Chapter 487 – Treasure Hunt

The Event didn’t start immediately when the last spot filled. Instead, it gave them all fifteen minutes to find their starting points and for anyone who still wanted to leave to exit. Since the overall event was supposed to last for sixteen hours, Sophia was pretty sure that the second reason was the real one.

They still moved away from where they’d been while the timer ran out. It was too close to others; they’d have a better chance to find something if they were farther apart. 

When the timer finally ran out, the fog that gathered near the ground rose and concealed everything in the distance. Only the space near Sophia seemed clear, and even that was partially shrouded. She could make out the ground at her feet, mostly, but anything beyond about eight or ten feet from her was completely blurred by the nearly-white fog. She’d seen fog that dense in the past, but only a few times.

“I remember what you see,” the wind seemed to whisper to Sophia. 

The words had to be the World Tree’s answer to her question. It wasn’t the answer she wanted; she’d wanted the World Tree to share information about which caches were cleared or at least which areas were searched, since she couldn’t place people in the Lifeweb on a map. It was probably too big a request, so she wasn’t surprised she didn’t get it. At least she had confirmation that the World Tree would help track her own progress; that was something. Sophia wasn’t nearly as good at mapping as Dav was.

Admittedly, he had help. He didn’t often talk about his cybernetics, because most of what they could do was useless on a disconnected world, but there were still a few features he could use and rudimentary mapping of his own position was one of them.

“The fog will clear some as the Event progresses,” Rivexy reassured them. Her voice was blurred and softened by the moisture in the air and Sophia couldn’t even make out the shape of the bear. “I’m not sure if I said that before or not.”

“You didn’t,” Dav answered bluntly, “But it does explain why you thought things would be so hard to find. Are you sure the lights will even help?”

Dav didn’t have one. He could still see in the dark, so he’d waved off the offer of a light. Sophia didn’t have one either; if she needed it, she’d make it then. She also still had her old magelight globe in her pack; it was failing, but it would work for a little longer. 

“Definitely,” Rivexy confirmed. “That’s why we asked for narrow beams. If it gets too bad, we can clear it. That’s what a lot of teams will do, but it won’t work for you. Clearing the fog alerts monsters; you’re going to have to search in it.”

Sophia closed her eyes and reached out with her aura the way they’d planned. The fog might not have been mentioned, but she didn’t plan to search with her eyes anyway. She hadn’t concentrated this much on finding things with her aura since the dungeon on the way from Casterville to Izel where they ran into the spirit guide, the one in what Sophia suspected was an old railway tunnel.

The space around her was magical, literally. Everything had a hint of magic to its structure. She didn’t remember sensing that back in the Cloud Clan’s Spirits of the Woods Challenge. Despite that, it was probably there, too; that was a constructed environment as well. When she concentrated, she could feel stronger sparks of mana. Most of them were almost certainly magical items.

There were far too many to be the gear she knew about. 

Why did her Domain feel so spread out, even discontinuous? Wasn’t she using her aura? That surrounded her body.

Sophia pushed at the boundaries of what she could see. It wasn’t perfectly rigid, but it was far easier to pull back her perception than it was to stretch it, even though it didn’t feel like she was pushing her aura at all; it was more like there was a soft limit to each bubble.

A soft limit roughly the size of the aura of someone without specific training in using their aura. Sophia was starting to get an idea, and she wasn’t sure if she liked it or not. It would be powerful in this Event in a completely unexpected way but it was also a bit of an invasion of privacy.

Well, it would have been an invasion of privacy for humans. The Archons around her didn’t seem to have that issue; they welcomed her touching their auras and even seeing through them. There were a handful who didn’t, and Sophia was easily able to withdraw from those auras. 

The Lifeweb changed things. It certainly seemed to have resulted in a different set of assumptions on privacy for Archons. It also meant that Sophia could instantly know when she was overstepping her bounds as long as she listened, which was positively amazing.

Sophia’s eyes opened and she pulled up her Status to check a couple of her Abilities.

Plumed Knowledge 

As your Plumes gather knowledge for your partner from all within your Demense, you may relay your partner’s information to those marked with your Arcane Signifier so long as they are within your Demense.

Lucid Plume of Perception

See, hear, and know all that lies within your Demense as your Plumes reach out to test it. Your understanding is enhanced near your Plumes.

“That’s what it meant,” she muttered. “I can see through linked Plumes, just like I can see through Plumes in my aura. The area’s smaller and I can’t stretch it the way I can my aura, but they’re still part of my Demense. That’s why I can boost people who carry them. I should have realized.”

