Chương 136: Chapter 134: Flying across the ocean

Silk allows us to climb onto their back and wedge ourselves between the scales on their back. It's not all that comfortable for anyone, but I didn't exactly expect there to be seat belts. We'll have to hold on for the whole ride, and I imagine it's going to be pretty exhausting for all concerned. Gigi is giddy as she settles in. She looks around even before we've taken off, enjoying the scenery and the view from atop the back of a dragon. I set myself more or less directly between the wings.

Experience has shown me that this is the most stable point on the dragon's back, and I intend to have as smooth a ride as possible. I don't know if I'm going to gain more levels of ride from this trip, but I imagine I will. I'm grateful that I gained a level of negotiation and a level of haggling from making the deal with Silk; I will probably need those to convince their cousin to take us the rest of the way in exchange for thirty magical crystals.

But maybe we'll find something on the island that will pique the other dragon's interest. Right now, though, we need to focus on the task at hand. We need to focus on getting across the ocean. Once all four of us are settled in and as comfortable as we're going to get, Silk begins flapping their wings. They spread the wings out so far that I can barely see the tips, and then they start flapping them with powerful strokes.

Soon, we are lifting off the ground, Silk grabbing the makeshift bag we fashioned from the tarp, containing their treasure, in one of their central claws. It's always strange watching dragons take off. Some of them seem able to just take off vertically, but most of them have to start moving forward, getting a bit of a running start before they leap up into the air and let their wings catch the air underneath them and foist them up into the sky. Silk does move, but not nearly as much as I would have expected.

I guess I expected them to need a long runway, like a jet, because of their size. But they take just a few steps and leap upwards, the flapping of wings taking away some of the weight before they jump and allowing them to leap high into the air. Gigi begins screaming almost instantly. Not out of fear, but rather out of joy. She's having fun on this ride. I can't say I blame her. After a few minutes, we begin moving pretty fast. The wind hurls past us, trying to rip us from the dragon's back.

Luckily, Silk flexes their scales a little bit, pressing down on the parts of our bodies that we have wedged in there. It's a bit painful, but far better than being ripped off their back. We'll all have bruises on our legs, but that's a small price to pay. I try to spot Amanda and Vincent as we start flying, but I think we're moving too fast. They can't be more than twenty miles off the coast yet, and Silk quickly puts that distance behind us. We're also too high to spot them, I think.

They're just human sized figured against the vast spread of ocean. Effectively invisible, at least as far as my eyes are concerned. The dragon smells heavily of musk, but I can still make out the pleasant salt water aroma of the ocean all around us as we fly. Soon, there's nothing in sight but ocean. Silk could probably do a barrel roll, flex out their scales, and just drop us all into the ocean at this point.

We'd stand no chance of making it back to shore, and they would get to keep all the loot in the makeshift bag. But there's no sign that Silk wants to do anything like that. They keep flying straight and true, riding thermal winds or whatever it is flying creatures do that lets them move incredibly quickly without flapping their wings all that fast. I have no idea how fast we're flying. There's no point of reference to help me measure it.

The waves below us are too mobile to get a fix on anything, and there's nothing in sight but water. Water, water, everywhere. In every direction. It's kind of hard to do much sight seeing, not that there's that much to see. But Silk's silver scales reflect the light of the sun behind us, giving a bit of a glare when you try to look too close to the dragon's body. So I try to look off in the distance, keeping my eye on the horizon. Horizons are strange things to watch.

They never get any closer, yet you eat up the distance between them and you. We fly for an hour, then two. I didn't think that just sitting still would be tiring, but it is. I guess that's because I'm not actually sitting still. I'm making tiny little adjustments, micromovements to keep me balanced where I am. The wind is not as bad as I feared, much of it broken up by the shape of Silk's snout. We're cutting through the air with a quickness, and the wind isn't as powerful as it probably should be.

I'm not about to get up and walk around the cabin or anything, but it at least makes sense that we can stay on Silk's back for the duration of the flight. I've never had any trouble with flying in a plane. It's annoying, it's stressful, and it's generally unpleasant, but it's not that big of a deal. A little bit of turbulence isn't going to be a problem. I mostly just tried to find ways to distract myself. But riding Silk isn't quite like riding in an airplane. For one thing, we're on the outside.

The wind is less powerful than it could be, but it isn't absent. It's still blowing too hard for us to have any kind of real conversation. It's too windy to try to read a book. Not that I have a book with me that I could read. There really isn't anything to do. I've had my fill of the blueish green of the ocean below us. I can see it everywhere I look. I can see the curvature of the world, but even that loses its excitement after a little while. Is boredom really going to be my biggest problem with this flight?

Probably. I doubt we're anywhere close to the island they're bringing us to, and we've already been flying for hours. I'm not sure how fast we're going, but I'm also not sure how far across the ocean is. It's probably at least fifteen hundred miles. Does that mean we're going to be doing this for fifteen hours? Do I have fifteen hours to myself, just in my own head? That's not good. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

I don't like being alone with my thoughts. I mean, I do. I like being alone. Being alone is usually how I prefer things. Being around other people is just so draining. You have to do all the social niceties, you have to mask your feelings, you have to smile, and you have to talk. That's fine in small groups, which is why I don't mind traveling with the girls. I like our conversations. But they're different. They're my pack. They don't count as people.

