Chương 520: Chapter 522: Storm

Our group of thirteen made our way to the westernmost point of the island. It would have been a seven hour walk under the best of circumstances, but we constantly needed to avoid wandering fog banks, which nearly doubled the travel time. Normally, I would have been more than happy to rip them to pieces - but we needed to save our mana and essence, and the swordsmen needed to save the charges on their swords. Finally, we reached the wall of fog banks that the fog pillar had told us about.

In the distance, I could see that the number of fog banks suddenly increased. Previously, we had encountered a few fog banks an hour while walking, and they occasionally travelled in groups instead of alone. But in front of us, I could see a giant herd of them. I did a quick head count, and felt my throat go dry with anxiety when I finished. There were about two hundred fog banks in the distance.

That was on a completely different level than the previous worst fight we had been in, where we had run into six fog banks during our first hunt. This was a completely hopeless situation. If we got into a full-on fight with these things, there was no question of whether we could win or not. We would get surrounded and ripped to pieces, and I had zero confidence I could even save myself, much less keep other members of the group alive. I shuddered, before I took in the rest of the area.

The giant herd of fog banks resided in a great valley. The valley looked like it had come straight out of a primordial jungle, much like our previous world. It was covered in dense ferns, leaves, and vines, which made the entire area look strangely cluttered in my soul sight. The area itself was still surprisingly small, though - perhaps three kilometers in diameter. I wasn't quite sure why this one specific area had so much more plant life than the rest of the island, but I decided it wasn't important.

It didn't seem obviously threatening, at least.

"How many fog banks do you see?" hissed Veritum.

"I count about two hundred. There could be more just out of range of my soul sight," I said. Veritum sucked in a breath.

"That's a lot of fog banks," he said. I nodded.

"Way more than I was expecting," I muttered. I had been envisioning a few dozen of them. This was far worse.

"I don't detect anything with my senses that might give us a clue on how to actually stop the attacks. Does anyone else have a good idea what might lie in the center of that valley?" Veritum specifically eyed Anise and I.

"I can feel a big vortex of esse- errr, mana," said Anise.

"Near the center of the valley. It feels like it's pulling something towards it? I can't detect anything beyond that point, though. I have taken a few feats that boost my senses towards mana, but I think I would still need better Feats to really detect what's happening there."

"What about you, Miria? Anything else to add to Anise's observations?" I squinted at the fog banks, and after a few minutes, I realized I had missed a detail. Some of the fog banks in this valley were unusually weak. They looked almost like newborn souls. My breath caught as I realized what this meant. We had found fog banks who weren't grown up yet. In other words, this was probably the place where they were born. Equally relevant was the fact that the fog banks here weren't as threatening as they appeared to be.

They still had overwhelming numbers on their side, but each individual fog bank was much less terrifying than an adult. If the fog banks had displayed any real signs of communication with us, or proper sapience, that would have made me pause. I wasn't going to murder children, even the children of a nation or city we were at war with. That would absolutely cross my bottom line. But apart from their ability to work together sometimes, these fog banks seemed like proper monsters, at least as far as I could tell.

They had unwavering hostility towards us, displayed no interest in communication or higher level thinking, and demonstrably desired to eat human flesh. So I felt no hesitation at the thought of wiping out a valley of monster cubs.

"A lot of the fog banks here aren't grown up yet. We might have found where they're born."

"Really?" Veritum sounded excited, and I saw several other warriors grin.

"So we can hit these damn things before they grow up and come to slaughter our own children?"

"Do keep in mind that we're still severely outnumbered," I said.

"But yes, we can hit much weaker enemies here before they have time to grow up. Also, if we figure out how they're born, we might be able to stop or slow down their birth rate. If we can reduce the rate at which the fog banks appear, they could transform from an existential threat to a valuable resource." After all, we needed some source of levels to secure the future for our settlement.

The biggest issue with the fog banks was that they attacked us too frequently and in overwhelming numbers, and we hadn't had time to build all the anti-fog bank weapons we needed. If we resolved these issues, the fog banks could be a valuable resource for future generations. The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

"I can see something kind of strange near the center of the valley," said Sallia, a few moments later.

"It looks like some kind of cyclone. I think it's the same thing Anise detected. I feel like it's absorbing materials from somewhere else, and then compressing them," said Sallia. I noticed how much she emphasized the word 'absorbing,' and nodded to myself. So the fog banks were born from some kind of mixture of absorption essence, which was then compressed, combined with fog, and then got spat out? If that was the case, that cyclone might be where all of the fog banks on the island came from.

