Limitless Path

The pillar was absolutely the source of the issue, that being the flood of beasts that had been disturbed. Not just because the beasts were spawning in droves around the pillar and rampaging out from there, but because it was very clear the pillar was disturbing beasts in a massive range that were getting agitated. Beasts didn’t seek to kill or go nuts twenty-four/seven, they would wander about without a clear purpose, eat, or rest at times. The pillar was interfering with all of that, sending the beasts into a frenzy, which also seemed to drive them out of the caverns and towards the surface, though Beth suspected that a decent number had been pushed further down and died to the much scarier things that were very deep down.

The groups had cleared most things out and Bai looked around, finding Bjorn and the dragon still fighting at the pillar. The tall, lanky man that was with them, she thought his name was Adam, was on the far side of the room and handling things from the two tunnel openings over there. The rest of the team was standing around talking, analyzing things, or focused on the pillar. The short woman, Andrea, was chatting with Li Feng, Wang, and Mei Mei, the conversation causing even the stoic Wang to laugh. Yet another strange member of Beth’s group, Bai hadn’t even caught her name, was standing and chatting with Ming, Bai noting several odd features now that she examined her more closely, including what looked like some chitinous segments on her forearms. A close check with her eye power showed the strange woman was some kind of bee species, which Bai privately thought fit right in with the small circus the stupid American carted around.

On the other side, the tall wolf girl, Blood if Bai’s memory was right, was scanning the final tunnel that led into the area. The woman with very pale skin and too many joints, having at least one extra elbow and several extra joints in each of her…six fingers? Well, it wasn’t Bai’s business, but the pale woman was hanging on the wolf in a most unprofessional way, whispering something in the wolf’s pretty ear that made it twitch before the lupine woman growled something back quietly in response. Beth was standing by Bai and scanning the room as they rest of her group either fought or talked, likely using whatever her extra power was to try to figure things out.

“So, the pillar is the problem?” Bai asked in her lightly accented English.

“Yes and no,” Beth replied, holding up a hand and wobbling it back and forth. “The pillar is the problem, but that’s because the last group, sorry to talk shit about them, didn’t know what they were doing. They activated it wrong, or they activated it and couldn’t do whatever was required and that caused this problem. I think we should just examine the pillar and see what we can figure out. Neph! Andrea! Cover the pillar with Bjorn and Sera. Blood! Val! Cover the other passages with Adam. Kris! Make sure Bai’s team is safe and nothing sneaks up behind us.”

“Got it,” various team members called out as Beth’s team repositioned. Despite their almost lackadaisical attitude, Bai was continuously impressed at how smoothly they worked together and how easily they followed such simple orders to such great effect. The various members of the other team repositioned almost instantly while Beth walked forward with Bai, moving up between Bjorn and Sera to the pillar to examine it from up close.

“What do you think?” Bai asked. The pillar was about two meters thick and square, made of some kind of dark green material with sections that were narrower every few meters and then sections that were thicker. The pillar started below the floor and extended up into the ceiling of the massive cavern, meaning it was at least fifty meters tall, or more than a hundred and fifty feet in height. The whole surface of the damn thing was carved with more runes than Bai knew what to do with, all at a scale so small somebody with less stats and no eye power would need a magnifying glass to read them. The whole thing pulsed with mana, the amount running through the pillar right now so thick it practically oozed as liquid from its surface, something Bai had never seen before, and a sign of just how powerful the whole thing was.

“I think I know exactly what’s going on,” Beth replied, studying the pillar.

“You can understand all that?” Bai asked, gesturing at the runes.

“Hell no. I doubt Val can understand much of it, and she’s a decent enchanter,” Beth replied.

“I heard that!” the pale woman yelled from one of the other tunnels.

“Anyway, this thing is why I said your group had a big opportunity. If I’m reading it right, it’s sort of like a trial, but nothing that’s super complex. You activate the pillar and it transports you somewhere where you have to fight waves of beasts. If you win, you get an extra prize, which I’m not really sure about, but I think it gives you bonus experience. If you fail, then that’s bad, and if you retreat, that’s even worse. I’m guessing those guys who set this off retreated, or started the pillar but didn’t accept getting transported. In that case, the pillar would just start spewing out all the beasts that they were supposed to fight,” Beth explained.

“And it’s still going?” Bai asked, quirking a brow a bit.

“Well, I think if you run away, it goes a little haywire,” Beth said, squinting at the pillar. “Hold on, let me mess with it a minute.”

Beth then stepped up to the pillar and started messing with something on her interface before releasing a huge gout of silver-white flame that coated part of the pillar. She wasn’t trying to melt it, or it didn’t appear so, and she moved the flame around and caused it to focus on certain parts. Bai wasn’t sure exactly what the point was, but after about a minute, the whole pillar shut off, just as if someone had flipped a switch, all the glowing runes suddenly dark and the mana concentration dropping, though it would take a minute to return to a more normal level. Beth made the fire disappear and slapped her hand together, stepping back with a satisfied smirk.

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“Didn’t know if that would actually work, but it couldn’t have really hurt,” the raven-haired beauty said with a nod. “I reset the whole pillar, so it’s back to exactly the way it was when those bumblers that set all this off found it. If anybody from your group wants a crack at it, it would probably be a really good reward, and I can shut it off again if the thing goes bonkers.”

“I’ll ask,” Bai said, not wanting to make a unilateral decision without at least some input from her team.

