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The thought that someone could peek into her dreams made Luo Wei's toes curl.
She had no idea how much the Dark Elf could see, but the things in her dreams were not fit for anyone's eyes. If he'd seen all of it, she'd rather let The Church drag her off and burn her at the stake right now.
She glanced at his slender back. No. He probably didn't have that ability.
If he could see everything, he would have revoked his faith in her the moment she arrived.
The Dark Elf carried the gold ore through a tall stone doorway. Luo Wei looked up at the plaque hanging above it: Alchemy Room.
He knew alchemy too? She followed him in.
There were plenty of methods for refining gold ore. She could think of heap leaching, gravity separation, and amalgamation off the top of her head, and she'd read up on ancient smelting techniques as well. If he didn't know what he was doing, she could always perform a "miracle" and offer some guidance.
She stepped inside just as the Dark Elf upended the wicker basket, spilling gold ore across the floor.
She looked around. No stone mill for crushing the rock. No kiln for smelting. Just a few sunken circular pools set into the ground. So how exactly was he planning to refine this?
Then she watched him scoop up a handful of gold-flecked rock and knead it. Like dough. The hard crystalline ore crumbled into powder between his fingers, and he sprinkled it into the water.
He apparently decided that wasn't fast enough. He pulled a charred black stick from the wall — a wand, she realized, carved from a withered branch of the World Tree.
A magical whirlwind tore through the room. The ore disintegrated into fine dust and settled with precision into the circular pools, the heavier gold particles drifting slowly to the bottom.
Right. Magical alchemy. Her mistake for assuming otherwise.
She also noted that his magic was clearly going into body tempering as well. That would explain the absurd grip strength.
After watching for a while, she got bored. Luo Wei left the alchemy room and drifted through the town.
There was no one here. The silence sat too heavy, too complete — even the wind passing through felt like it was mourning something. She wondered how the Dark Elf had survived all these years in a place like this. Prolonged loneliness was its own kind of death. His soul had been buried for centuries.
Maybe she should leave something. Something to prove she'd been here.
She looked around, crouched by the damp riverbank grass, and dug out a lump of clay. She turned it over in her hands, considered, and began shaping it into a gold ingot.
When she was done, she carved a few characters into the base: Mist Kingdom Ingot. This would be the highest denomination currency ever issued in the Misty Plains. She'd decided just now.
She set the clay ingot quietly at the entrance to the alchemy room. He'd find it the moment he stepped out. And with his intelligence, he'd know exactly what it meant.
Luo Wei spread her wings and lifted into the air above the town.
She wanted to check on the teleportation array she'd carved last time — see whether those Magic Runes were still active. The Misty Plains and the Western Plains were tens of thousands of kilometers apart, with nearly half a day's time difference between them. The sun had just crested the horizon here, so direction was easy. She'd arrived at the west coast last time; her current position was somewhere in the middle of the continent. Flying west should find it.
But that felt like a waste of the night. She'd finally made it to the Misty Plains. She wasn't going to spend the whole visit in the air.
She dropped back to the ground. From above, she'd spotted an altar inside the town , well-suited for a teleportation array.
The Dark Elf was still busy in the alchemy room, completely unaware that someone had climbed onto his painstakingly constructed altar and was drawing all over it.
When she finished carving, Luo Wei pressed her palm to the center of the Magic Rune. Light swept across the altar's surface. The teleportation channel opened.
In an instant, she was standing in a lush forest.
It looked different from her last visit. The weeds and rubble had been cleared. The collapsed platform had been propped upright with stone pillars. The carved stone slab had been repaired , the jagged edges ground smooth, the surface polished until it was almost slippery under her fingertips.
Luo Wei looked down at the teleportation array beneath her feet and stopped.
The Magic Runes she'd carved had been changed.
Her original work had been shallow, barely more than scratches. What she saw now cut a full finger-joint deep into the stone, and the patterns were far more complex than anything she'd left behind.
The six magic stones still sat at the center of the array. Strangely, their luster hadn't faded at all.
That meant the array wasn't drawing on them. Someone had infused it with enough magical power that the stones weren't needed.
Only one person could have done this.
Luo Wei stared at the six magic stones, her fingers twitching with temptation.
If they weren't being used, could she just take them back?
Would the Dark Elf think she was cheap?
She hesitated for a long moment, then let it go. She wasn't going to embarrass herself over a few magic stones.
She crouched down and started studying the runes.
The sections the Dark Elf had added were nothing short of inspired. He'd taken her basic low-level array and, with a few additions, pulled it up to the standard of a high-level one.
If she could replicate this on the Western Plains, genuine intercontinental teleportation was possible.
High-level Magic Runes didn't respond well to sustained attention. Stare at them too long and the mind started to slip.
Luo Wei divided the array into fan-shaped sectors and forced herself to look at each piece separately, never letting her eyes trace the complete pattern. She memorized one section at a time.
Even with that precaution, her head was pounding by the end. When she finally finished, something warm ran from her nose.
She reached up to wipe it.
Nosebleed.
Moments later, her vision blurred red. Two thin lines of blood ran from the corners of her eyes.
Before she could find anything to wipe her face, her ears went wet.
High-level Magic Runes could do this much damage, even when studied in pieces? The backlash she'd gotten from stealing high-level incantation patterns before was nothing like this.
Luo Wei pushed herself up from the ground. The moment she got her feet under her, the world lurched. A rush of iron and sweetness surged up her throat.
Seven orifices. She was bleeding from all seven orifices.
And, to make things worse, she had no idea how to get back.
Her body was still in the Western Plains. What was here was a thread of dream-consciousness projected across the sea. If she died in this forest, no one would ever know.
Wait. A dream. Was there any chance this was just a dream?
If she woke up tomorrow in her dormitory bed, how would she prove she'd ever been to the Misty Plains at all?
Luo Wei swallowed the blood gathering in her throat, wiped her face, and looked up at the sky.
The backlash was bad. Worse than she'd expected. Teleporting directly from the Western Plains to the Misty Plains was going to take considerably more preparation than she'd thought.
But if everything happening in this dream was real, then proof had to exist somewhere.
Like the Color-Phantasm Birds, for instance , the ones that crossed the ocean carrying branches in their beaks.
She waited for her nosebleed to stop. Then she spread her wings and flew.
The Misty Plains were vast. She'd barely scratched the surface of what was here. If she looked carefully, there was no telling what she might find.
Take the spices on the Western Plains , priced like gold, origin unknown. The nobles had been using them for years, most of it collected by mercenaries along the coastline. But nothing grew along that coast that could produce them. The Western Plains' climate was wrong for it anyway. Merchants had tried cultivation and failed. The Wastes were a dead end , all desert, dry air, almost no rainfall.
She'd been thinking about this since her very first potions class. Somewhere in this world, there had to be a landmass that resembled the geography of southern Asia. Only a tropical rainforest produced conditions like that. The spices on the Western Plains had to come from somewhere , and the most likely answer was migratory birds, carrying seeds across the sea the same way the Color-Phantasm Birds carried their branches.
The Misty Plains. It had always been the Misty Plains.
➤ Next: Chromatic Illusion Bird Delivers a Message
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