have died?" Ryan asks.
Aster scoffs and sends us another message. Celestials can't die. They're eternal beings who outlive universes. He also once contemplated reincarnation before remembering that Celestials don't possess souls, they simply exist.
Which might explain why they don't change in personality or grow. They simply are.
"Whoa," Ryan clutches his head as he stumbles back a bit. "I think I need [Animal Communication] to fully understand that. The most I could understand was that they're eternal, not immortal."
"That's about it," I say. "Aster, buddy, do you remember what the big boy was doing before he vanished?"
Another message, this one a little bit easier to understand.
"He was… observing people?" I ask, and he sends me more. "Oh, okay."
"That one didn't come to me," Ryan says.
"It seems the King of the Celestials was trying to better understand mortals," I say. "Aster said that the last thing he can remember the big boy doing was… I think he said that the big boy said he was going to go watch them more closely?"
Aster nods.
"Could he have turned into a person to observe without being noticed?" I ask, and receive another message. "That's what you and the others think, but none of you can find him on any world. He's just vanished."
Aster nods again, then sends another message.
"He wants to go to bed," I say. "I should be going now, but I guess this was pretty informative. And the evening was nice, Ryan. Could we go on another date next Saturday?"
"Same time?" He asks.
"Yeah," I answer.
"Sure," he says. "Before you go, I might have something for you. Do you cook?"
If I'd known he was going to give me a gift after the date, I'd have made sure to bring something for him as well.
"A little," I answer. "I'm admittedly not very good at cooking. That's a pretty different field from alchemy."
"Here," he holds out his hands, and a small cooler appears. "It's meat from the silver minotaur. Several cuts of it. They gave me about thirty pounds of it."
On top of buying an expensive tome for me, he's gifting me meat from a silver minotaur. Normal varyihn meat is a little expensive, but silver varyihn is even more so. The quality is much higher as well.
"My cooking skills aren't quite up to par for that," I tell him.
"I'd still prefer some of it goes to you," he says. "You can feed it to Aster if you'd prefer. I'm… sure berries aren't the only things he likes."
Aster looks a the small cooler, then looks up at me as his tail starts wagging a little. I'd like to turn this down, but I'm starting to suspect I'm going to be the substitute dad for Aster for awhile. He probably only likes sweets and high-quality meats.
Ryan probably gives some of the meat he receives from hunts and Dungeon runs to his friends already, anyway. This is just adding me into the circle.
"Alright," I say. "Thanks, Ryan."
I shift Aster so I'm holding him with only one arm, then take the cooler and send it into my storage. Ryan offers me the tome as well, since he can't actually read it and will need me for understanding what's within.
"I can drive you home," Ryan says. "It's getting pretty late and even if you're an Awakened, that won't help with the rain."
"No worries," I tell him as I readjust my grip on Aster. "This little guy can teleport, so I'm sure we'll be able to get to my place quickly. Here, kiss?"
Ryan steps closer so we can kiss.
"Good night," I tell him once we do.
Rather than asking the pup – who I doubt would actually teleport me if I asked – I access my gate and first travel to the Great Napping Spot, then use it to appear in my bedroom. Once there, I shift Aster back to one arm and pull out my phone to take a selfie to show Ryan I made it home safely.
[Ryan]: I forgot you mentioned he can teleport!
[Ryan]: That must be pretty convenient
[Evan]: Not sure if he'll do it every time, but I'm glad it worked.
A little white lie for now, but me having regular access to a Mythic Forest is something I want to keep a secret. Letting him know I went into one earlier was fine since it could be assumed as a one-off thing. Regular access is an entirely different beast.
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I might be attracted to Ryan, but that doesn't mean I need to tell him everything. I want to try and restore more of the forest before even considering letting someone else know I can come and go as I please.
"Before you go wherever you go to sleep now," I tell Aster. "I want us to go back to the Mythic Forest. I have some… questions. And theories. First, though, I want my gear."
