Chapter 208: The Envoy
"No. I'd rather stay here in the forest," Ling said quickly.
Shuang laughed, a sound like ringing silver bells that echoed through the air, then flew back to her perch atop the unicorn's head. Together, the two of them turned and made their way deeper into the forest.
Winter had come, and the school term was drawing to a close, with examinations underway in every course. Evan and Boniface rarely crossed paths these days — both of them, whether by intention or not, kept their distance from each other.
Evan's own classes had already ended. With the winter break arriving, Sky City decided to head north, answering an invitation from the Elven Forest for a goodwill visit. As a necromancer, Evan technically had no standing to join the delegation, but since he kept a house of his own aboard Sky City, he came along all the same. Jessica traveled with him too, along with a group of merchants — magic traders who rented shopfronts on Sky City.
Sky City had opened itself up to merchants for two reasons. The first was that Sky City was, in essence, a fortress in the air, and every faction eyed it with some wariness. Ortlando had simply thrown open part of its space and turned it into a peaceful marketplace, which changed its whole character. People's guard dropped to almost nothing once trade moved in — it was Hollingburton's way of signaling its intentions.
The second reason was simpler: maintaining Sky City cost a fortune, and renting out part of it went a long way toward easing that burden.
Between these two reasons, Sky City had become what it now was — and precisely because of that, its magic bazaar did a booming trade, which in turn softened the edges of what was, underneath it all, still a fortress.
Sky City had already set out several days before the term ended. Flying as high as it did, it drew little attention from below, and its departure caused no great stir. Evan and Jessica followed by airship. Sky City had a head start of several days, but it moved slowly enough that Evan wasn't worried about catching up.
Aboard the airship this time were Evan, Jessica, and Emma. Emma had no house on Sky City, but she served as Deputy Minister of the Magic Items Management Department and was, in practice, the one who managed the Sun God line of airships. She was already among the delegation, planning to discuss cooperation with the forest elves on airship matters.
Shuang, of course, sat perched on Evan's left shoulder, while Evan himself piloted the ship. Their airship wasn't large. It shimmered faintly with magic light and used no sails of any kind — Evan had designed it in a spindle shape instead, whose one great advantage was speed. It covered more than four hundred kilometers an hour, dozens of times faster than Sky City itself.
The airship ran on magic crystals for power, leaving a trailing wake behind it as it flew due north.
"Professor Wang, do you think the elves in the Elven Forest will welcome you?" Jessica teased.
"What can I do about it? I'm a necromancer. If they don't welcome me, I suppose I could always sneak in," Evan said. "To be honest, I'm quite curious about elven customs, and about their nature magic too. I'd love to lay eyes on their sacred tree."
"Yay, I want to see the elves' sacred tree too!" Shuang bounced with excitement. The longer she spent with Evan, the less of a flower fairy's grace she seemed to retain.
Emma frowned. "The elves' sacred tree isn't shown to outsiders at all — it's guarded closely. It watches over the entire elven city, and nothing we do escapes its notice. If there's any living thing that surpasses the Pope, my guess would be that tree. Its name is the World Tree. The elves have endured for tens of thousands of years, and every bit of it rests on the World Tree."
"The World Tree — does it have any connection to the World Tree of the northern myths?" Evan asked.
"No one knows. Whether the World Tree of myth even exists is still an open question. One theory holds that the myth drew from the elves' own sacred tree — though the sacred tree in the Elven Forest is only a sapling of it, so to speak. Legend says the true sacred tree, the source of them all, stands in Goling," Jessica said. She hadn't brought Jenny along this time — over the winter break, Jenny and her older brother Reinhardt were going home — so Jessica was making the trip to the Elven Forest alone, as part of Sky City's delegation.
"Goling — the legendary homeland of the elves, deep within the Sunset Ocean?" Evan asked.
"That's right, or so the legend goes. Sailors keep reporting sightings of it, but it's never been anything more than a story," Jessica said.
The airship made good time. After six hours of flight, it finally caught up with Sky City, which was cruising ahead at full speed — though to the airship, even Sky City's full speed looked almost like standing still. As the airship closed in, a scanning beam shot out from one of the mage towers to confirm the identity of the newcomers. Sky City hadn't raised its full defenses, but a transparent barrier still hung over it.
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Once the barrier's sentries recognized Evan and the others, a doorway opened within it. Security had tightened considerably since the last incident — airships could still come and go freely, but teleportation within the barrier had been disabled entirely. Not even a Legend mage could blink past it now.
Below them, several enormous airships hung with white sails drifted by like ships sailing through the clouds, shuttling back and forth between the ground and Sky City. Evan checked the map and understood at once — the area below was home to a fairly large magic market. It made sense that merchants would be coming up to trade; the goods sold on Sky City were all rare and exceptional. Nothing less than top quality could earn its keep up there — the rent alone would eat anything ordinary alive.
