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Ch192-First Impressions

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Sylver starred up towards the sky as they walked and listened to Spring’s report as he told him about the various buildings that were on the line Edmund’s tracker had created.

He had hoped there would be something obvious, like a giant lead cube from within which a man’s shouting could be heard, or a grave with a green flame dancing on it, or maybe just a man with a name tag that read ‘Edmund, Arch-Pyromancer,’

But, the closest thing Spring found was a building that was very likely a prison of some kind, that was sadly too well enchanted for Spring to venture further than the outskirts.

Sylver had 3 more attempts to track Edmund.

He wanted to find him as quickly as possible, but Sylver was worried that Edmund wasn’t in this city. And if he tracked him right now, he would have wasted another charge, with nothing to show for it, other than that Edmund was somewhere far away.

If he wasn’t here, Edmund was North-North-West of the Schlagen mountains.

Then Sylver would go as far as he could, and then he would be forced to use the tracker one more time, and if Edmund was even further North, he would have only one attempt left to find him.

Unlike Earth that Ria was used to, Eira’s geography isn’t what could be described as ‘consistent.’

The Ibis even had a way to measure how inconsistent a certain area was. The higher the concentration of mana, the higher the inconsistency of the land.

For a place like Arda, with a functional dungeon, and a ton of micro lay lines, the number was probably somewhere in the high 80s. Whereas the area surrounding the Schlagen mountains felt quite weak, and Sylver doubted it was higher than 20%.

Aside from the fun nonsense, like upside-down waterfalls, trees that screamed, giant boulders that turned out to be light enough for a child to move, lightning strikes that created pillars of ice, and Sylver’s personal favorite, a wave of inert gas that suffocated an entire town and provided him with over 600 perfectly preserved corpses, there were less fun inconsistencies.

Like how a trip from point A to point B could take 8 days to walk, but a trip from point B to point A could take 2 days. Most of the time it was due to time dilation, there were spots around Arda that had this problem, but thankfully they were very easy to avoid if you knew what to look for.

And if you were prepared, it wasn’t that hard to cancel out the effect, a small lead rod or an enchanted ring was the common solution.

The popular theory in the Ibis is that things like this happened due to fae, spirits, or some other magical creature.

The less popular, but in Sylver’s personal opinion more plausible, theory, was that these kinds of phenomena were simply the result of mana interacting with Eira’s air, water, and earth. Sylver hadn’t studied the subject all that much, other than enough basics to nullify it, but a woman he respected said this was the most likely explanation, so Sylver chose to believe in this theory, as opposed to magical creature one.

As to why someone couldn’t just ask the fae, spirits, or magical creatures to confirm, the answer was that they did. They tried to ask them.

A lot.

But the problem with that is that all the fae, spirits, and magical creatures, gave inconsistent and contradictory answers, down to the point it was impossible to tell who was telling the truth, and who was just fucking around with the curious mages.

Another reason why Sylver believed the mana interaction theory, was because it fit very nicely with the Ki interaction theory.

An area with an abundance of mana tended to produce mages, whereas an area with an abundance of Ki tended to produce cultivators. And similar to how mana interacted with and altered its environment, Ki did too, in its own unique way.

The most obvious difference was the flora and fauna, Sylver didn’t even know what kind of monster a featherless goose was, but he didn’t like the sound of it.

Sylver felt Faust’s soul wake up a little.

“I know I already asked, but is there anything I can do?” Sylver asked as the small man shook his head.

Faust tried to brush away the strings holding him upright, but Mora ignored his feeble attempts and kept his back straight and head looking forward.

“I’m fine, I just need to rest,” Faust repeated, as he had the last couple of times Sylver had attempted to find a solution.

A healing potion wasn’t going to cut it, a stamina potion would just hurt him, and the powder Sylver intended to use to keep himself alert when he didn’t have time to sleep would be fatal to Faust in his current condition.

And according to Xalibur, the aforementioned powder was an extremely potent, illegal, and expensive, drug.

Thankfully Sylver was good at hiding things on his person, and if it was necessary, with a small incision near his lower ribs, in his person. He didn’t have a whole lot of empty space inside himself, but his body was malleable enough that he could discard a couple of kilograms of muscle to replace with something else.

“There’s something I always wanted to ask… Is it true witches in the south can make gold out of iron?” Xalibur whispered, and Sylver thought it over for a moment.

He decided he didn’t want to bargain with the man right now and would ask what he wanted to ask later.

“Sorcerers and mages can, but it’s too delicate of a magic for the majority of witches. But if you want to get technical about it, no. They can make what’s called dirty gold, but it’s useless,” Sylver explained, as Xalibur nodded.

