Back in Mundus we were back on the road, heading west. I was feeling a little under the weather, so to speak. Not the physical weather but the emotional turmoil within me was taking a toll. I had, since coming to Mundus, employed a strange mental separation between the mobs that were to be slaughtered for fun, EXP and profit and the beings that I considered just as alive as I was, even if they were born from electronic impulses.

Cogito ergo sum, as the philosophers said, and after talking with Sigmir and sharing a mind with Lenore, denying that they were cognisant would be a joke. And that was without thinking about the deeper implications about my feelings for Sigmir. I had considered that mental separation before, but never quite managed to get my feelings and my logos, my thinking mind, to align. To do that, I would have to acknowledge that I was someone willing to sacrifice other, thinking beings, beings just like me and those I loved, to gain power. Because that was what we were doing, hunting others to strengthen ourselves.

As I was considering that, Lenore suggested something for my consideration, she found my turmoil illogical but I had been aware of that. But her suggestion was to think about the thinking beings, the animals and such, that died every day in the real world to feed the vast society that she had glimpsed in my memories. I tried to reason internally that those were just, well, animals, raised for the explicit purpose of being slaughtered later, which helped.

I had asked Lenore for her take on the whole affair, but to her, it was simply part and parcel of living, you had to eat and you either got more powerful or you would be food one day. While she felt it would be wasteful to slaughter beings that were too weak to add to our strength without provocation, she had absolutely no compunction against revenge, even preventive revenge, striking to make sure that enemies could not ready themselves.

Curious, I asked the others about their opinions over the next few days.

Rai’s might be the easiest to understand. He simply considered the rest of the group and me in particular as the leaders, so if we said “Kill”, he killed, if we said “spare”, he spared. I considered it a bit of an emotional cop-out, simply saying ‘I was just following orders.’ but it was what it was.

Sigmir was similar to Lenore in a few ways, to her it was about keeping her people, which primarily meant Ylva, Lenore and me, with Adra and Rai being of lesser importance to her. To do so, she needed power and to get power, she needed to kill. She felt no need to go after weaker beings but, like Lenore, she was happy to prevent potential problems from becoming actual problems.

Finally, Adra considered for the longest time. She was seeking for something, her destined tree, as she called it. That tree would, one day, become part of her, allowing her to reproduce while sharing her powers and immortality. That meant she was looking for challenges, like the attack on the elder dryad Tegi, that had been a challenge, or the dungeon under the glacier, another challenge. Fights that didn’t challenge her were boring, so she simply ignored them, until she needed to fight or it became challenging.

Sadly, those ideas didn’t help me to solve my own problem, so I spent a few days worrying until Lenore hit me with a thought I had not considered in such a direct manner. Her question had been how many lives would have to be at stake for me to consider sacrificing Sigmir. My instant answer, without thinking or considering had been that I would happily freeze over the world if it kept Sigmir safe. Lenore had simply laughed and told me that, if I wanted to have that choice, I would need to keep increasing my power, no matter what. When I considered that, I had to grant her point, unless I had the power to keep mine safe, I might lose Sigmir. And that was something I wouldn’t let happen, even if I had to sacrifice children, cutting out their hearts. At least that was my initial reaction; whether I had the strength to stomach my convictions, the future would show.

That is not to say that I only debated the topic of morality during the week we travelled west, no I also studied the images from Kolyug’s magic-store, discussing with Lenore what could be done with the information we found.

What intrigued me the most was the mention of an item called Warding Orb. The description was a little vague but, unless I was grossly mistaken, it was essentially a spell formation carved into elemental crystals, for example Eternal Ice, that allowed to channel bursts of pure elemental energy from the orb. My idea was to circumvent the extreme volatility of Eternal Ice by substituting it for directly controlled Liquid Moonlight, it would reduce the punch of the item-turned-spell by a great deal, but it would allow me to attack without using runes for each spell.

When I tried my idea, it sort-of worked, using a seven-rune circle of pure Liquid Moonlight, creating the substance and taking hold of it with my Ice Magic straight away. It took a lot of Astral Power to create a fist-sized orb but afterwards, I could send out thin streams, almost like beams, of Liquid Moonlight to attack, allowing for rapid attacks, spread almost as far as I wanted. My second attempt was an attempt to unleash the Liquid Moonlight all at once, creating an effect similar to the cone of cold I had used against the glacier-dungeon end boss and the result was promising. The range was a little short and there was no way I could use it with my allies in the line of fire but I could unleash the orb of Liquid Moonlight in a single burst, freezing everything in a one-hundred-twenty degree cone for a few meters.

“Do you think we can get to results between ‘almost uncontrolled burst’ and ‘single-target shooting’?” Lenore asked after that experiment.

It was a simple question but it gave me ideas, which made me happy.

My first idea was to hold the orb over my head and just protect myself, creating a small explosion centered around me. The radius was roughly the same as with the cone-burst, maybe five meters and the power was reduced quite a bit, but nonetheless, I had something useful if I found myself surrounded. In memoriam of one of the most iconic spells in many-a-game, I named my new creation Frost Nova.

The next was to try to combine the idea of the original beam-like shot and the cone, creating a lense-effect, basically allowing for limited cones that I could focus as I liked. For now, that part was a work-in-progress, with which I failed, even with Lenore’s mental encouragement and her help. All in all, the experimentation netted some benefits, raising my Ice Magic to seventy-six and my Ice-Rune Mastery to sixty-nine.

Otherwise, nothing exciting happened, no bandits, no dangerous animals, nothing. That made me write a report to Pantheon, stressing the importance of adding some content between the various strong-points. The world of Road to Purgatory was wonderful but, at least with the current number of players, it was simply too empty. We had covered hundreds of kilometers on the old, imperial road and I think we fought twice, if you can call it that. There had been a few villages near the road but even those hardly broke up the monotony of travel; maybe if you wanted to immerse yourself in their culture they would thaw to you, but to me - maybe because of my outsider-trait - the villagers were unwelcoming, answering with few words and little warmth. That left the landscape as selling point for travel, but while the landscape was beautifully crafted, it was slightly repetitive. After seeing a few thousand snow-covered trees, they become boring, no matter how magically the snow glitters in the night, no matter how romantic it would be to curl up with a significant other next to a nicely burning fire, watching the snow fall.

There needed to be some excitement during travels or some way to cut the travel-times further, or people would simply leave. Sure, there was the social part of travelling with people you liked and I enjoyed travelling with my group, especially Sigmir. But still, sitting on horseback for hours on end, looking at the unchanging landscape took its toll. Hopefully, it was just in the far north like that, even in the real world, the area we had been travelling in was one of the places least touched by human hand.

But after the week of travel, things suddenly changed, the snow-covered forests made way for windswept plains. They were covered in snow, just like the area we had been in, but the sheer emptiness made me slightly uncomfortable. At least, nobody would sneak up on us.