Chương 137: Chapter 135: The island

To pass the time, I sing songs to myself. I'm impressed with how many songs I remember all the words to. They aren't all good songs. Many of them are songs from summer camp, those stupid little songs that have verses and choruses and are structured about as simply as possible. The ones meant for sing alongs. I remember more of those than I'd care to admit. But I sing through them all, in my head, as the time passes. We do eventually land on the island. The sun is setting when we land.

How long does that mean our flight was? We left maybe an hour after dawn. If dawn is at about six in the morning and dusk is about eight at night, that means we've been flying for at least thirteen hours. That's pretty impressive of Silk, if you think about it. Flying for thirteen hours must be exhausting. I bet they're hungry. We slide off the dragon's back, and I turn to look at Silk.

"Are you going to hang out for a little?" I ask.

"We could find something to eat." Silk shakes their head.

"No. The longer I'm here, the more I incur my cousin's wrath. We've made it this far without her noticing us; I think it's better if I just flew on."

"Aren't you tired?" Silk laughs.

"I am a mighty dragon," they say.

"I do not get tired." But I can hear the weariness in their voice, so I know that's not true.

"I'll be fine," they say.

"I'll probably eat a dolphin or two on my way back, just to keep the reserves up. Have you ever had dolphin meat? It's very tasty." I've never eaten dolphin. I don't think I'd want to either. As far as I know, they're as smart as humans. Possibly smarter. I don't want to eat anything that intelligent. I wouldn't eat an orc, so I'm not going to eat a dolphin. But I'm also not going to shame a dragon the size of a 747 for their culinary choices.

"All right," I say.

"Good luck and enjoy your treasure. Thank you for the lift."

"You are welcome, Caleb Strong." I never told them my last name. But it's not exactly a secret, or hard to figure out. It just means that at some point, Silk identified me. Probably all four of us. I wonder when they did that. Not important. The dragon takes off and starts flying away. I still can't tell how fast they're flying, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was in the hundreds of miles per hour. The sand kicks up in a cloud of dust again, and I shield my eyes.

I use the moment of blindness to see that I did, in fact, gain a level of meditation and two levels of riding from that trip. We wait for the sand to die down again and take stock of our surroundings. It's an island. We saw it as we got close. It's big and round. I think it's volcanic, judging by the huge mountain right in the middle of it. I think that mountain is a volcano, just a dormant one.

The caldera has fused shut, making it look like any other mountain, but it's probably ready to erupt again if it needs to.

"The dragon probably lives in the volcano," Ash says.

"I'd like to explore a bit rather than just charging our way straight there, though. Anyone have any objections?"

"I'd like to suggest that we camp for the night," Gigi says, stifling a yawn.

"I'm exhausted." There are no arguments. I take the first watch, as usual. They set up the tent and go immediately to sleep. I spend my watch building us a fire and generally looking around, trying to see what kind of wild life is on this island. Is it big enough that there will be monsters here? Will there be a dungeon or something like that? I'm just hoping we can find food in the morning. For now, I'm eating land shark jerky and just thinking about what we've done today.

We're on an island hundreds of miles away from the land that we've been living in since we came to this world. We've traveled so far, so quickly. The different zones of the world are left behind us, and we'll find all new monsters here. We'll find new threats and new complications. And we might even find a way to become gods. I'm not sure if I want to become a god. It's a daunting idea. What responsibility. What pressure. I don't want a life of pressure. My old life had more than enough pressure in it.

I like being an adventurer. I like being able to decide where I go and when, and I like being able to fight for my life. I like that I don't have to get up at a certain time and go to work. But I also like that I can leave town on a whim and go survive out in the wilderness if I want to. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. Would I be able to do that as a god? Seems to be that being a god isn't an increase in freedom.

When you're a god, you're responsible for the world. It's up to you to make sure that things are going smoothly, that the world is continuing along. If you're the kind of god who answers prayers, then you have to always be listening to prayers from all kinds of people, and judging whether or not they are worthy of those prayers being answered. And assuming they are, you have to figure out a way to do it that isn't too obvious. At least, that's the way it was in the old world.

