Chương 203: Chapter 277 - Journey

The air blasted past Mirian's force shield, white jets of cloud streaming past. The taut chains followed behind her. Below, Alkazaria rapidly shrank. Unlike with the storm she'd conjured a few days ago, there was little nuance or complexity to her spells. It was simple: go up fast. Fast enough that she could feel the force of acceleration through her whole body, but not so fast that she'd pass out. The Akanans had tested how far from a leyline a repulsor could be before the connection lost power.

Mirian used the repulsor for the first few miles of travel, then felt the connection fade. For a brief moment, the acceleration stopped, and she was drifting by inertia, the clouds laid out below her, the world looking so peaceful and small. Then she cast supreme levitation, focusing the majority of her mana through the anti-gravity glyphs. Accelerating away from a center of gravity was what it did best, and that would last for several hundred miles.

This time, though, there was no Divir entropic field to disrupt her spell or slow her down. She soared faster. The air thinned. She compressed a last bit of air into her shielded bubble. Off to the side, she saw Luamin, surface glinting bright in the sun. Together, she and the greater moon both rose to meet each other. Around her, the stars usually hidden by the glow of the atmosphere appeared. Across the void, there was a beautiful cloud of them, stretching like a band of some other great horizon.

A memory flitted by. That cloud had been thicker, once. Not in her memory, but in the Ominian's dream. There had been more stars—but then there'd been that wall of fire. A chill passed through her. The Gods' War was truly unimaginable. She looked down below. There was beautiful Enteria, in all its majesty. Off to the side, she could see Divir, small and dark even as the sun illuminated it. It was a pebble set against the ravishing blues, greens, browns and whites of the planet.

After a time, she felt the forces on her settle, and she shifted her mana away from the anti-gravity glyphs and to the force glyphs. She sped up again, her speed now far beyond even an artillery shell. And yet, her travel felt peaceful. There was no air rushing by her anymore, just the void. No drag. She tapered off the mana she was using to generate acceleration, instead using energy transmutation to turn the stored energy in Equinox's repositories.

The relics she'd found in Vaults could store a great deal of energy, allowing her to slowly use those. Each energy relic was like a piece of fossilized myrvite, except they had less weight, better efficiency, and no toxic mana release. As the air grew stale, she opened up the first of her containers, keeping the gas as contained as she could. She looked down again. Enteria was so big. From up high, the two known continents looked impossibly small.

Beyond the storm walls, she caught glimpses not just of other continents, but strange colors. Vast flora with colors like twilight—shades of purple, violets, oranges and pinks. Strange clouds, too iridescent to be water. Her brow furrowed as she considered the implications. If the Labyrinth controls the climate as Viridian thinks, perhaps the climate isn't uniform. Zhuan wanted to break through the stormwall, but—could we even survive in such a strange land?

She suddenly thought of Eyeball and Conductor with their biology that was fundamentally different from hers, and even most myrvites. She thought of the holy texts. Xyltarvia granted us a piece of Enteria. Was that literal? Was that part of the Pact? Then she laughed. After all this time, she still was finding more questions about the world. Perhaps even the Elder Gods had questions. Below, Enteria slowly shrank. She kept her shield up out of caution, and it was good she did.

Suddenly, there was a flash of light and a massive crack formed in her force shield. Mirian immediately recast the spell, then looked around trying to figure out what had hit it. Her divination revealed no creatures, no spellcasters—no terrible void creatures. There were, however, minuscule pieces of rock. That made sense. She was moving fast enough that even a tiny pebble floating in the void was moving faster than a bullet.

She began to drink some of her mana elixirs, one every dozen minutes, stabilizing her aura after each. The temperature of the air bubble plummeted, but she reversed the flow of the heat repository in Equinox, directing the stored energy to release. With that, she didn't even need to cast a simple heat spell. The sun began to burn her exposed skin, but that was fixed by a light-dimming spell. That same sunlight was also recharging the light repository. She directed that energy to transmute into force energy.

An hour later when she looked back, Enteria had shrunk. She could see the whole circle of the planet, and the glimmer of stars around it. It looked… fragile. A jewel suspended in a vast void. She could see now that down in the southern hemisphere, there were even more colors, swirling red clouds above a continent of teals and deep grays, while off to the east beyond the stormwall, she could still see those strange violets and oranges. It only reinforced how vulnerable the world was.

The Elder Gods had shaped Enteria for life, but it was like a great spell engine of unimaginable complexity: shatter the wrong piece, and it might all come apart. Even without Divir's fall and the entropic soul-scouring explosion, the leyline crisis would eventually doom them. Did the Ominian know? Was it better to have Divir rise and fall as a warning so that we didn't just delay the apocalypse crisis to a later time? How much of this was Their plan, and how much coincidence?