Then, I caught a faint trace of something else. Something I hadn't expected to feel here. I could detect an extremely faint trace of the ocean of souls. It felt like a subtle undertone to the momentum of the cyclone in the center of the valley. Was the cyclone literally pulling water from the ocean of souls, then somehow compressing it to create more fog banks? I used my dimensional sight to get a closer look at the cyclone, and realized that the fog banks weren't just made out of water from the ocean of souls.

There was a bunch of essence also swirling around the cyclone, and a good amount of actual fog, too. Apparently, these three ingredients were all that were needed to constantly produce more fog banks. I could see a few new fog banks growing within the cyclone itself, and rubbed my forehead in frustration. I finally understood why these things were so hard to clear out. This cyclone was probably producing about a dozen fog banks a day.

Even if only a few of them moved towards our village afterwards, while the others drifted towards the ocean or other parts of the island, it was only natural that we would constantly encounter problems with the fog bank population. I felt my mind rush, as I looked at the fog bank hatchery. Suddenly, several aspects of their biology made far more sense to me. The fog banks were so deeply attuned to the soul because they were literally 'hatched' from giant buckets of water from the ocean of souls.

I had never seen this kind of production process before. That also led me to a new question. Were these fog banks really natural? It seemed like the process of drawing water out of the ocean of souls, compressing it with a precise mixture of essence and fog, and then giving birth to a new fog bank. The cyclone itself didn't have a soul, so it clearly wasn't some kind of hive-queen. I wasn't quite sure what to make of the sight in front of me.

I also wasn't really sure how natural it was for something like this to exist in an essence rich world. After all, this was our first time in a Tier 9 dimension. For all I knew, this was a regular weather pattern in high power worlds like this. I shook my head. If this was an artificial phenomenon, we might have follow up problems if we dealt with it. However, if we didn't deal with it, we would face extinction. We had no real choice.

"What do we do?" I asked.

"I think that's where all the fog monsters come from, and it does look like they're much weaker when they're born. But I also don't see a way to disperse or destroy the cyclone itself, especially not at this distance." Truthfully, I had no idea if we could destroy the cyclone at all, or even if doing so would be a good idea. After all, we still wanted to keep some level of fog monster production around - we just wanted it to be controlled. That would be the most stable foundation for the future.

"Maybe we could just wipe out several of the newborn fog banks?" said Sallia.

"If we wipe out a few dozen, retreat, and repeat, we could probably face much easier fights. That would also allow us to keep the fog banks around for future levelling purposes. If we can successfully take control of this valley and then just have our strongest warriors wipe out newborn fog banks anytime they appear, the danger to our village would be controlled, and we could constantly use or sell the fog cores. It's the best way to hit all of our needs and wants." I nodded thoughtfully. Sallia was right.

If we could control this valley and kill each new fog bank right after it was born, it really would be the best possible future. There was just one problem. Right now, the fog bank valley had about 200 fog banks in it, and I seriously doubted we could clear out the buildup of fog banks on our own. They outnumbered us by way too much, and that was before taking into account their summoning magic. On the other hand, I also didn't see any other real path forward.

"Let's try wiping out a few at the edges, and see how the other fog banks react," said Veritum, after a few moments of thought.

"This is the best, and maybe only chance we have to make things better for the village. I can't just let it go. Besides, when we've fought fog banks before, we've never alerted fog banks that were more than a few hundred meters away. if we're lucky, maybe we can just hit a few and then retreat before the rest join in? If that works, we can slowly whittle away their population using hit and run tactics." I gritted my teeth. That sounded very dangerous. But I also didn't have any better ideas.

"All right, let's go. There is a group of three fog banks about four hundred meters in front of us," I said.

"They're at least somewhat isolated, and they have about a quarter of the life force of a fully grown fog bank. They're a good test to see if this works at all." We sprinted towards the group I had found. I wiped out one of them with an extinguish, while the warriors used their weapons to rip apart the other three within a few cuts. Just as I had hoped, these creatures were much easier to deal with before they were fully grown. That was where the good news ended.

Right after we killed four fog banks, I saw three other groups of fog banks jolt, as if they had just injected themselves with caffeine. Then, fog banks that were further away jolted as well. In a chain reaction, five seconds later, every single fog bank in the valley started flying towards us at top speed. I gritted my teeth. It looked like we were not going to experience our best case scenario.

The fog banks did, indeed, have a limitation on how far they could communicate with each other - but they had quickly spread word to the others. We turned around and dashed back towards the forest as the fog banks chased us, and I tried to come up with a new plan. If we tried to ambush the fog banks like this, we would need too much time to lose them after each ambush - we might not even keep up with their birth rate. We had found the source of the problem, but a solution seemed just as far out of reach as before.