So whenever Sky City passed over a magic market, airships would come up to ferry people aboard. Passage wasn't cheap either — only the wealthy could afford to make the trip.
Evan only glanced at the scene below before guiding the airship neatly through the doorway in the barrier. The barrier itself was colorless, but the door burned like a ring of fire — clearly a passage opened specifically for them, sparing them from having to jostle for space with the merchants.
Once the airship passed through, the flames died out at once and the doorway vanished. Evan brought the ship down slowly beside his own house, while Shuang shot off ahead, unable to wait.
"Come sit at my place for a bit?" Evan offered.
"No, the two of us will head back to my place and rest up first. See you tonight," Jessica said.
"See you tonight!"
Evan went inside. The house was considerably smaller than his one on the ground, but it was already fully furnished, and the magic icebox was well stocked with food. Over the past few months he'd made a habit of coming up to stay every couple of weeks or so, and his laboratory here was already set up too, though it was far more modest than the one on the ground — let alone the one at the school.
Shuang had claimed a small room of her own here as well, positioned directly across from Evan's bed and set up high, just as it was on the ground — like a bird's nest, though a very fine one.
Once inside, Evan quickly slipped into meditation. Five or six hours of flying had left him a little worn in spirit, unusual constitution or not.
At his current level, meditation carried him straight into the Sea of Consciousness. There, that towering tree stood between earth and sky, filling the whole space. It wasn't the tree that Evan meditated on, though — his focus was the Black Lotus, which appeared to be entirely absorbed into the tree's trunk now, invisible during ordinary times. But the moment he began meditating, his consciousness would connect with it at once, and it would begin turning slowly, drawing in great clouds of grey mist while breathing out strange, shifting colors of light that the great tree absorbed in turn, as though the Lotus had become a source of nourishment for it.
Evan had tried to exert control over it before, without any effect — the great tree simply wasn't influenced by him at all. But he'd found that his own magic wasn't stagnating; if anything it kept growing, slowly, so he'd stopped worrying about the arrangement.
Today was no different. Two hours later, he opened his eyes. It was still early, so he sank back into the Sea of Consciousness and tried once more to focus his attention on the great tree. This time, though, something felt different. He fixed his mind on the tree and noticed what looked like patterns on its leaves — something he'd noticed once before, but the patterns had always been too indistinct to draw his attention.
Today the patterns were still indistinct, but something about them felt familiar. His mind stirred, and instead of taking in the whole tree, he poured all of his focus into a single leaf. It felt almost as though he were looking down at it from a god's-eye view. The leaf slowly grew larger before him, lines unfolding one after another, straight and curved alike, growing bigger and clearer by the moment — and then he started. This was the magic diagram for his Yin Spirit Arrow. He'd studied that diagram so many times it might as well have been carved into his brain, yet here it was, appearing on the leaf of this tree.
He looked up at the tree. It was almost impossibly vast, its leaves beyond counting — did that mean it might hold more of his own magic than he could ever number? The moment the thought crossed his mind, he shifted his focus to another leaf. Sure enough, it was Lich's Howl. He checked leaf after leaf and found all of his spells there. The ones he used often stood out with perfect clarity, but a few seemed veiled behind some strange layer, as though seen through frosted glass — this one turned out to be the diagram for Meteor Firestorm. Realization struck him at once. Those were spells he couldn't cast as a lich. Did that mean a spell's clarity on the leaves reflected whether he could actually use it?
With that thought, he raced through the other leaves, and just as he'd suspected, the spells he'd gained through his research papers' natural feedback — ones that bypassed the limits placed on him as a lich — showed up perfectly clear. That raised the next question: how could he make the clouded ones clear as well? Many leaves, meanwhile, carried no pattern at all yet. Evan suspected that as his mastery of magic deepened, patterns would form on those too.
Then what were the flowers for? He looked up at a branch full of buds waiting to bloom and tried bringing his thoughts close to one of them. The instant he did, a flash of green swept through the Sea of Consciousness. Without warning, the bundled knowledge the Life Goddess had once passed into him — knowledge he still lacked the strength to unlock on his own — burst open. A swarm of thoughts flickered through the air all at once, like a sky full of green stars. Before Evan could even react, that whole field of stars came falling toward a single point. A flower bloomed, and every one of those stars poured into it. Faith drawn from beyond himself surged in as well, filling the flower with something like darkness, scattered through with points of starlight.
A phrase rose unbidden in Evan's mind: Let there be light. As though the world itself were being born, the flower lit up in an instant — and it felt, for all the world, as if a tiny universe had just come into being.