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One hour later... He carved out the map on tree bark. The map was little more than fraying bark stitched with spider-silk threads—old caravan routes inked in resin, dots for hunting ponds, jagged red scratches for wyrm nests long since abandoned. Yet it was all Kai had. He knelt on a shale outcrop a few kilotres away from the tunnels, silver hair fluttering as dawn’s second light slipped between cobalt leaves.
He traced the narrow river tributaries feeding southward, then the curved line depicting the sea’s scalloped shoreline. Kai exhaled.
On land, it would an weaving through fen-marsh, rock canyons, and three minor beast territories and more. One month to forty days journey.
But if he could ferry them by sea? A straight line back to the Eastern Shore, then inland past his mountain’s southern spur. It will be twenty days’ journey, maybe less—assuming the water wasn’t cursed like Luna said.
"I need to see it for myself."
A gust rattled glassy serpent spires behind him, scattering violet shards that clicked over stone like brittle rain. He folded the map, tucked it into armor, and set off downslope—boots crunching charred peat where beast ichor had once hissed.
The southern forest thinned another hour later, trees giving way to knuckled knolls littered with small star iron fragnts. Each step carried the scent of salt and sothing colder. It was an undercurrent of tal that tasted like a blade pressed to tongue. Wind howled through crooked pines.
Halfway down a ravine, Kai paused at a shallow spring. He crouched, cupped water in his palms; the surface rippled with flecks of silver pollen blown from thorn blooms overhead. His reflection wavered, crimson eyes, hair streaked with soot, jaw shadowed by the sleepless night. A ruler’s face, but also a man’s: bruised, fallible, more than muscle.
He drank. Chill water rolled down his throat like shards of moon glass.
"This path splits here."
He pictured the forest route: slower, safer, full of ambush gullies. Then the sea track: quick sandbars, treacherous rip currents, and the unknown danger that traps people who go deep into the sea.
He rose, flexing shoulders. His muscle plates whispered beneath shirt and skin was always present even in his human form. He followed the salt path.
By mid day, the forest fell away. Kai erged atop a listone bluff, wind roaring up the cliffside so fiercely his cloak snapped like a war banner. Before him stretched the Southern Expanse: a great horseshoe of turquoise water rimd by white and black sand, distant reefs flashing erald beneath rolling waves.
And farther out? Mist.
Kai’s point of view from the beach: Not the gray fog of dawn, but a living wall of shadow Nine hundred to over thousand kilotres from shore, maybe more it is hard to tell for him. It rose like a storm bank yet didn’t roll inland. It was held in place by sothing unseen. Black tendrils drifted along its base, curling and dissolving before touch-ing the clear water near reef break.
Kai narrowed his eyes. He’d fought lightning serpents and aberrant toads; he knew predatory aura when he felt it. He felt like the Mist was watching him.
He knelt, scooped a handful of sand. It was warm, crystalline. He sifted it through his fingers while scanning tide rhythms: ebb every seven breaths, flow every nine, slightly skewed, as though the ocean itself lingered before each return, reluctant to reach the shore.
Luna’s warning echoed: "Sothing invisible lurks there. Those who sail out deep never co back."
He recalled an old caravan story he heard in the ant kingdom. So rchant ships drifting ho empty, hulls etched with spiral scorch marks; fisher rafts found nosed into mangrove inlets, nets bleached bone-white, no crew aboard. Talk dismissed as sailor myth—until one counted the missing.
He thinks, "This story must be related to this black mist."
Kai rose. He pulled out a damage spare from his soul cube. He hurled it out to sea with all his power. It goes high, arching. It whistled over the gentle surf, fell beyond one hundred tres away, and it went into the water.
Nothing. The shaft simply blinked from existence—as if a mouth had swallowed it.
He felt a tiny tug in his aura, like a filant snapping. His aura on the spear was erased.
A shiver crept down his spine. "If soone fell into the sea water did they vanish? Or their aura sucked by soone? If the water itself is the danger then what is that black mist?"
There were a lot of questions on his mind but no answers. Or maybe what he felt here all is illustrated by sothing or soone. Or everything is real, only his experience is different?! The right answer is yet to be found.
He hiked northward along the cliff for another hour, eyes never leaving that horizon. He saw a flying beast overhead. It was flying on the sea. After so ti it drifted too close to the fog, wings shearing sideways as if clipped by windless shears. It spiraled, thudded into water, and vanished. There was no trace of it.
Kai clenched fists. "So that’s the price of shortcuts."
He paced a rocky shelf jutting thirty ters above the froth. Salt spray kissed his face. He opened the Soul-link panel—fingers hovering to call Luna, to ask if she got any sea lore about devouring fog. But his aura reserves were thin: his aura hasn’t fully recovered yet. It should be more but after last night’s the queen’s union, it is now [Aura: 1900/4100]
"Before the journey I need to fully recover my aura. I can eat the frog beast cores but it should be kept for the journey. Let’s do sothing else. I will contact Luna if there is no other way."
He closed the aura interface. Instead he listened to wind, to water, to the subtle vibrations of land prey thrumming through bedrock. No hidden predators here. Only that far off mist wall, breathing like a slumbering god.
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