While Petra was off doing 'Petra things', the rest of the world didn't wait.
The United Army had already begun its long march towards Oriest.
Groups of soldiers, mages, mercenaries, and refugees moved across the broken landscape, following the long road that Petra had previously taken. They carried the weight of recent losses, and the knowledge of what awaited them. There were no speeches, no fanfare, only the steady rhythm of boots and the low murmur of voices in the rain.
* * *
The Cursed Hills.
The Cursed Hills rose and fell across the horizon, bare and colorless, half-swallowed by a gray fog that continuously spilled across the landscape while following the flow of the wind.
Within the fog, a massive procession advanced forward.
Near the front of the procession was Elena.
She had shoulder-length blond hair, and bright green eyes like a forest. Her clothes were tight, clinging to her body and its curves, maximizing her dexterity, with only an old mantel to shield her from the wind. Her hand pressed against her chest, not from the cold, but from the vague discomfort in the chest area that hugged too tightly. Two daggers hung at her waist, and a black ring wrapped her right hand's index finger. Her cloak whipped in the cold wind and rain, as she stepped across the uneven stone.
Golden traces of spiritual energy flickered faintly in her eyes, as she scanned the empty hills ahead.
The air here was heavy, not just with moisture, but with memories of her past life.
Elena had never liked the western region.
That feeling stemmed from many things…
Unlike the rest of the Cross Continent, where the Elfefalein Empire had vanished along with almost everything related to them, this place was still full of their fallen scars and abandoned technology.
The ruins here refused to die, lingering with life far beyond their creators, a behavior that didn't match any common system in the current world. Every ridge, every valley, every crumbling stone or rolling hill, all of them echoed with the forgotten power of what the elves had once built.
This wasn't a good thing…
In truth, this area had suffered a disaster long before the Elfefalein Empire had disappeared.
Elena's gaze swept over the horizon.
The massive, brittle stone spires jutting from the gray hills and pale pools were not ordinary rock. They were relics, remnants of old High Elven technology unique to this part of the empire. It wasn't that they weren't discovered, no, the reason none of this could be taken or touched was because this area of the world was filled with countless curses that stuck to those lost to time.
In short, everything was 'contaminated'…
To the human eye, they looked like weathered stones, brittle to the touch. But Elena could feel the faint pulse of spiritual energy still moving through them, persisting. These inconspicuous spires carried echoes of ancient machines hidden within, concealed by some force that swept through after the collapse from long before the current era.
She remembered reading about them once, in one of her loops, far into the future from now.
A future archaeologist named 'Yuna Kastone' would later uncover the truth after a special team returned to the western region to investigate the aftermath, and decide whether it was still reclaimable. These 'Runic Stabilizers' had once been a small part of an enormous leyline network used to regulate the Elfefalein Empire's magic network.
They were basically power polls…
Ahem! But that discovery would come decades later…
Mm, well… 'that discovery 'should' come decades later'. As long as nothing 'unseen' happens…
As for the girl named 'Yuna', Elena had never considered her important enough to track down, so she had no idea what she was doing at this point in time.
For now, these brittle pillars were nothing more than silent monuments to a civilization that had already disappeared. No, not even that…
Most people didn't even view them as anything special.
Elena sighed softly and pressed forward. Behind her, the elites of the United Army continued to trudge through the mist, picking up speed.
-
It had already been two weeks since the fall of Darkwell, but the mood hadn't recovered. The soldiers moved in staggered formations, pooling into small groups of around thirty at a time.
The Cursed Hills were unpredictable, alive with whispers and illusions, and plagued by lingering curses. Sometimes the wind spoke in whispers, sometimes footsteps echoed when no one was walking, sometimes a soldier's shadow lagged behind them, and sometimes, those who wandered too far never returned. Worse still, those who did return often came back wrong, with hollow eyes, and voices that echoed twice when they spoke.
These were the curses of the Cursed Hills.
They lingered in the environment like a virus.
But still, they pressed on. There was no time, and the army had to keep moving.
Although the landscape itself hadn't changed much, they could feel the occasional tremor shaking the region. These continental tremors were constant reminders that the massive roots beneath the western region were still expanding, stretching toward the rest of the continent like greedy beasts.
Time was ticking…
The black clouds overhead had yet to dissipate, and if anything, they had grown thicker and denser, and the lightning running through them like cracking glass only became more frequent.
As they approached the Corrupted World Tree, it became clear that the roots had changed the land more than expected. Although the continental plates hadn't shifted on a wide scale here, the terrain here was twisted and deformed in unnatural ways, filled with countless roots of varying sizes. They looped overhead and buried themselves back into the ground, replacing the distant canopy and sewing the forest floor together.
The Cursed Hills and the Yin Forest had once been relatively flat, without mountains and ravines, but now the path rippled up and down like broken terrain. In the most extreme areas, far in the distance, the upper backs of massive roots breached the earth like low-lying mountains.
This distortion only worsened the closer they got to the Yin Forest.
* * *
The Yin Forest
Three days later—
After a long, weary crossing of the Cursed Hills, Elena and the United Army finally reached the Yin Forest. It was once said that this forest had been used by the High Elves for meditation and self-tempering, an ancient and sacred place where the soul could reflect upon itself.
But now—
Now it was a graveyard…
The only meditation left was resisting the soul-shredding aura and the bone-piercing winds.
They entered.
The trees were thin and silver, with bark pale as bone, and leaves like translucent glass.
It was like a winter forest, only without the winter.
This was 'Yin'.
The air swayed faintly with spiritual energy.