Rather than using the Mythic Forest to travel quickly, I head outside and deal with the rain for a couple of minutes to enter my shop. Once the door is closed and secure, I set Aster down and check my pack to make sure it's stocked again. I move things into my bracelets and pick up Aster, then take us back to the Great Napping spot.
"This hill," I say. "It's where that massive tree once stood, isn't it? The one from your memories?"
"Woof," Aster confirms.
"And after your big friend disappeared, that's when this Mythic Forest started dying?"
"Woof," he confirms.
"How long ago was that?"
The answer to that is 'many sleeps'. No matter how I try to get a better answer out of him, I quickly realize that Aster probably has a worse sense of time than me. The best he can give me really is 'many sleeps'.
A creature who can travel between worlds, dimensions, planes, and realms probably struggles to keep track of time since they aren't only in a single location with a set day or seasonal cycle but many with them.
I set the pup down and look around as he paws at the ground mournfully. The King of the Celestials isn't dead, he's just missing. Most of the memories Aster gave me – and even the drawings in the tome – depict him as lying down or sleeping.
"Aster," I say. "What are the odds that he decided to take a nap outside of here and is just… asleep somewhere? Time moves differently in here, so what might be a normal nap for him in here might be a very long time outside. If he took a nap like that outside, an even longer time would pass in here."
Aster contemplates that for a few moments, then lets out a long, depressed breath as he flops himself onto the ground. I'll take that as a yes.
"Alright," I say. "Can you use your powers to help this place out? It needs plants and water again, and seems to take care of the rest once there's some there."
Since insects must be helping out in the zones I've worked so far, there's other magic at work as well. Magics which help generate smaller things like necessary insects once there's plants for them to live with.
Aster looks at me, then sighs before sending me another message. His king created this place so that the mythical beasts and other Celestials couldn't affect it with their powers. It was meant as a garden for himself and he later opened it up to mortals like myself and Ryan.
Since the powers the System granted me work on the forest, he must have made an exception either for mortals or for Skills.
Things which neither mythical beasts nor Celestials are or possess.
Another explanation is that the System itself has some authority in this place and has granted me the ability to affect it because it wants me to restore the forest. I'm trying my best without knowing that, but there are limits to what I can do. Even a stretch of land a couple of miles across can take awhile to restore. The fact that I can leave here and let time pass more quickly so nature does its work in the zones I'm restoring will speed things up by a bit but I'll still need other zones.
What's more, I don't think the Mythic Forests are actually a couple of miles across. I think there are fewer of them than are believed, they just get divided up into smaller zones when used as a reward. Each of the Mythic Forests which take place in tundras might all actually be the same one, just different parts. Same for those on snowy mountains, or those in a desert.
The records we have on Mythic Forests make mention that there has never been a case of one displaying traits of two zones in even minor ways, so it probably is just what I suspect. If they were all connected to each other, then there would be transitional zones as well.
That works in my favor a little as I doubt I could do anything to restore the entire thing if all of them were connected.
I don't have reason to doubt the System gave me full access to this Mythic Forest, so I might have a stretch of land thirty miles or more to restore. That's something which I can easily check.
"How good are you with distances?" I ask Aster, who then sends me a response which seems to suggest he can use dozens of measurements for distance. "In miles, please, how far away from here is the Sparkly Earth Cave?"
Thirty-eight miles to the north, set into a series of small hills and cliffs. A river flows down from the hilly zone in the image Aster gave me, and I now have a new goal. Though this place is bigger than I expected.
In all of the memories he gave me of this hill with the tree, there's a massive lake surrounding it. The best way to give this forest a kick-start on restoring is to get that lake filled back up with water. In theory, that will get the condensation cycle restarted properly.
"Hm…"
Aster looks up at me as I muse.
I need to make sure of things first, so I begin drawing magical runes in the air with my right index finger, lilac light flowing after it as I shape the spell. This one is significantly cheaper in terms of MP than the one I used before and I don't use even half of my reserves.
Upon completing the rune casting, I let the spell seep into my body. My body feels lighter now and I hop a little. Rather than dropping back down to the ground, I remain floating at the peak of my hop.