She looked for the smaller moon, but couldn't make it out. Up here, there was no sign of humanity. They were small beyond belief. And yet, the Ominian sought to protect us in the Gods' War. What did They see in us? She turned towards Luamin. Another bit of rock smashed into her shield, deflecting off in a burst of flame. Mirian reconstituted it, swapping to a stronger prismatic shield, then layered a force shield over it. That little pebble had drained more mana than stopping an artillery shell.

I wonder what our ancestors did? she wondered, thinking of Xylatarvia's memory of the Viaterrian Chiminan Behemoths floating through the void. Colossal, and yet, impossibly small. Mirian finally cut her mana to the force spells accelerating her and simply floated through the void. She was going faster than anyone ever had—except for those distant ancestors, she supposed—and yet, she felt like she wasn't moving at all. Luamin was growing larger in her vision.

Soon, she'd have to accelerate away from it so she didn't smash into the surface like a meteor. For now, though, she drifted through the great void. Looking back at Enteria again, she thought, I should bring those fools I've been dealing with up here. Let them see what all their machinations and politicking looks like from the void. So high above, it all seemed immediately obvious to her that the rivers of blood that had been spilled to draw lines across maps had been an exercise in futility.

Known Enteria was small compared to the planet, and the planet was nothing compared to the grand void around it. Such a tiny thing, she thought. But worth saving. It's all we have. And we could be so much more. She thought again of a society of Grandpa Irabis. She thought of the grand towers the Viaterrians had once built, of the archmages laying down their lives to bury the Mahatan Gate. Mirian looked out across the stars. Where did we come from? And what happened to that place?

It was another question, one impossible to answer now. Maybe there were other places out there for people, and if they failed here, it was a tragedy, but not an end. Maybe this wasn't the first apocalypse humanity had faced, and the void-ships Xylatarvia had rescued were all there was. Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. She turned her attention to Luamin.

She knew from Jherica's calculations that it was moving impossibly fast in the void, but like her, it hardly seemed to be moving. She checked her pocket watch. Half an hour, she thought. Then she'd begin the deceleration. For now, she wanted to see the surface better. She pulled up her lens spells and began to examine the moon. The better the look she got, the more of the Elder construction she could see.

The larger structures they'd seen from Jherica's telescope, but this close, she could begin to pick out details. The geometric patterns running along the surface didn't become less complex, just smaller, branching from each other in fractal swirls. Jherica was right. The entire surface is artificial. So the Elder Gods… built this? As she examined it, she saw structures that reminded her of the math behind various spirit constructs and the way myrvite organs looked like under a lens spell.

Her first divination spells told her there were thin currents of arcane energy running across Luamin, but it wasn't at all like the leylines. The closer she got, the more the complexity amazed her, and the better her divination could pick up the movement of arcane energy along the surface. It's like a giant spell engine, she thought. As she began to decelerate, she aimed towards the largest structure where the most arcane energy flows were.

At first, she thought the structure was a temple, like the Mausoleum of the Ominian. As she drew closer, though, she realized her perspective was skewed. The hub-structures near the big one were the size of the Mausoleum—large enough to fill up the central hill of Alkazaria. The large structure she was aiming towards was the size of a bloody mountain. But of course it was. It was a building designed for the Elder Gods. The colossal doors at the base of the pyramidal structure were large enough to fit the Ominian.

As she drew even closer, her divination could grow more precise. Luamin was warmer than might be expected given its apparent lack of atmosphere. That implied imperfect energy transfer. Waste heat. From something big. There was a missing piece to the time loop, and her observations were pointing towards confirming something. Confirming something important enough that even a God like Carkavakom might take notice. I wonder how they prevent meteors from damaging the structure, Mirian thought.

With no atmosphere to burn them up, even occasional hits would add up. A few minutes later, she had her answer. There was a burst of light from the surface—pointed at her. Shit, she thought, and accelerated rapidly to her left as a beam of light tore apart her shield. The beam had been intense enough to hit Equinox through her shield. Only the armor's sequences that absorbed and transmuted energies had saved her from being killed by even the glancing strike.

She put up black shield in its place, then accelerated right as two more beams erupted from the surface. Her black shield also shattered. She swore again, recasting the shield and accelerating in random directions. Her steel canisters clanged and jerked about. One of the chains snapped before Mirian could apply force to steady them, sending one of the air containers spinning off into the void.

This time, the beams of light only clipped the shield, but it was still rapidly depleting arcane energy she needed to save for deceleration. She could turn some of the energy Equinox had absorbed into force, but it was far less efficient than using mana. The devices down there—there's too many of them for Elder creatures like Eyeball or Conductor to be operating them. Perhaps a ward system, or an automatic spell engine? If it's automatic, it must have preconditions. Another of her shields shattered.

They wouldn't want to waste energy. She looked back. The steel canister she'd lost wasn't being hit by beams. It was also heading off in a different trajectory. Perhaps… Mirian embraced the Lone Pine stance and adjusted her course again, accelerating rapidly enough in a new direction that her vision narrowed. Without adjustment, she would now miss Luamin. The devices below stopped firing. She breathed a sigh of relief. That gave her time to consider the purpose of the devices, and how to defeat them.

