Chapter 59

Scattered Ruins

Leo yawned and stretched lazily, leaving the hut and glancing about. Most of the animals were still fast asleep, as were his pair of Disciples. The last few days were rather... boring. It was mostly just watching the kids bring back the stones, and him putting the stone onto the fantasy-suffused wood, watching the raw material be processed into proper shape. On the way, he'd gather reeds and straw whenever he'd see some, having already gathered around 60% of the needed numbers for both.

Following a quick bath, he made breakfast... but it wasn't as fun anymore. He'd tried practically every combination that he could by now, and there was little else to attempt. The only thing he could do was wait for the seeds that Yue planted to grow, and see if he could concoct something with them.

As soon as the breakfast was ready, both the animals and the kids woke up and quickly converged. The fire in their eyes was never extinguished--on the contrary, it seemed that the 'word' was spreading further and further out into the forest, as Leo spotted six newcomers this morning. They were an entire family of four-eyed, white-feathered sparrows... except they were the size of a larger pigeon.

"Master," Yue suddenly broke the silence. "Once we complete the longhouse... can Liang and I leave the forest for a little while?"

"Hm?" Leo glanced at them. He wasn't particularly surprised--if he could, he'd leave too. There was little to do in this place, and especially for the young people in the prime of their lives, it was probably quite suffocating.

"Don't--don't get me wrong!" she quickly said. "We enjoy spending time here, a lot, but there is this one place that I always wanted to go to. Especially now, when we're growing stronger, I feel like we can accomplish something. We won't even be that far, just south of the forest--Cradle of the First Men," while Leo maintained an indifferent expression, he wanted to laugh a little bit at her reaction.

"Are you confident?" he asked.

"Hm," she nodded. "We'll go together and never separate. If we truly ever feel like we're in danger, we will use the Void Scroll... if, if you don't mind it."

"Yes, the reason I gave it to you two is that I'd mind if you used it, so it's just a useless decoration to be left hanging in your pocket," Leo smiled faintly, taking a sip of the juice. Though he felt a bit strange about going back to loneliness, them leaving would afford him the time to explore the depths of the forest and locate the well. "Of course you can go. Just stay safe, that's all I ask."

"Of course, Master," she said. "We won't stay long. Two months at most. Ah, the Cradle is sort of like a rite of passage," she added. "It's a settlement of forts scattered around and usually manned by Disciples of the Sects. There are a lot of Demonic Beasts as well as Others, so there are constant hunts and fights happening." Leo listened to it carefully, mapping inside his mind where it was. "There are two Soul Ascendance Realm cultivators overseeing everything and protecting the forts, but it isn't unusual for the Disciples to die there, especially if they extend far past the forts' influence."

"Others?" Leo queried. He grew a bit bolder with his questions, poking and prodding here and there, his excuse of 'being away from the world for so long' locked-and-loaded if either of the Disciples asked. Neither, however, seemed to question why he'd ask that.

"Hm, it's mostly what we call bandits and the mutants," she said. "They, too, come to the Cradle to fight for the resources. There are quite a few canyons that flood yearly, and once the floods retreat, for some reason, a lot of treasures appear--weapons, pills, herbs, armor, even martial arts and cultivation methods. Nobody has ever learned why it happens, but when it does, almost every Sect sends their best Disciples to look for good opportunities."

"Just last year," Liang said. "Senior Brother Xu went to the Cradle as one of the weakest of his generation, but he lucked into Root-Washing Pill and upgraded his roots overnight!"

"..." Leo's eyebrows twitched for a moment as he recalled that he still had that single Root-Washing Pill somewhere in his robes. He never ended up using it, and he hadn't given it out just yet. Luckily, one of the rewards for completing the longhouse was a few more pills, so he would be able to give them out and even have two extras for the future.

Leo had already decided to make a Sect of his own as part of the main quest rather than joining a new one. In time, he hoped, that one of the two kids in front of him would grow strong enough to herald the Sect so that he could just be a mysterious 'Master' or an 'Ancestor' that never really interacted with the world. While they dealt with the matters of the Sect, he'd travel the lands and have a bit of fun.

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That was for the future, however--a very distant future, at that.

"That's nice," he said. "But don't chase treasures at the risk of your lives, okay?"

"Of course, Master," Yue said as the three fell into silence.