The problem with being alone with my thoughts is that when I don't have anywhere to guide them, when I don't have a direction to lead my thoughts, they tend to go to some pretty dark places. They tend to fixate on something bad and then spiral downwards. It's a problem I often have when trying to go to sleep. I'll remember something from years and years ago, and it will lead me to some dark or unpleasant memory, and I'll find myself feeling those feelings all over again, as fresh as if the event just happened.

Time heals all wounds, even psychological ones. But my mind is not above traveling back in time to before the wound was healed, to make me feel it all over again. So I usually have to focus my thoughts around something. I pick a topic to try to think about. Sometimes I imagine conversations with people, trying to get the cadence of their words right, so it feels like I'm actually talking to them instead of just writing a dialogue in my head.

Other times, I will try to hyper focus on one thing above all others, trying to see it from every angle. I'll try to solve puzzles that maybe don't have answers, or try to find new answers to existing puzzles. When I talk about the things I think about, it makes me feel smart. But that's not really the case. I'm not thinking about some grand problem in the world that I could find a solution for. I never laid in bed and tried to solve global warming or world hunger or anything like that.

Usually, I would go over a television show that I watched and try to think of a more clever way to do things. Or I'll try to solve the puzzle of which pocket in my pants I put my wallet in, and whether or not I want to keep things in that pocket or put them somewhere else to avoid pick pockets. I usually think about dumb things. That's normal, right? What am I going to think about right now? I should meditate, realistically. Meditation will help me pass the time, and it will help me gain in a skill.

I could gain levels of a skill while I'm sitting here. That might be good. That would at least be a productive use of my time. But as I've said before, meditation is really hard for me. It's easier when I'm following my own mana through my body, trying to refill my MP faster. But my MP is full right now. I have 5, 740 MP, and nothing to really spend it on. Well, I suppose I could spend it on Blur. I might be able to level that up too. I activate the spell. I doubt anyone can tell that I'm doing anything.

I haven't moved, and I'm not turning invisible. I'm really just casting this spell to keep it going, to let it drain my mana so that I have a reason to meditate later. I'm bored, and this is occupying my mind, just a little bit, and I'll take what I can get. Maybe an hour later, I turn off Blur and start to meditate. Keeping Blur active for as long as I did drained four thousand of my mana, leaving me with a lot of emptiness that I can follow with my attention. It gives me another hour of something to do.

I shut out the world around me and just focus on myself, my inner self. I focus on the magic and try not to think about anything else other than what I'm doing. Meditation is not a perfect science. Not for me, anyway. I keep getting distracted by tangents, and having to wrench myself away from the tangent and go back to focusing on the various places in my body where the mana is pooling, where the magic is flowing.

So I have to stop myself from wondering how long Gigi kept screaming with joy, and whether or not she's bored now too. We've been flying for at least four hours at this point. Surely the novelty has worn off. But maybe it hasn't. And I start to wonder if she's enjoying every second of this flight, and I'm here being a bastard with the audacity to be bored as I'm flying hundreds of feet above the ocean on the back of a real life dragon.

I wrench my thinking back to the meditation, and keep paying attention to my pooling mana. It comes back so much faster when I meditate. I wonder how much faster it comes back for Vincent when he meditates. I mean, he regenerates three points per second on his own. Does the meditation just increase that to four, or does it increase it to five? Maybe it increases it to thirty, making his regeneration happen ten times faster than when he isn't meditating. I wrench my thinking away from Vincent and back to my mana.

I'm getting distracted too easily. I need to focus, or we're going to land and I'm not going to have much mana to spend. I've already recovered a portion, but it's not enough. I was down four thousand points. That's a lot of MP. I can feel it refilling my extremities, my forearms feeling almost like they're swelling, my knees moving around as the cartilage floats in place.

I can feel all the tiny movements of my body, all the adjustments that I'm making subconsciously as I stay on Silk's back, as they fly relentlessly towards the other side of the ocean. What are we going to find on the other side? Will the weakest monsters be level 50? Will the most common monsters still be of legendary rarity? I can't know until we get there. All I know is that this is a different world, so to speak, and that things are going to be more dangerous there. Much more dangerous.

How long are we going to survive? Should we reset our spawn points when we get across the ocean? There's something to be said for either option. If we don't set out spawn points over in this new land, then as soon as we die we'll be shunted back across the world, across the ocean and back into Marketplace. We'll have to find a way back across the ocean again, do another of these flights, if we want to continue over there.

But we'll have quests we can turn in, and we'll have an area where we can fight weaker monsters to regain our levels. If we do change the spawn point to the new land, then we may end up spawning at level one in an area that's meant for people around level fifty. If there isn't a town there, if there's nowhere over there for us to turn in quests, then we'll have to level up extremely carefully. Or we'll end up dying a lot, which might undo most of the progress that the death cycle made for all of us.

Of course, it's possible that there will be somewhere to turn in quests over there. There's also a chance that we won't be able to set our spawn points over there. We might have one chance, one life to live, in that part of the world. That would definitely make things more difficult. It would make us have to be more cautious, more selective with the fights that we undertake. It would mean that we had to be very careful. I take a deep breath and force myself to focus on the mana gain.

I pay attention to every cell of my body, trying to block out all other thoughts. This is why I don't like being left alone with my thoughts. They keep jumping all over the place, and that makes it harder to meditate. I have to constantly be on guard. My thoughts are insidious; they start off seeming perfectly normal, even in line with what I'm trying to focus on. By the time I realize that I've gone off on a tangent, I may have been there for a long time. I do manage to get all my mana back.

But if I had to guess, getting that four thousand mana back took me at least three hours. It only should have taken a little bit more than one.