Mirian checked her pocket watch. She still had nearly an hour of flight time. Simply throwing up shields wouldn't be enough; a single beam could shatter anything she threw up, and her mana would be depleted long before she reached the surface. They must be detecting me somehow. It can't be based on aura or soul, or they'd miss mundane meteors. Sound waves would have nothing to propagate in. Light, then. But where on the spectrum? Her total camouflage spell would need to be expanded to cover the steel canisters.

Right now, it wrapped both visible, infrared, and ultraviolet light around her because the latter two kinds of light were commonly used in detection spells. If she needed to veil herself from anything more intense than ultraviolet light, she would have trouble; the mana drain would be higher for those higher-energy lights, and she'd need to maintain it for an hour. Mirian summoned her spellbook and paged through it. After her evasive maneuvers, her calculations on trajectory would need to be redone.

She knew the approximate speed of Luamin, but she needed to know her own speed, then the distance from the moon. A bit of simple trigonometry would help her plot a course that would make her miss Luamin, but only by a tiny margin. Then, when she was closer, she could throw up either camouflage spells or shields. There were divination spells for nearly anything.

She could measure arcane energy intensity as it increased, then map it to a simple Holgart-Bosin curve, but without knowing what the pseudo-myr intensity was at the surface, she didn't have a baseline to map a starting point on the curve. That was out. She flipped through her divination-cartography spells. Some cave mapping spells used sound energy too low for people to hear, but, again, nothing would propagate those waves in the void. Other cave mapping spells used x-ray light energy, and could measure distance.

How they measured distance, no one had ever quite worked out, but she would only need to adjust the glyphs slightly. Mirian sent a modified map distance light spell towards Luamin. And… nothing happened. Hmm… so all those wizards who tried casting spells at Luamin weren't running into fundamental distance limits or the infamous 'prism' problem. Some of those devices on the surface must be doing something to mess with standard divination spells. Not arcane energy, but anything light-based.

Mirian looked back at Enteria. Well, that ought to work. This time, she sent the mapping spell back at the distant planet. She received a result—but it was strange. It was like there was a delay of at least two full seconds, and the mental image of distance she was getting felt fuzzy. She tried it again, this time looking at her pocket watch. There's a three and a half second delay on the spell result. Strange. Then, a realization. Wait… are the scholars wrong? Does light not travel instantaneously?

Great, she'd gone and made yet another research breakthrough. At least it wouldn't cause as much of a headache as trying to get people to understand that necromancy and celestial magic weren't actually different. A time delay, she could work with, though. She hadn't remembered to bring a pen, but she could draw out her calculations using light illusions, and even make a light-based abacus. She started rapidly going through the math. I think I can adjust my course about five degrees towards Luamin, she thought.

After her adjustments were done, she thought, Mirian, you fool. There was another easy adjustment she could make to the distance-measuring divination spell. If Luamin was absorbing or redirecting x-ray light, it sure wasn't redirecting visible light. Evidence: she could see the damn moon! Mirian adjusted her spell again, then cast. That gave her a much better sense of the distance, and her estimations could be improved. One more degree moonward.

Then, with her trajectory close, she could start testing out her theories. First, she used her usual camouflage spell, only spread out in a sphere that could encompass the chains and canisters, rather than wrapped around her. She prepared two layers of shields behind the camouflage barrier, then adjusted her course so that she'd hit the moon. Another beam of light shot out. Mirian veered away as her shield shattered. She adjusted what spectra of light the camouflage was blocking, then tried again.

Finally, with a camouflage spell redirecting the light spectrum ranging from the low-energy light that no one had agreed on a name for yet all the way up to a little past ultraviolet, the spell engines below stopped firing. She kept up a single layer of prismatic shield, then adjusted her course again, drinking the last of her mana elixirs as she continued her deceleration.

She still had some soul energy in her book's and armor's reservoirs, but aside from that, she would have to rely entirely on her rapidly depleting aura. Without being able to absorb ambient mana from Enteria, she was hardly regenerating any mana. Yet another danger of the void, she thought. As she descended, the moon grew in size, filling her vision. Thousands of structures ran across the moon, some metallic, some glinting with strange prismatic reflections.

Here, the architecture was much less like the artistic whorls and spines favored in the Mausoleum, and much smoother. She looked back at the circle of Enteria—so small and distant, looking like the moon did, with a blackened crescent of night embracing it. The world felt surreal, more like a dream of the Ominian than something she was actually doing.

As she got closer, the doors of the great temple of Luamin loomed before her, standing perhaps a thousand feet high, embedded in a mountain of shining metal and great sweeping fractal engravings. Mirian's heart began pounding. She had a guess as to what she'd find, but what marvels would she uncover? And what dangers?