ushernet Chapter 507: The Center of the Mist
Chapter 507: The Center of the Mist
After the meeting, the camp started to bustle with activity. Now that people were planning for long-term settlement, there was much to do. The first order of business was housing. The cold and damp conditions of our new settlement weren’t a huge problem for people who were higher level, but long term exposure could make some of the younger and weaker kids sick. Most adults also wanted a degree of privacy that cramped tents simply couldn’t offer.Several adults got to work chopping down nearby trees and processing the wood, to get some basic houses set up. Due to the influence of the System, their work speed and efficiency far surpassed that of regular people. However, as I watched people work, I noticed that people’s construction methods were slightly off. It only took a few minutes of thought for me to realize why. People here were used to living on giant, mobile village-bearing beasts that roamed a frozen jungle. The architectural needs for a mobile village were completely different from the architectural needs of a settlement.
Most of these weren’t huge problems. Our architects had somewhat weak city-planning skills, and so houses and workshops were kind of clustered together in totally random arrangements, which wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t the end of the world. However, I took particular offence to one issue - nobody had any plans to establish a sewer system. That might not have been a huge issue when we all lived on mobile villages, since people could just store waste in chamber pots and then chuck it off the village-bearing beasts and into the jungle. The jungle was mostly inhabited by monsters anyway, and so it was a bit gross, but worked well enough. Now, there was no giant, uninhabited space where we could throw all of our waste.
said Anise.
I spent a few seconds scratching my head in confusion, before I remembered what Anise was talking about. In our third world, Felix had been born as some kind of test tube baby in a lab, and we’d needed to drag him out. The lab had been hidden in the city’s sewer system. I had already forgotten most of the finer details from that adventure, since it had happened centuries ago.
I got the distinct impression of Anise rolling her eyes at Sallia through the bracelet.
Naturally, I agreed.
Two hours later, a very loose construction plan for a sewer was included in the town planning, and a few Mages had new jobs. Those Mages didn’t seem too happy, but after a discussion about the danger of disease, as well as the sheer grossness of living in a city without sewers, they grudgingly agreed that it was a job someone needed to do, and they were the most suitable ones.
The rest of the day was mostly spent watching the settlement take shape. I couldn’t do much with my magic yet, since I still needed to wait another day before I finished healing. That didn’t mean I was content to sit around and idle away, though. I hauled materials to and from various construction sites, in order to make sure that the supply chain moved as fast as possible. With the aid of the System’s supernatural enhancements, by the end of the first day, we had two crude wooden huts built, and the outline of several more buildings and the sewer system set up. Of course, the wooden huts were far from perfect - they lacked almost any kind of furnishing or functionality beyond a place to sleep for the night. However, they were good enough to at least keep heat inside and keep the mist outside, meaning they could keep the youngest and weakest of the clan safe from sickness. We also got a few seeds planted and watered, so that we could get a start on agriculture.
The night was also peaceful. By the next morning, I started to wonder if we needed to go investigate the column of mist in the center of the lake. Perhaps disturbing it would invite an attack on our town, right after our settlement had started to take shape? If we disturbed some kind of giant sleeping monster, and it woke up and decided to kill us all, I wasn’t actually sure we could deal with it, and if we needed to flee, we would have to abandon all of the work we had put into the town so far. This dimension was, at least in theory, a Tier 9 dimension --- and while the threats we had encountered so far had been weak, that could always change in a heartbeat.
Still, unresolved threats and unknown dangers were not the kind of thing I wanted to found a town near. I also didn’t want some curious kid a generation or two from now to explore the mist and then blow up the town while I was away, or to destroy the town after I died of old age someday. Human curiosity was an inevitability, and we needed to plan around it and handle the danger before it blew up in our face.
I sighed, and sent a pulse of essence through my body. I smiled. At the very least, I wasn’t going into this situation unarmed. My magic was fully restored. I could use it without any pain again.
Without a shred of hesitation, I immediately used my soul sight to check our surroundings.
The first thing I confirmed was that we were not alone. The giant column of mist in the sky, and several of the fog banks I could see in the distance, were alive. I frowned.
The fog banks were alive?
I quickly used my dimensional vision to get a closer look, and confirmed that there were a few mist mammals appearing near the living fog banks - but none of the mist mammals had souls. There were also some fog banks in the distance that didn’t have souls - and these also had no mist monsters guarding them.
No wonder we hadn’t gotten any essence for killing mist monsters a few days ago. They weren’t alive in the first place. Based on what I could see, they must be some kind of magical puppet, or something of the sort. The only enemy we had actually fought was the mist cloud itself, and it had fled after it started to lose the battle. How were we supposed to handle these mist monsters? Was there some kind of core we could access and destroy, floating in the middle of each fog bank? Or perhaps we needed to use fire magic to evaporate it? I shook my head. Either way, this meant that the fog banks were actually far more troublesome than expected. I would need to give the other adults this information before we left for the island in the center of the lake, in case we didn’t return. My info might not give our town all the information it needed, but it could at least help people look in the right direction.
After that, I looked at the water of the lake with my soul sight. This was far less interesting than the forest. The fish had souls, the plants at the bottom of the lake also had souls, and the water itself was just as boring as most water. The only real point of interest about the lake was the fact that the fish seemed rather weak for a tier 9 world, but even that wasn’t too strange - the fish didn’t seem to have many opportunities to grow and advance, and the essence amounts in the lake were definitely on the lower side, which would make it much harder for the fish to develop any magic-related skills and advance further.
Most interesting of all was the column of mist itself. It didn’t seem as if it were one giant, colossal monster, which was what I had feared the most. Instead, it looked like there were hundreds of tiny, powerful souls scattered throughout the mist - almost like motes of sapient sand. I wasn’t sure if these were newborn fog-bank monster colonies, or something else entirely, but they were definitely unusual.
However, I couldn’t see whatever lay deeper in the mist column. Something in the mist cloud was blocking my soul sight.
I estimated that I could probably kill a dozen of the motes of sapient sand with extinguish if push came to shove, before I ran out of essence. In other words, the danger within the mist geyser, or at least the outer edges of it, should be manageable. The fact that I couldn’t see further inside made me nervous, though. I hadn’t seen anything just block my sight before. If it turned out to be a dangerous and powerful monster, we could be in for a very bad time.
A few minutes later, Sallia joined me, and the two of us sat in the camp in comfortable silence as we waited for dawn to arrive.
“Ready for today?” asked Sallia.
I nodded.
“What did you see with your soul sight?”
I spent several minutes describing what I had noticed so far, complemented with images that I shared through our communication bracelets. Sallia simply sat and listened, until I finished.
After that, Felix and Anise woke up. They joined us. A few minutes later, the other elite combatants who were supposed to join us in investigating the mist column also joined us.
“Did someone already bring the boat over?” asked Anise, after we had breakfast, checked our weapons, and finished our basic preparations for our journey.
“One of the [Spatial Mages] teleported the boat over to the lake so that we could use it,” said Amanda, one of the elite combatants. “Took care of it last night while we were asleep.”
“So we’re ready to go?” I asked.
“To the island in the center of the lake,” said Amanda.