She knew why she hadn’t. She’d tested everything she could think of and worked with all of her Abilities, but she was working with Dav in a small area, an area small enough that Dav was within her aura while they were trying things out. They’d separated long enough to test whether or not she could still stretch her boosts out using the mindlink and his plumes, but neither of them had thought to test if she could see through the plumes while they were outside her aura. It simply hadn’t occurred to either of them; she usually only used the Ability while she was Plume Shifted; the rest of the time, it gathered information passively.

Sophia pulled back to her own aura. Before she spent any time figuring out what else she could see, she should make sure she knew what she was looking for. If she couldn’t see the caches after all, there wasn’t any point in spending the time looking through others’ Plumes, at least not here.

She could shape her own aura. For this, she needed to spread it out as far as possible, as far as she could get and still see what was going on with the magic around her. She was going to have to search for what she was looking for; it wasn’t going to jump out at her any more than Waldo did in a Where’s Waldo image.

Hopefully it wouldn’t be as bad as trying to find Waldo; she hoped it would be more like trying to find a specific type of tree in a forest. If you knew what to look for, you could pick that tree out easily. In this case, she was looking for any magic that wasn’t the background of the World Tree and also wasn’t magic items. The background was relatively easy to ignore, since it was steady and very stable. 

Magic items were much brighter and moved as the people carrying them did; they were easy to find and a little distracting. They also moved in groups, which a cache shouldn’t. Sophia couldn’t be certain a cache wouldn’t move - after all, if she were designing a treasure hunt, she’d probably make a few high-value treasures that could either move on their own or be moved by the monsters that guarded them - but she could be sure they wouldn’t move in clusters.

No, a cache was going to look a lot more like … well, like that spot that floated a few feet off the ground off to Sophia’s left. It was only a couple of feet from her and seemed to slowly bob up and down. She followed her aura sense with her eyes and found herself staring at a tree branch. She couldn’t see the cache, but there was something there; she’d have to go look. “I think I found something.”

“Already? You’re lucky, then. What’s in it?” Revexy sounded excited. “I haven’t done Forest in the Clouds on this branch yet, but most of the ones I found on the third branch had one or two Cache Reward Chips.”

Sophia frowned at the thought of how many caches they’d need to find if each cache only had one or two chips. They needed fifty to get both of them to the fifth branch, and fifty caches sounded like a lot, especially if they had to share some of them with Vexy’s team. On the other hand, they had sixteen hours, which was a long time; if they found three or four chips an hour, it could be done. With how much it sounded like it slowed down at the end, Sophia guessed they probably needed to find twice that at the beginning of the hunt, just in case.

Sophia grabbed the tree branch and pulled herself up. “I don’t know, I have to find … oh. There it is; it’s just a small leather pouch.”

She hopped down and peeked into the nearly flat pouch. A pair of small wooden tokens hid at the bottom. “It’s just two. It’s a start.”

Sophia sighed, then tapped them to add them to her Event Inventory. She wanted to be sure she had 25, and that seemed like the best way. She’d get Dav up to that number and then start keeping them in a pouch like this one.

Sophia felt coolness from her hand and focused on the pouch. Maybe she could use one of them to store tokens, but it wasn’t going to be this one.

With the tokens gone, the pouch started to turn into mist like the fog that surrounded them. Sophia guessed that was one way to keep people from wondering if a cache still had anything in it; make it disappear once it was emptied. They could test what happened if it wasn’t emptied when they had another convenient pouch, but it was probably best if that waited until they were done. Right now, she needed to look for more caches.

A shout from the direction of Roxy’s team told her they’d already found one, but it was one guarded by monsters. Fire-breathing ones, based on the noise. That seemed like an odd combination for a forest, but Sophia guessed that maybe it was fine because of all of the fog; everything was damp and therefore unlikely to catch fire.

There wasn’t another cache in her aura’s range, but when she shifted over to using Dav’s Plume to search, she immediately saw a spark that definitely wasn’t from his gear. 

“There’s a cache…” Sophia trailed off as she turned towards Dav. He was already kneeling and looking around the roots of the tree where she saw the spark of magic. “Did you see that at the same time I did?”

“Nope,” Dav confirmed cheerfully. “I wasn’t there yet, but I got the feeling there should be something there if I looked, so I jumped ahead. This is going to be great.”

That feeling had to have come from the Lifeweb, which meant Sophia could help other people as well as their team. All she could do was narrow it down to a small area, but even that was a huge help. “I guess I should start with ours and work our way out if I have time? I know Rivexy said people give a little if others help, but it seems like finding our own would be better, if we can.”