Chapter 162: Completely New Environment
Chapter 162: Completely New Environment
Rohan kept on moving. For a long time, that was all he allowed himself to do.
The Ashen Marshes did not welcome him at all. The land was too open, too empty, and way too hostile to living creatures like himself. There were no trees to cover him, nor any friendly slopes or streams — just steep cliff drops and either no water at all, or intense rapids that could even rip an Awakened like him to shreds if he fell in.
Rohan doubted that anybody, ever, had looked at this place and thought ’Yes, this place will do.’
Even psychopaths and insane people would avoid coming to this place.
There was only cracked black earth stretching for as far as the eye could see under his boots, disturbed now and then by jagged rocks jutting from the ground like the bones of some buried giant.
’This IS another universe — giants that size could exist for all I know.’
Rohan gave the nearest formation a wide berth. Places like that looked like they’d attract the kind of trouble he was looking to avoid at all costs.
Then he gave the next one an even wider berth.
However, the one after that...
It twitched when he stepped within its proximity, causing Rohan to stop mid-step. Everything, even Rohan’s inner thoughts, turned silent.
Several seconds passed where Rohan stared at the long, charcoal coloured ridge half buried in the earth. At single glance, it looked nothing more than just a pillar of stone. Then, one of the ’ribs’ unfolded.
A narrow limb, with one too many joints making it look far more creepy, scraped across the ash surface.
Rohan held his breath, waiting to see what happened afterwards.
But the thing didn’t rise, nor turn towards him as he was half expecting. It shifted to the side, as if settling in its sleep, and the ground around it released a faint hiss of grey dust.
Rohan took one slow step backwards after another before changing direction completely.
’Nope.’
His grip on the spear gifted by Hestia tightened until his knuckles cracked.
’Absolutely not. I have been in this universe for less than ten minutes. I am not picking a fight with a sleeping stone monster the size of a building.’
This was a land he was completely unfamiliar with, both in terms of strength and in knowledge.
What might look like a simple, harmless animal back in his own universe might be something far more horrifying than any beast he’d ever faced before. However, if there was one thing that stuck true for both universes, it would definitely be the fact that the bigger it is, the scarier and stronger it is.
He kept up his walking pace.
Running wasn’t even a thought that crossed his mind in this moment. Not only would it cause too much noise, but it would give him less time to react to any changes in the environment around him, and less time to observe the landscape.
While he was in a rush to return to his own universe as quickly as possible, he still had to be rational in his thinking.
The tremors from the creature to the east faded behind him, though he still glanced that way every few minutes due to caution. Its shape briefly remained a distant disturbance behind the black ridges, visible only when it moved and briefly blocked the violet glow of the horizon.
He avoided that at all cost too.
Anything that moved, glowed, breathed smoke, made sound without wind, or looked too unnatural to be natural, Rohan avoided.
Some might consider this cowardice, but Rohan would consider anyone who thought that nothing more than fools.
In this place, trying to act tough and facing off against every monster he found himself faced with wasn’t brave, but utterly stupid.
While Hestia had sent him to this place, she hadn’t exactly given him much information about it before doing so, so he had to figure things out for himself.
’Strategic restraint,’ Rohan thought, angling around a shallow basin filled with pale, glassy reeds that chimed slightly despite the lack of a breeze. ’That’s what this is. A wise soldier chooses his battles. A stupid one dies trying to identify the local wildlife...’
One of the reeds bent toward him. Rohan immediately started speed walking away, in the nick of time for something to shoot out of the reed straight through the air where Rohan was just inhabiting.
The bleak landscape continued without mercy.
***
Hours passed. Or what felt like hours to Rohan. He wasn’t exactly able to tell the time in this place where he had no idea how time worked at all.
For one, the ’Sun’ — if you could even call it that — hadn’t even moved from its original spot on the horizon, so that wasn’t of any help.
The sky not changing wasn’t the only thing. There was also the violet streaks of light dotting both the landscape and the skies, which blocked out any change of using the stars to tell the time, or even for navigation.
No wonder Hestia decided to locate her realm to this Star System, or nearby to it, wherever it was.
If anyone happened to stumble across this place, they’d immediately leave after seeing this type of environment.
’This place is exhausting.’
Only mentally, though. Physically, his body was holding up better than expected. Hestia had not lied about that, and the suppression he had felt inside her sanctuary was gone, replaced by something both strange, yet familiar.
He could move like normal again.
His muscles responded with enough strength that each stepped carried him smoothly over the cracked terrain. He could tell that he wasn’t as powerful as he might’ve been back in the Origin Realm, perhaps due to the fact that his centres of power had been combined into a single Rank in this place rather than being split, but he was far from ordinary either.
That didn’t mean he could relax though.
Every shape in the distance was a potential threat. Every faint sound, no matter how close or distant, made him stop in his tracks to investigate before deeming it safe to continue onwards.
Eventually, he climbed onto a low shelf of black rock and crouched behind a twisted outcrop.
The land ahead dipped into a shallow valley filled with a drifting grey fog, of which something moved inside it.
Several somethings.
Rohan narrowed his field of vision.
The shapes were low to the ground, no higher than his knees, but there were hundreds of them.
They moved in awkward, jerking bursts of motion, stopping and starting as if each limb took a hulking amount of effort just to move.
Their bodies were hard to make out through the fog, but he caught flashes of white shell, long spindly legs, and thin tails glowing faintly at the tips.
Rohan lowered himself further behind the rock, blocking his body from being visible to the figures in the fog, if they had eyes.
’Not going that way.’
He waited.
The creatures continued to scuttle through the mist, completely unaware of his presence.
’Good, they didn’t notice me.’
While he was crouched there, hidden for the time being, another thought crept in.
’This is probably the safest chance I’ll get.’
He looked down at the spear in his hands, then at the barren valley.
The extremely faint pull from the overlap was still there. He had been following it since he stepped through the portal. But if he was going to survive long enough to reach whatever waited at the end of that pull, he needed to understand the changes Hestia had made within him.
’Besides, I don’t even know how far the overlap is. It could just be a few dozen kilometres away, or all the way in a different Star System for all I know!’
That was the trouble with his faint connection with the Origin Realm — distance was not a factor that was provided.
Rohan drew in a careful breath.
"Status," he whispered.
A panel appeared, one that might look identical to his Origin Realm status at a quick glance, but it was not.
[Status]
[Name: Rohan Roy]
[Titles: Rabid Wolf Slayer I, Hestia’s Acknowledgement]
[Rank: 25]
[Class: Evolution Gene]
[Attributes: Molten]
Rohan stared at his status.
He leaned in closer to the panel, his eyes flicking across each line.
The information was sparse. Far sparser than he wanted, because apparently even the divine creator of the Great System liked to be cryptic.
’Ouch!’
A small spark flew out from the status panel and hit Rohan, giving him a faint, electric shock — no more than he might feel from a simple static shock.
"You’re still observing, Hestia?" Rohan suddenly asked.
It couldn’t be a coincidence that he was just cursing her, and his status happened to shock him.
’Ouch!’
Confirmation came with another shock.
Rohan quickly moved past that, as Hestia clearly didn’t seem keen on having a conversation.
’Time to find out if there are any differences in my powers now that they are attuned to a completely different universal system.’