Chapter 487: The Root of the Problem
The next day, the moment my essence reserves recovered enough, I dumped almost all of my essence into creating a dimensional anchor. Creating a dimensional anchor with my skill felt odd - it was as if the moment it was completed, a weight settled into my mind - an awareness of a particular point in space, connecting me to it and allowing me to always know how far away I was from that location.
While it was far from the intended use of the skill, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I now had a very reliable compass that I could always use.
I also learned a few more things about forming and using my portals. These dimensional anchors each cost about 80% of my total essence reserves - which was a staggering cost, considering the fact that I could use any kind of essence to form a portal, and yet I needed to borrow from every single essence pool just to make a single dimensional anchor. Once I realized just how ridiculously expensive each portal was, I was glad I had taken {Glimpses of Space} for my last Feat. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to use my new Skill at all.
The other thing I learned came a day later, after I created a second dimensional anchor and tried a few test portals. I learned that while each dimensional anchor was ridiculously expensive, each gate was not very expensive. The cost was somewhat noticeable, but realistically, I could open a portal between two gateways without too much of an essence cost, even if it was right after a hard fight. The cost for longer-distance gates was a bit more expensive, but not by much - probably because, at least from a higher-level magic perspective, the distance between each of my dimensional anchors was actually quite small, even if it seemed like quite a lot of distance to our clan. I suspected that if I tried to teleport things thousands of kilometers away, or tens of thousands of kilometers away, I would run into essence issues again, since the cost for portals seemed to ramp up exponentially once a certain distance threshold was reached - but when it came to shorter distances I could manage quite easily. In other words, essence costs weren’t a huge issue for me at my current stage in development.
As I played with portals, our clan alliance continued to march through the enemy’s territory. We had lost nearly a fifth of our combatants during the ambush of the wooden butterflies, which was a nearly catastrophic level of deaths and injuries - but many of the people here had come because they saw no other choice for the future anyway. Furthermore, without the assistance of a Feat to help navigate, their embers were likely to lead them to death anyway. We were all long past the point where we could flee.
Fortunately, we didn’t run into any other special monsters during the next week. It seemed like the leaders of the universal tree branch we were fighting was either busy dealing with other problems, or was biding their time and waiting for another opportunity to strike. Either way, I was grateful for the time we had to recuperate and prepare for the next battle.
Of course, while things were relatively stable, that didn’t mean they were entirely peaceful. We still ran into rat nest after rat nest and needed to clear them out. Thankfully, with my soul sight, combined with my absurd perception stat, we found the rat nests far before they found us. We went into every battle with scout information that the enemy could only dream of having. That, along with the rapidly increasing levels of the rest of our alliance, meant that casualties got lower and lower with each fight. Even if a few people still died here and there, we didn’t suffer any significant casualties during the march forward, and many of our people actually got stronger due to the relentless battle. Including myself, of course.
| You have leveled up! Ice Mage has advanced from level 52 to level 58!
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| +9 Free Stat Points (X6) +3 Sense (X6) +3 Mind (X6) +3 Vitality (X6) +5 Mana (X6)
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| Power: Level up (X6) Influence: You played a moderate role in the battle against the extraplanar invaders! (X8)
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| Achievement +300 (X6), Achievement +500, Achievement +400, Achievement +600, Achievement +700, Achievement +300, Achievement +500, Achievement +500, Achievement +500
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Of course, while I still helped with battles anytime they cropped up, at the insistence of the clan leaders, I also started setting up more dimensional anchors. I had naturally told them about my new skill, although I had pretended that it was a feat rather than an offshoot of my extinguish abilities. After all, even gifts usually had limits, and I didn’t want to constantly attribute everything to my gifts in case the universal tree had some kind of listening device monitoring us and realized something was wrong.
The clan leaders were all rather enthusiastic about a more viable escape route after we completed our mission, so I was brought into more of the upper level meetings, and I was also given a lot more access to knowledge and resources I could use to help plan our escape route back out of the universal tree’s territory.
After a week and a half of travel, I started to feel a little bit uneasy. The universal tree might have been busy, but they were clearly paying at least some level of attention to our resistance in this world - otherwise, they wouldn’t have created the wooden butterflies to counteract our resistance and kill us.
And yet, for some reason, the universal tree hadn’t thrown a single unusual obstacle our way. We were nearly halfway through their territory by now, and the only thing we had encountered after the desperate fight with the butterflies was more rats. We hadn’t even seen another one of the large giants made of several component monsters. That, more than anything else, made me think that something was wrong.
Finally, at the end of the tenth day traversing the Universal Tree’s territory, I felt something. It was a strange feeling that seemed irretrievably linked to my heart itself, rather than any of my typical senses. It brought with me a strange sense of belonging and connection - but at the same time, it brought with it a feeling of familiarity. I blinked in confusion, and then looked around - but I couldn’t see a single reason for why I would suddenly feel ‘connected’ to something I couldn’t see or detect with any of my other senses.
<Do you guys feel something weird?> asked Felix. <I think I feel something connected to me, kind of like an item from an item slot in the Market. But I don’t know where it is, or what exactly I’m feeling.>
<I also feel it,> said Anise. <It feels almost like something is calling out to me.>
<Me too,> said Sallia. <I feel a strange, instinctive desire to go towards it. It feels like it’s right in front of us - but unimaginably far away. I don’t think it’s a mental attack, per se - but it feels very weird. I don’t know if I like it.>
<What is it? Are you sure it’s not a mental attack? I can’t think of any other reason why the four of us would be compelled to travel in a specific direction at the same time,> said Felix. <The fact that it’s in front of us also makes me think that it’s some kind of trap from the universal tree. If they have a way to compel our village-bearing beasts and the rest of our people to travel directly forward, perhaps they set up some kind of trap that they want us to walk into.>
<None of the people near me are reacting,> I said, as I studied all of the other people in our surroundings. <They look perfectly normal, unlike me. I’m having a hard time keeping my eyes away from whatever it is I’m detecting, but they seem perfectly normal. I can’t think of a compelling reason why the universal tree would feel a need to target us specifically, unless someone from the universal tree figured out we’re from the Market.>
<I’ll notify our [Sound Mage] and see if the other villages are having similar issues,> I said, before I ran to the [Sound Mage] that relayed messages to and from the other village-bearing beasts.
It took a few minutes of querying before I confirmed that there were no similar issues in other towns, and no other people experiencing similar symptoms to the four of us. It seemed as if only the four of us were being influenced by this strange sensation.
I had no idea what was going on, so I remained on high alert for several hours.
It wasn’t until the next day when I saw the next anomaly.
In the distance, from a gaping wound in the sky that seemed as if it had torn apart the atmosphere, there was a giant gash in reality. Through that gap, there was an illusory tree root, stretching out from the sky and gradually worming towards the ground. It had yet to make contact with our planet, but the moment I saw the giant tree root, alarm bells started ringing in my mind. If that thing touched our world, I had a sneaking suspicion that our mission would fail. Unrooting the universal tree from this dimension would become nearly impossible for a group with our level of strength.
But even more terrifying was the wood. It looked exactly like the splinter of wood that Felix had used to craft an item not that long ago.
We were looking at a root from the Universal Tree itself.