Chapter 241: Interlude - Anko - Part 2
On the edge between one abyss and another, Anko sat and caught her breath.
She’d climbed for hours and hours, it felt like. Until even her mana-enhanced body had started to strain. And just when she’d wondered if she should have explored down instead of up, she saw it: a little slice of light that marked a place where the tower had broken.
Upon reaching it, she’d discovered the "slice" looked to be about ten measures high, a break in the tree where the tower was also broken between two parts that had been bolted to the interior.
The break in the tree was wide enough to let her rest, and it was enough for her to see that she’d entered an area that was very low on mana. An area where, above her, something was filtering down a weak amount of light and spreading a strange, mucky haze that smelled rotten.
Rather than continue up into that fog, she made the decision to leap for the next section of the tower as soon as she felt able. The climb brought her across more breaks in both tower and tree, as if some cataclysm had tried to but largely failed to dislodge the entire structure, until at last she found a break that was different from the rest.
For one thing, it led out onto a massive section of what seemed like more wood, but upon stepping onto it she discovered it to be a giant mushroom attached to the side of the tree.
The sights that met her from that platform were strange indeed. A forest not of trees but of mushrooms, linked together loosely by ropey strands of white that threaded about the trees like the universe’s largest basketweave.
Some glowed, others seemed to sway unnaturally, and more than a few had gloopy, unidentifiable pools of substance on their surfaces.
And then there were the bugs.
Giant insects whose forms blurred the lined between all manner of species moved about, gathering and glomping and nibbling. They seemed unhurried, and after a few minutes of staring with her mouth open, Anko realized that none of them were attacking each other. Just taking in bits of the fungi and moving about in some unseen order.
All of them were dense with mana, but aside from a few rare exceptions, the air around them was clear. Almost as if they only drew mana without emitting it, the same as the mushrooms.