“What makes dirty gold different from real gold?” Xalibur asked.

“It’s worthless. It doesn’t conduct mana, can’t be mixed to make an alloy, and is soft enough that you can cut it with a blunt knife. It also doesn’t reflect light the way real gold does, just a little less shiny. I can’t tell the difference by eye, but all mages can tell dirty gold from real gold with a single touch. It’s also kind of sticky, and feels like it's covered in wet paint when you touch it,” Sylver explained, and could almost see the idea get snuffed out in Xalibur’s head.

Gold is precious and used as a currency, for a reason. It’s fucking hard to find and mine, impossible to replicate, and the amount of effort required to grow and harvest gold trees makes it a waste of time for everyone Sylver had ever seen attempt it.

“Is it true your women walk around without covering their chests?” Xalibur asked, and Sylver felt a little proud that he had some good news for the man.

“In some port towns, yes. It’s normally only done by sailors, but I have heard that several towns adopted it as the local fashion,” Sylver explained, and Faust coughed into his fist for a moment before he spoke.

“Which port towns?” Faust asked.

“Aren’t you actively looking for a wife?” Sylver asked, but could feel Faust roll his eyes before he rolled them.

“I am, but it feels like one of those places you should visit at least once in your life,” Faust explained, and Sylver couldn’t help but agree.

“I think there’s one that isn’t too far out of our way when we go back… More importantly, how much further is it?” Sylver asked as Xalibur squinted to read the small symbol on the flag near the door.

“We’re nearly there, their land is on the very edge,” Xalibur said, and continued to basically walk with only 1 leg.

Sylver wasn’t sure how he was doing it, but his best guess was some sort of Ki spell that shifted his center of gravity with each step. This wouldn’t be all that impressive for a mage to pull off, but it was almost surprising for someone utilizing Ki.

Ki was an energy that could be said to be parallel to mana.

There was positive Ki, negative Ki, solid, liquid, gas, plasma, with the main difference being that it was also split up into Yin and Yang. Which were similar to the way mana was split into dark and light, but according to cultivators Sylver spoke to, there was a bit more to it than just that.

Not that he particularly cared, as an undead Sylver’s body had a unique property living mages didn’t possess.

He was immune to Ki.

Sylver was to Ki, what a piece of lead was to mana.

Provided he snuffed out his spark of positive magic, and retained only negative mana within the part being struck. Positive Ki could affect positive mana, but positive Ki couldn’t affect negative mana.

Now, what that should mean is that all that a person needed to fuck Sylver up was to attack him with positive and negative Ki, but Ki didn’t work like that.

You either had positive Ki or negative Ki, but you couldn’t have both.

Sylver forgot the exact reason, but it was something like cultivators had no choice but to overspecialize, to the point their unused Ki type atrophied and eventually became completely inaccessible to them.

Not that the vast majority of them cared, positive Ki cultivation was superior to negative Ki cultivation in every conceivable way, except for one.

Positive Ki cultivators could cultivate using their own Ki, whereas negative Ki cultivators could cultivate using the Ki of others. Which in turn meant they could attain a great deal of power very quickly, but also needed increasing numbers of victims to gather Ki from.

To make a long story short, they killed whoever they were training to kill, then they were attacked by the brother, father, son, aunt, grandma, cousin, buddy, wife, mistress, second cousin, family pet, of whoever they killed, and then the situation was resolved in 1 of 2 ways.

Either the daughter/sister/pet managed to kill her father’s/brother’s/owner’s killer, and that was the end of it.

Or, very very rarely, the negative Ki cultivator killed all of them and became powerful enough that there wasn’t anyone left in the area that could deal with him.

Except, of course, a certain necromancer that was paranoid about these kinds of people snowballing even further out of control, and took it upon himself to handle them.

Aside from the healthy paranoia, there was also the small issue that negative Ki cultivators fucking always arrived at the conclusion “summoning demons to help me is a great idea!” Sylver was a busy necromancer and preferred to deal with this kind of shit before hordes of demons got involved.

Unlike with most of his mistakes, Sylver learned his lesson regarding bloodthirsty cultivator nutjobs the first time they summoned a demon king.

Sadly, it also meant that he wasn’t used to dealing with positive Ki cultivators. Sylver would go as far as to call himself rusty.

Snuffing the spark of positive mana out was simple enough, reigniting it was easier than breathing, but getting rid of all the positive mana on his skin, robe, and the trace amounts in the components flowing through his veins, was a bit tricky.

Not impossible, just… tricky…