Every sound echoed longer than it should, and the mist bent light into strange patterns, like skeletal hands that reached towards anything that moved. Bioluminescent spores drifted through the fog like glowing snowflakes, flickering with an eerie azure light. Time didn't feel right here, sometimes seconds stretched into minutes, and sometimes hours vanished without notice.
This was one of the reasons the western region had chosen this place as its capital. Only those with a powerful mind, body, and soul could survive here.
To call Oriest the city of the strong was no exaggeration.
Unlike the rest of the continent, those who lived in Oriest needed strong wills and resilient bodies to resist the constant deterioration caused by the environment. That deterioration was omnipresent, a mixture of warped spiritual energy and strange flora that silently eroded one's vitality.
The soldiers could feel it immediately.
It was like an unseen snowstorm, cold and suffocating, grating, and formed a soul-shearing sensation that slithered through their bodies.
Elena halted the group near the edge of a stone ridge and surveyed the path ahead.
"Report," she called.
Hexfill approached with Pillia, Vellina, and a few other leaders from the small forces. Pillia's shoulders drooped as she spoke. She was soaked from the rain, her 'feathers' dripping with black water.
"According to the scouts… there's no movement behind us," she said quietly. "But…"
She hesitated, shuffling nervously on the spot.
"There's something wrong with the spiritual energy here. I can't make a clean connection to the outside world. The signals keep 'folding and distorting', er, there 'delayed and desynced'." She pursed her lips and added, "Also, not long ago, I'm pretty sure I even got an answer for a question before I asked it…"
Her voice trailed off, her face reddening slightly.
She wasn't crazy!
Hexfill remained silent.
His armor was dark and worn down from the repeated battles, the fur-lined shoulders soaked with blood and black ash, the silver metal chipped and scarred. It was reaching its limits, just like many of the others and their equipment.
He hadn't spoken much since leaving Darkwell.
He let Pillia take care of that…
Despite being silent, his mind was far from quiet.
Guilt weighed heavily on his shoulders. Ticilli, the excavation site, the Poison Sea, the Duskwood experiment, the Laboratory, each memory tightened another knot around his heart.
Elena knew…
He was sure of it!
That was the worst part. She could see it in the way he avoided her gaze, but she said nothing. She didn't need to, because it wouldn't help.
His eyes drooped, and soon, they continued forward.
-
As the group moved—
Something began to stir near their feet.
Whhhos…
The mist cloaking the ground started to shift like a tide, and a large, middle-aged man near the front shouted, pointing as the fog twisted into unnatural waves.
They paused.
At first, it seemed subtle, perhaps just the wind, but as they observed, it became clear that something was wrong. The white tide around their ankles slowly pulled back, retracting deeper into the forest, disappearing towards the direction of their destination.
They continued.
The mist withdrew deeper and deeper, as if drawn to something.
They followed…
Then, just before they began to 'panic', Pillia spotted something ahead.
In the distance—
A ripple in the fog, no, a silhouette...
They approached carefully, passing through the twisting forest and uneven road.
They reached a clearing.
A pure white obelisk rose from the mist, its base rooted in a natural mound of stone and earth, as though the forest itself had grown around it, intertwining. Trees leaned inwards, their trunks and branches subtly curved towards the monolith like plants to the sun. Moss and roots threaded through the surrounding rocks and bound the structure to the earth. It was an aesthetically pleasing sight, if not for the unmistakable sense that this way stone lay at the heart of the strange mist tide.
Its smooth surface was carved with countless fine runes, their patterns unmistakably High Elven.
Sickly light pulsed through the runic channels, seeping outwards like a corrupted current, bleeding into the mist and disturbing the natural rhythm of the surrounding forest.
One's first impression would be a 'filter'.
Elena stepped forward and rested her hand against the stone.
It was warm—
Unnaturally warm, like a machine on the verge of burning out. It wasn't much different from the stabilizing runes in Darkwell, only far more advanced, and with a different purpose.
Beneath her touch, the runes flickered faintly, disturbed by her aura.
"This is High Elven," she murmured. "A 'Boundary Obelisk'. They used these to contain spiritual energy. There should be more, but…"
She looked around, failing to find the chain.
Hexfill frowned. "Contain? It doesn't look like it's doing much of that."
Elena pushed her spiritual sense into the stone.
Then—
Her expression darkened.
"They're supposed to absorb spiritual energy from the outside world and contain it within a region, creating an area of extremely dense spiritual energy," she said slowly. "But… It's reversed."
"Reversed?" Hexfill asked.
"The array isn't keeping energy in. It's pushing it out," Elena said. "By doing that, it's concentrating the corruption. No… It's feeding the Corrupted World Tree."
She tilted her head.
She hadn't seen this in her previous life.
Looking at it now, it felt deliberate.
Was this why the Second Calamity had come early?
The First Calamity, starting five years early, naturally didn't accelerate the second, something had to have interfered to bring it forward.
Someone had done this artificially…
The group fell silent.
They all understood how dangerous concentrated corruption was.
Pillia shivered. "Can we destroy it…?"
Elena shook her head. "No. This is part of a network. If one node is destroyed, the others destabilize. It could tear the entire area apart."
"Then what do we do?" Hexfill asked.
Elena turned her eyes towards the distant storm.
"Keep moving," she said quietly. "We'll deal with it later."
She frowned.
After scanning their remaining troops, she added, "As for the corruption, we'll just have to fight it off for as long as possible."
They continued towards the massive tree on the horizon, drawing closer with every passing hour.