Night fell quickly without any anomalies, but I stayed in place, I wasn’t leaving until I figure out what is going on. I was slowly growing bored, so I started to draw circles in the dirt until the feeling got so bad I had to go into hunting mode. A meditative technique that eliminates all boredom and other miscellaneous feelings and focused all energy on the hunt. With the hunger-induced boredom out of the way, I was back on full alert. A couple of more hours drew on while in this state but soon my patience paid off when I detected a rudimentary spirit jump coming from deep within the valley. I didn’t rush though, these things take time and slowly made my way out of the den and down the mountain.

As I stalked the foliage and waded through belly-deep snow, I took the time to inspect the magical disturbance coming from the jump and found it very archaic even by my standards. It was clunky, rudimentary, and very wasteful, from my spot calculations around fifty percent of the magical power was wasted. It was good news for me which means that my enemies are likely very novice in the magics and I probably don’t need to take all the precautions I have in place. I followed the disturbance from a distance and went for a place I could watch from a safe area. Soon I found a small ledge where I could sit and watch while still being camouflaged naturally in the snow.

From my new vantage point, I saw the flickering glow of a spirit rift and the outlines of four hooded figures. Interestingly I could only faintly detect three unique signatures and one repeat, a clone maybe? It could also be an elemental with two bodies. I watched with interest as the figures took their sweet time walking over a frozen river and towards a large stone wall. With the spirit rift emitting a large amount of magical disturbance I scanned the area with magic and found that the valley was coated with a subtle illusion, and what looked to be… an aura suppresser? That’s a very rare ward that usually protects very important things, but it takes time and effort to set up, so it’s only used sparingly.

I didn’t dig in any deeper and continued to just use my senses to keep an eye out for things. They sure are taking their sweet time to just walk ten feet. Their slow-motion walk session outlived its welcome by the time they even took two steps, and it only ended when they met the cliff wall. One of the men with a shared signature went up to the wall and slipped a dagger into one of the inconspicuous cracks and twisted. With a rumble, a section of the cliff face pushed inward and lift up until it completely disappeared, and the familiar aura blew out in waves. I had a better look at the group now that I had a decent view and saw that one of the group members did not seem to be there willingly.

A woman by the sound of her voice, what at first looked like a cloak was actually a large sack. I honestly did not know how I completely missed that, my night vision is perfect, and I have plenty of experience doing this kind of thing. Illusions don’t affect me and neither do mental suggestions, so I don’t really have an excuse. They did another slow-motion walk session as they entered, and I jumped down in anticipation of the door closing behind them only to find it showed no signs of closing. The spirit rift behind me remained open too, are they just too confident to not take any precautions? Could it be a trap? I was in turmoil about how to proceed but quickly snapped myself out of it. I shuffled over to the portal sent some magic through to mark its coordinates before turning back and leaving, but not before giving the girl a small blessing.

There are too many factors at play here and I don’t want to tip my hat too soon. Despite the robed people's obvious lack of magic knowledge, there was still a hard-to-make aura suppression ward beneath me and the entity that destroyed the local animal population and Is currently leaking aura of the killing fields. I felt bad about leaving the girl to her fate but my blessing should help her and also give me a connection that I can look through to observe the insides of the base thing. I wasn’t going to leave her there long though my little weapon should finish in around two days, one if I speed up the process, I should be back very soon.

I ran for an hour or two until I was completely out of range of all wards and continued running until I doubled the distance. When I had a big enough distance between me and the wards, I performed a jump to the spirit realm and continued to run in the wrong direction and in random patterns. After a while of doing this, I let a magical copy of the fox form do its thing and performed a jump to my territory. Colors increased in contrast and the artistic lines of the realm blended together before separating again and revealing I was back.

A fun outing to say the least but still a bit dull. I morphed to my usual form and relished the feeling of not mimicking a fox all the way down to its brain activity. I popped my neck and rubbed my bottom jaw before hunkering down in my shack. With a new variable at play, the girl, I compressed time around the burial site and injected a dose of pure mana to speed up the process. As I relished a cup of wine the lone crow of my little guest echoed out causing my mood to lift a little bit. The bird had taken flight a while ago and disappeared home presumably and I thought that was the end of it. Looks like I was mistaken.