It has been some time since it was just him and the animals, Leo mused. And though he liked having people around (probably just as much if not even more), there were moments where he yearned for silence, too--especially if the pair of his Disciples broke out into one of their pointless fights. The entire forest would roar with Yue's anger and Liang's whining, and even the animals would know to scatter at those times, hiding in the holes and the trunks and the bushes, away from the hubbub.

Even if, at times, their fighting sounded like a nice melody, at other times it was akin to locking two cats who hate each other in the same cage.

Following the breakfast, Yue and Liang went to the quarry to finish up and make it ready for any future excavations while Leo took the compass from Yue and headed northward. He largely stayed away from the north as that was where Chilly--the crow--was. However, so long as he didn't cross that 'invisible barrier' that his gut would warn him about, he figured he would be fine.

It wasn't long before the healthy trees gave way to the macabre ones, but he ignored them. He was alone, for the first time in a while, as none of the animals accompanied him--not even in the shadows (as far as he could tell). Though a bit scary, he fought the urge to turn around and run, investigating with the compass in hand, waiting for the damn thing to light up.

The north, much like further west of the western pond, stuck out from the rest of the forest. None of the trees or the plants that seemed to live here appeared anywhere else in the forest--the red-capped mushrooms that were like polka dots, the 'breathing' flowers whose petals would close up and open in rhythmic fashion, the swaying branches that were almost like sentient twines, coiling around virtually everything...

Furthermore, unlike the rest of the forest, there were no animals. Not the animals like Hoot or Red, the 'mutated', weird sort, or animals like that dog--completely ordinary. As far as he could tell, there was only Chilly, and everyone else stayed hell away from it. Leo couldn't blame them--just the mere glance of that crow made him feel like he'd touched the glass pane of death. He couldn't imagine trying to live and raise a family while surrounded by that feeling.

The trees suddenly parted, and Leo came upon a rather wide clearing--it was rectangular, stretching out westward for nearly half a mile. He paused at the edge, stunned and confused; unlike every other clearing, which had within it things you'd ordinarily find in a forest--ponds, flowers, grass, and such--this one had... a building. Yes, it was a building in major disrepair--there was no roof, half its walls were eaten by time, and it was reminiscent of those ancient ruins back on Earth that were really just a set of twelve walls vaguely forming a set of rooms.

Leo approached with the caution, fearing something might jump from the inside--but it didn't. Just like its spiderwebbed walls, its insides were overgrown with nature too; grass and flowers had taken over, but there were still remnants of things that were. In one corner, he saw a cracked, obsidian-black cauldron lying on the side. In another, there was a stool missing two out of its tree legs, the rest of its body deep in the phase of rot.

Scattered bits could be found between the walls, reminders that someone once lived here. Leo's mind drifted back to that grave, and he wondered whether the forest... was always a forest. There was a good chance that before the trees sprouted like in Eden, this may as well have been a completely different topology--maybe it was a flat or hilly plain, maybe it was city or a town, or even perhaps a Sect.

He sat down onto one of the walls after ensuring it was stable, gazing upon the weathered stone. The winds blew past him, swaying the grass. Somberness and melancholy overwhelmed him, almost like a tidal wave surging from within. At some point in time, there was a person, or people, living here, enjoying everyday life. And yet, all that was left of them... were these stained walls and cracked pottery.

Life, in moments like these, seemed woefully meaningless. They, too, must have struggled with something--perhaps cultivation, perhaps familial expectations, perhaps just love. And yet, all their struggles, small and large, faded like ashes in the winds of time. All that was left was a last syllable of their existence, a tiny speck of their cosmic inconsequentially.

Would his life, and thus death, be any different? All his efforts to build a life in this forest, to befriend its netizens, and to help people... would they all eventually fade, the only reminder some cold structure that could not make a sound? Would those mud huts survive his end, and eventually become curious findings of people a thousand years into the future who'd wonder why somebody built mud huts in a desert?

He chuckled lightly at the thought, standing up.

It didn't matter, not really. He did a thousand things to make himself memorable back on Earth, but what was the point? He had no means of seeing what his death meant to that world, just as he won't have means of seeing it here. Life was too short, and too full of possibilities to fear what might come after it disappears.

If there was time to ponder legacy after death, there was still a breath left to live. Just as he took a step forward to walk past the structure, he felt a buzz in the palm of his hand and watched the compass light up in a golden hue--it had found something.