I suppose we could have miracles left and right in this world. But it's still a lot of work. I don't think that gods get time off. They don't get to just hang out with their friends. They have a world to take care of. That's a lot more pressure than I want to handle. I guess the fact is that I don't want to be a god. Which, unfortunately, means I'm more qualified for it. No one who wants that much power should ever be allowed to have it.

No one who seeks that level of power for its own sake should be permitted to possess it. You need someone who doesn't want that power, who only takes it because it is the right thing to do. Will I become a god? Maybe, if that's the only way to keep the world safe and to stop someone else from becoming one. Do I want Amanda to become a god? That's another important question. I'm not sure if she wants the power for power's sake, or if she wants to be a god so that she can make the world a better place.

If she wants to help people, then by all means. Someone who wants to make the world better for all those within it should have that kind of power, if that's what they really want. But how can you tell? How can I be sure that it's what Amanda really wants? Maybe it isn't what she wants. Maybe she just assumes that's what's going to come next, that's where her path is taking her. Maybe she just wants to keep exploring the world, to find somewhere that challenges her and keeps her interested. I can understand that.

There's something to be said for still being challenged. I don't feel challenged with most anything that we ran into back in the old world. We fought an army to a standstill, and only lost because of overwhelming numbers and an eventual loss of stamina. If stamina hadn't been an issue, we would've kept fighting, and probably defeated the whole army. We fought the land shark without difficulty, and we killed the beach guardian with just a change in strategy. It wasn't the kind of challenge that really matters.

I mean, maybe trying to kill one just the four of us would be, but maybe not. Maybe we'd be able to fight and kill the beach guardian with the same strategy. That's not to say that a lack of challenge is always a bad thing. There's something to be said for being the biggest fish in the pond. There's a freedom to it. I never had to worry about one of the guilds trying to push me around, to extort me or to try to control what I did when.

I could explore that old world without fear, just looking at all the wonders of the world and seeing what I wanted to see. I didn't need to be constantly on guard. There was definitely freedom in that. There's a lot of freedom when nothing can really kill you. When nothing can truly challenge you. It's like being a millionaire and going to Vegas with a few thousand bucks. Who cares if you win or if you lose? You're there to have fun, and nothing else matters. But eventually, it would have lost its charm.

It would have stopped being fun, and just started being boring. I could explore like I was playing a video game on god mode, but sooner or later I'd start looking for a new challenge. And that's what we're here finding. We're here to see a new challenge, to be able to fight new monsters, to gain new levels and find new treasures. We're here to explore a world that has essentially been cut off from other players, a land that hasn't been corrupted by our kind. We're invaders of a sort, but we're also explorers.

And we can go knowing that we are the first ones to explore everything we find. I do wonder if we'll find anyone civilized in our journey. Will there be other species of sapient beings that we can talk to? Will we be able to get new quests? Our experience gains may be locked down to fighting and crafting, to the actual doing of things and not the rewards of quests. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. A quest is like the game system telling you what to do.

It's designed, hopefully, to be a challenge or at least an interesting sequence of events. It will take you to new places and let you see new things. But at the end of the day, there's nothing stopping you from going to those new places and seeing those new things without the quest. You can make your own fun. You can make sure that there's something for you to do, you just have to take the responsibility for yourself. It's a balance in most games.

They have to balance between giving the players free reign to explore and do what they want and giving them guard rails and guidelines to help them achieve specific things. We may get to this new land and find that there are no guard rails, that there is nothing that stops us from going to certain places and nothing that guides us towards anything in particular. We may be purely on our own. And that's okay.

But I still wonder if maybe we're going to find someone who can give us quests, something that can shape the direction we go. I mean, if there's going to be a path to godhood, there has to be someone that lays out that path, right? There has to be something that is going to make it possible for us to ascend to whatever the next level of our existence may be, and that something has to be clear. It has to be available for us to follow a path.

Something, someone, has to set the path before us, even if we're the ones who walk it alone. I don't know. It's all guesswork. But maybe, hopefully, there will be someone to talk to, something to do that isn't just killing monsters and trying to survive in a much more dangerous world. Hopefully there will be more to it than that.