The journey to Summer Rest was an easy, if lengthy one. Every day they travelled elevated further the knowledge that Azenia-Ra was several levels larger than Ctania. Their first impulse was, much like getting to Clearwater, to try and simply fly over the ocean. As soon they discussed the scale of things, however, the absurdity of that idea became obvious. Even the shortest gap between the north-western island they were currently on was about half as wide as Ctania had been.

They would have needed to fly for two to three consecutive days in order to get across the ocean. As far as the map showed it, there were no islands to rest on. Even more than that, they could easily lose orientation above the open sea. This Leaf wasn’t fundamentally flat, limiting the range of the vision considerably. One gust of wind, a light left tilt at a moment of dropping concentration and they could find themselves lost with nowhere to land. They had a map, but a compass was not in their possession.

All of that came before the issue of food and water. Taking the shortest route was, in purely logistic terms, suicide.

Instead, they had to follow a traditional path. This proved to be less of an issue than they initially feared. Once they knew in which direction to march, something made thankfully easy thanks to wooden signs that marked the occasional crossroad, all they had to do was follow the road. The first two days, they mostly marched off the road, keeping to the protection of the loose forest. Eventually, it became apparent that the road wound itself properly through numerous environmental hazards, like small bogs, hills, and rivers. Once the trio walked on it directly and had a number of encounters with other travellers that were all defined by a simple passing, they kept their detours into the treeline to their nightly rests.

It was the first time for Apexus that he properly used things created by civilization to get somewhere. Whenever he had been in the proximity of civilization before, the slime had felt like an animal observing a new environment, scavenging for a necessary resource. Now he was a traveller like anyone else, using the road for the same purpose as the other people they met. In a way, he was now part of that civilization.

He walked over dirt and paved roads, the state of the road depending on the wealth of the area. Soon, he came to expect a certain look to the houses in the upcoming village or city, depending on the amount of nature that had reclaimed the streets. The more weeds stuck out on the road, the higher the likelihood that the houses would be basic or in a state of mild disrepair. The deeper the trenches at the side of the roads, the more carts he expected to roll around.

It wasn’t too different from the wild, from tracking animals by their footsteps. Many smiths pointed towards a mine being nearby, many hunters but a low number of leatherworkers pointed towards a migratory herd of animals that happened to be in this area by chance, a swelling of travellers on the road pointed towards a market day, and so on. It was all so similar to seeing leaves missing on a bush up to a certain height, to reading imprints on the floor, to measuring a half-devoured carcass to see what size its predator must have been.

As Apexus made those comparisons, he felt less alienated by this thing called civilization. A house was just a very intricate burrow, a market just another competitive ecosystem. The results of things may vary considerably, but the fundamental rules weren’t that different.

It was quite impressive what humanoids could do when they banded together. Especially since they lacked the natural unity ants had. By some incredibly complicated process, they seemed to thrive on outcompeting each other, rather than working together. It was as if humanoids had taken the entire process of survival of the fittest from nature, limited it to their own species, accelerated it and also taken the majority of deadliness out of it. All at the same time.

Apexus found that ludicrous, but that’s what he kept seeing.

Now that he understood that, or started to understand it anyway, and was himself a part of it, Apexus felt a strange sense of comradery with those humanoids. His paranoia continued to force him to stay at least three metres away from anyone he didn’t know to feel safe. Aside from that though, Aclysia. Reysha and he were fitting in relatively well. They traded more animal parts from their daily meals on their way south and slowly acquired a bit of money that way.

Apexus’ ultimate revelation the humanoids were absurdly crafty came when they were about to go from the north-western island to the western one. It wasn’t any city. Apexus got houses. They usually weren’t that complex. The principle was to stack rocks on each other and support them with extra things the larger the hollow pile got. There had been impressive buildings he saw, sure. None of them competed with the ridiculous bridge that connected the two islands, however.

It was absurdly long, spanning a larger area than most of the cities they had come across. Arch after arch spanned from one stone pillar to the next, each of which vanished under the water. They all supported a pathway that was entirely artificial. Rocks were glued together by cement and plaster; a grey path illuminated by metal lanterns that were mounted onto the bridge’s stone railing.

“How?” was Apexus’ only question.

“How what?” Aclysia asked, her and Reysha both turning to the flabbergasted slime. She was preoccupied being thankful about the fact they arrived and would set over during the dark hours. There was a city on either end of this bridge and she didn’t want the attention.

“How did make-“ he stopped himself to reformulate his sentence in a grammatically sound way. “How was this bridge made? Did the gods place it?” That would have made this ludicrous construction sensible as far as the origin was concerned, although Apexus was still confused about how the middle parts of the thing didn’t just sink downwards.

“Doubtful,” Reysha said and pointed towards the stacked stones at the rim that made it difficult to tumble into the water. “See those holes? Seems like stones are missing, they probably fell out with time. When gods add things like this to the environment, they are usually magically maintained in some fashion.”

Aclysia nodded and led the way onto the bridge. Apexus was still confounded. “How then?”

