After their discussion in the woods earlier that day, where Rean made her see reality, she went back to the place she was staying, yet everything kept nagging at the back of her mind. She knew staying longer and having episodes, she may bring more danger to them, when she is not even strong enough to defeat more than one distortion.
She looked at the palm of her hand, which trembled from the energy flowing within her, and she sighed. She got up, packed a bag with things that could last her a few days to eat and grabbed a map, making up her mind.
With a determined heart, she left before dawn, not because anyone told her to, but because the silence before morning felt honest. Lystern slept beneath its lantern glow and layered wards, unaware that something irreversible was about to occur.
From the edge of the square, Elder Rean watched her go without calling out, her staff grounded firmly at her side. The elder's expression was unreadable, but her eyes followed every step, already knowing that this departure was not a test of courage but of consequence.
Rean did not stop her.
Stopping her would have been a lie, since she knew in order to grow, the girl needed to experience the world or at least part of it, the reality of what she came into and just how different it is.
The moment she crossed the final ward line, pain struck.
It was sharp and sudden, like barbed wire dragged through her veins, a pressure that crushed inward before tearing free. She staggered, breath leaving her lungs in a ragged gasp as her core flared violently in protest.
The wards did not repel her, nor did they reject her. They peeled away from her presence instead, stripping familiarity, safety, and borrowed stability all at once.
Her knees hit the ground and she gritted her teeth, claws biting into the soil as heat and cold collided inside her chest.
"So this is the price," she muttered, as she realized through the pain. Leaving isn't just movement, it was separation from the village, which was partially isolated from the rest of this world.
The system reacted late, almost cautiously.
[Warning: Territorial Buffer Removed]
[Core Stress: Temporary Spike]
[Status: Enduring]
The pain faded gradually, leaving behind a deep ache and something worse, a hollow sense of exposure. The world beyond the village did not cradle her existence. It weighed it, measured it, and waited to see if it would break.
She pushed herself upright and behind her, the ward shimmered faintly, whole and unchanged, as if daring her to return. She did not look back again.
The forest swallowed her quickly.
This was not the tame woodland near the village's edge. The deeper she walked, the stranger it became. Trees twisted in ways that defied symmetry, their bark threaded with faint luminescent veins.
Creatures watched her openly from branches and undergrowth, beings she had only ever dreamed of or read about in half-forgotten fantasy; some were antlered wolves with eyes like molten amber, insects shaped like floating glass shards, and serpentine silhouettes drifting between roots without disturbing a single leaf.
Yet for some reason, none attacked, they simply observed her with caution.
Her instincts cataloged everything automatically, threat levels, mana density, and movement patterns, yet something else was layered over it all: awe.
This world was not gentle, but it was vast, alive in ways her old one had never been. Every step forward made the air feel heavier, more real, as if she were sinking deeper into the true body of the world itself.
She was careful as she went through it and even rested when she could, since the area was quite vast and she was following a map she could barely understand.
She passed ruins hours later, stone structures consumed by moss and time, arches half-collapsed and engraved with symbols worn so smooth they no longer carried language. These were not recent. These were remnants of things that had once mattered, proof that survival here was never guaranteed, no matter how powerful one became.
She slowed as she moved through them, her shadow stretching unnaturally across broken stone. The observer's mark pulsed faintly, reacting to the old authority buried there, but she did not stop. Whatever those ruins had represented, they were endings, not beginnings.
There was no turning back now.
She felt it then, unmistakably, as the forest thinned and the land opened into something broader and harsher. The mana shifted in the air, sharper, less forgiving. The pressure returned, but not as pain; it came back as expectation. This was no longer the outskirts of safety or the buffer of a small village clinging to survival.
This was the real world, the area far beyond the secrecy of the forest.
Her heartbeat steadied as she came to a halt, standing at the threshold where paths splintered in directions she could not yet name. Danger waited in all of them; she knew that, but so did growth.
She inhaled deeply, shoulders squaring as she braced herself, not for a single fight, but for the long reality of what lay ahead.
Back in Lystern, Elder Rean finally turned away from the forest, her grip tightening on her staff.
"I cannot feel her presence anymore; she made it out of the forest; she crossed," she murmured to herself. "And now she is in the real world, somewhere where we cannot reach easily and she will learn, maybe the hard way, but I hope she survives the rules out there."
Far beyond sight, something ancient shifted its attention fully toward her path and as she stepped forward again into territory that would not forgive weakness or hesitation.
She looked at the three paths ahead of her, each leading to different things, then she looked down at the map and her tail. Not knowing whether she would be accepted, she pulled on a cloak with a hood and took a step forward.
She understood one final truth with chilling clarity. From this point on, survival would no longer be enough.