She consulted with the others for a minute, bu the consensus was pretty unanimous. They wanted to be gone, or rather, they wanted to be out from underground and wrap the whole mission up. They weren’t cowards or weak, they just really didn’t like the underground and didn’t want to mess with some weird pillar that had killed a different team seemingly out of nowhere. Bai made sure they were all in agreement before she explained their decision to Beth, who just shrugged and got them all moving back the way they had come. They moved slower this time and let Bai’s team do most of the work, essentially providing a moderately safe environment with their escort where her team could grab a bunch of levels at a lower risk. The experience was great, and Beth’s team was both highly competent and able to treat minor wounds, letting Bai’s team operate for longer without having to stop and turtle up. They all had some form of some regeneration power as well, which meant they could handle a lot of punishment, and one of the later additions to her team, Lei Wen, was able to heal fairly well. In fact, as odd as it was, she was the only one out of both teams that had a directly applicable healing skill outside of a regeneration skill. The one called Kris was a spellcaster of some skill and power and could create a healing effect, but she didn’t have any skills dedicated to healing or even to schools of magic with healing as a focus.

About a day passed in this way before they neared the entrance they had come down from, all of Bai’s team getting at least five levels during the return journey alone. She appreciated what the foreign team did for them, as they certainly didn’t have to help them in any way, even with the emergency situation. They were back on the surface right as the sun was setting for the day, though even a night sky would have been preferable to being underground anymore. The makeshift barricades and fortifications were still there, as were the other teams that had been gathered to handle the crisis, and the first thing they had to do was go report. Despite her efforts, Beth largely remained in the background and let Bai do all the talking, though she assumed that was because the big blockhead was lazy rather than any other reason like wanting to give Bai’s team the credit. The commander of the whole operation gave the order that they were to stick around for forty-eight hours and monitor the situation, as they couldn’t be sure that that had really taken care of the problem, but Bai wasn’t really upset about that. They’d gotten nearly a week’s progress, maybe a bit more, just by fighting their way back out, and they knew about the trial underground if they wanted to make use of it in the future, when they were stronger.

“You’re sure you don’t want to use the pillar?” Bai asked Beth once the meeting was over.

Beth just shrugged lazily, hands behind her head as she looked up at the now dark sky. “Eh, doesn’t really matter. I’ve done trials like that before, and like I said, my team has easy access to time compressed dungeons. We really don’t struggle to get experience, and if the bonus was just extra experience, well, not really something we care about.”

“Still, you could have tried it to see what you got,” Bai said with a shake of her head.

“Eh, not interested,” Beth said with another shrug. “We’ll stick around for another day to make sure things are okay, but I doubt any problems will crop up. After that, we’re gonna take off and get back to some of the other stuff we have to take care of while we’re on-world. You’re welcome to come with us or stop by. Here, let me exchange communicator info with you.”

The stupidly pretty woman held out her hand and Bai grabbed it, exchanging details with the touch. “We might take you up on that, if you’re willing to sell us some time in one of those compressed dungeons. For right now, we’ve got other stuff to do.”

“Sure. It doesn’t really cost us that much, if anything, depending on what it is, so you can just let me know if you want some time to grind some levels,” Beth said, stretching before turning to walk over to her group. “Hit me up if you have any problems; I can’t solve everything, but I can help with stuff if you’re ever in a bad situation.”

“Right, I’ll let you know,” Bai said, shaking her head as she returned to her own group.

The rest of the time passed uneventfully, at least compared to before, and halfway through their watch, the foreign team left. That started a trickling out of all the other gathered teams, the other foreign teams returning to whatever they had been up to when the emergency was called. Bai’s team hung around until everything else was sorted and everyone else had left before returning to their own efforts, which was a split focus between leveling and studying mana. The mana study included a lot of work on understanding whatever they could of Mana Physiques in their preparation to build their own, and she could only shake her head when Beth sent her a guide that wasn’t easy to find for just such a thing. It looked like having her as a close contact was going to pay dividends, Bai only feeling bad that she was sort of taking advantage of the dumb blockhead.

Beth’s team, meanwhile, had set sail for a destination they had wanted to return to for a while, after she messaged her dad that everything had been handled, since he was the one that had wound up contacting them about the China situation. The team were headed back to what used to be described as, and likely still would be called the Middle East, heading into the middle of the desert in Beth’s airship to head to the tower of trials they had worked part of the way through. It had been a few years, and more than a few rebirths, since they had attempted anything in the tower, and Beth was sure they could make a lot of progress now that they were so much stronger. She had sent Veren a message that they were doing the tower, and while he didn’t show up, he did actually send a reply letting her know he had just stepped into Sage and had to solidify his new level before doing anything else, which was an improvement over him not even replying most of the time. Beth was happy to hear about his progress, and she was also glad that the tower saved something of a small profile for each of them, as they wouldn’t have to start at floor one of the impossible edifice and work their way up again.

The Tower of Rebirth, as the rather grandiose name labeled it, was very much the same as what Beth and the group remembered it to be. The surroundings, however, were much, much different, as not only had a small but rich city popped up around the area, but it looked like people had been doing some terraforming and/or bioengineering in the place as well. Likely they used magic to create and maintain the effect locally, as the group had definitely flown over a section of desert, a long section, to reach the place. If it wasn’t a locally contained phenomena, then it would have been terraforming on, well, a planetary scale, and Beth didn’t really see signs of that. Still, it had transformed an area for as much as ten miles around the small city into a large oasis in the desert, even beyond what one would normally think about when picturing such a thing, with a section of thick forest and an area with a small lake that had a few little boats on it. Beth wasn’t sure where to land, but found that there was an area at the edge of the city set aside just for small craft to land or drop cargo on, with a small, paved area and a broader area of dense grass. She set down there and then folded the ship up and put it away after they had disembarked, looking around at the new city.