“I mean… it’s a bridge?” Reysha didn’t know what the big deal was.

“A tree that’s laying over a river is a bridge,” Apexus blabbered in his confusion, feeling even more overwhelmed by the size of the thing when he stepped on it and it felt just as firm as any other solid ground. “That’s three to ten steps. This is hundreds of metres, maybe several kilometres. How did they even start building this?” He gestured over the railing. “How did they make the pillars? Did they just throw rocks into the water until something stuck? Where did they even get all these rocks? How?”

“Huh,” the tiger girl scratched her head and looked at the bridge in a somewhat puzzled fashion. “When you put it like that, yeah, I guess this shit is pretty impressive.”

That she hadn’t even thought about it made Apexus wonder what other manners of ridiculous humanoid accomplishments were out there. Little did he know that this bridge was a miniscule drop in the bucket in the ever-growing Omniverse. As neither Aclysia nor Reysha had any answers for him on this topic, he just had to take his befuddled state and live with it.

They arrived on the western island as dawn arrived. It had taken literal hours to cross that bridge and its soft rise had eventually brought them a solid fifty metres over the ocean. ‘Absolutely ridiculous,’ Apexus kept thinking, even as they searched for a spot to rest for a few hours.

The western island wasn’t much hotter, but a whole lot more humid. The forest was denser than even those on Ctania. Oddly enough, it was neither the underbrush nor the trees that seemed to dominate the forest, but a large number of plants that grew by hanging from the high-hanging canopies. This created a jungle where the view was obscured and moving was a pain. The floor was covered in roots, making footing difficult, and every step had to be accompanied with brushing motions. One unlucky step could have had anyone stumble into a basically invisible thorn bush.

Luckily for them, this jungle didn’t approach the eastern coasts. They only stayed in it for a bit of sleep, a very insecure and shallow rest. Buzzing, large insects, crying birds, screaming monkeys, they all made for a green hellscape of sounds that made it impossible for any of them to relax. They made very slow progress on the following day. The day after that, they finally arrived at their destination. A strait between the western island and the one called Summer Rest.

The humidity dropped, while the temperature rose. It was a noticeable and pretty quick change. Pairing the warm climate with frequent ocean breezes and it was all very pleasant. For a human, anyway, Apexus could have done without the wind. It cooled him down when the warm environment supplied him with a whole lot of energy.

The Summer Rest island was similar to Ctania in some ways and different in others. Like the island they had come from, the forest wasn’t all that dense. A number of steep hills could be seen in the south and Apexus kept towards them when they initially set over. It was the point that seemed the least densely populated and, because he had to carry Reysha, Apexus had morphed into the quadrupedal shape again. He would need to change back before they could get to any cities.

They spent a few days in the hills, scouting the surrounding area, getting used to wildlife, and other such things. Everything the gnome had said seemed to be true. The animals around were weaker and fatter. They didn’t taste as good due to a lack of magical energy though. They had traces of it at best. Which made them unfit for Reysha to subsist on. They needed to get into the actual dungeon to get a steady supply of food.

Something they had quite an easy time doing, thanks to the layout of things. The Summer Rest dungeon was quite similar to White Wood. A beginner-friendly dungeon located inside a large tree. The insides were populated by different monsters, but that wasn’t the main difference that was important for the trio. All they cared about was that it wasn’t overseen by the Adventurer’s Guild.

There were two large cities in relative travel distance, settlements of several tens of thousands of people, but neither were so close to the dungeon that they had any real way to keep track of who entered and left the dungeon. The trio could use the dungeon as their food supply without any issue. It was safe, easy, the environment was forgiving and pleasant and isolation was easy to come by. Most people on the island lived in those two cities, a very low count of villages connecting the two. It left most of the forest free for whoever wanted to rest anywhere.

An offer many people had clearly taken, now and in the past. The forest was practically defined by former campsites or other places of temporary dwelling. Caves with left-behind possessions, digs that were still filled with sand and ash and outlined with stones, holes that had served for sanitary purposes, and so on.

At first, the trio stayed in one of the caves, then they located a wooden cabin that had clearly been deserted for a while. It wasn’t much, a shack hammered together by someone that barely knew anything about building. A single room with minimalistic furniture, tree stumps for chairs, a stone slab on the dirt floor instead of a table and other such primitive things. The flat roof and the walls had large gaps in them, but it all wasn’t that bad. Only rain would be an issue. A trade-off they took happily, as this cabin was simultaneously harder to find than the cave, settled in a narrow valley between two hills, and closer to the dungeon. It also wasn’t frequented by bats, which was a huge bonus.

Three weeks after they had gotten the map, Apexus fell asleep in a bed for the first time in his life. The mattress was full of holes and the feathers therein lain through to the point of non-existence, but it was a tad nicer than stone regardless. They cuddled up in there like they had done in nature before. Within a few days, they would make it their home, the first one they had since returning from the Clearwater dungeon. They had arrived somewhere safe.

And were without concrete goals.