Okay, it works. It won't last forever, but it should last long enough for me to do what I want to use it for.
Closing my eyes, I focus on accessing the gate and pushing past the resistance. This one takes me almost a minute, but I feel the shift as I pass through.
When I open my eyes, I find myself floating above the cloud walls and ceilings. Far above it, as my destination was "not far below the sun or moon" and that's apparently pretty high up. I can almost touch the magically-generated "sun" here, and I don't feel any actual heat emanating from it. The King of the Celestials probably used his magic to regulate the environment while having the sun at the top of the pocket dimension to imitate how things are outside.
He even colored the horizontal cloud wall stretching out past the "sun" blue to help imitate the blue skies outside. That does bring up the question of if the clouds change color when night falls, if night even falls here.
The individual zones of the Mythic Forest below me are easy to pick out, as their cloud walls seem to have domed tops. There are more than a hundred different zones here… as the Mythic Forest seems to stretch about forty miles in all directions. At the very edges of it are cloud walls which stretch all the way up to the sky much in the same way as they do in Dungeons that are open all around.
Those must be the absolute borders of this place.
I use my gate to return to the hill, where Aster's turned onto his back and is just lying there in sadness. The pictures of the King of the Celestials must have really sent him into a down mood. Dealing with that can come next.
"Aster," I say as I draw some runes to cancel the float spell. "I just went above the clouds and saw an immense cloud wall at the edges in all directions. What's beyond that?"
Aster sighs a little in sadness, then flips over and turns around to face me. Images and memories pop into my head, messages from the pup. Nothingness lies beyond the cloud wall, a blackness as far as the eye can see. Water flows out of it in a few spots but quickly disappears into the void. The pup makes sure I know that anything which enters it is destroyed.
Though he also lets me know that there are passageways through the void, passageways created by the King of the Celestials himself just for the mythical beasts to use to get from place to place. Aster is very clear that he can travel through the nothing on his own but enjoys using the passageways to chase after others.
That's why he came back here – he was following the scent of Flow and the others in one of the passageways to see if he could surprise them. Their trail took him to Happy Butterfly Hill and he got distracted by the berries.
Which is when I showed up and distracted him further.
Remembering why he came here seems to have perked the pup up and bit and he runs in a circle, yipping, before vanishing. I'm going to hazard a guess and say that he's gone to locate the others.
I'm not entirely sure the reason why I was given access to this Mythic Forest, but I do still suspect that it's to try and restore it in the absence of the King of the Celestials. It may even be a task issued by the King of the Celestials.
He disappeared after letting the others know he was going to take a closer look at mortals. The access granted to this place to me might be one of his ways of doing that.
Suspecting this won't change my behavior. The reason I'm working toward restoring it is so that I can see the beauty of the Mythic Forest in full.
To do that, I need to get the water cycle rebooted if it's possible to do so, and I think the best way to do that is to get that major river flowing from those hills again. That much water would likely be a massive boon to everywhere it flows past and if water does evaporate here – there's no guarantee that it does, considering the nature of this place – then it would bring rains as well.
Though there's the possibility that evaporation doesn't occur here, considering the temperature is probably regulated by the magic of the forest and the sun is fake.However, whether or not there's a water cycle doesn't matter – what matters is the presence of water itself.
"For me to restore things," I muse aloud. "I need to get the main river running through this one flowing again. That means opening up its source waters."
A Special Quest is available! Slay monsters in the special zone. Reward: 5,000 EXP
It's pretty obvious that my verbal musings triggered this Quest considering the timing. Chances are, it was issued as a way of allowing me a reward for rebooting the river, which means the river's path itself is probably filled with monsters.
Either the Special Quests are suffering from the System shutting down and that's why the EXP reward is so low for such a large space, or it's less "kill all of the monsters" and more "kill enough monsters, repeatedly". I'm leaning towards the second option and it's one which will award again and again with the main river itself being the special zone. Another possibility would be that it's only a section of the river, I suppose.
I'll start on it tomorrow. If I start working on it now, I won't want to stop until I pass out and starting tomorrow will allow me to rest up beforehand.