Travelling northwards from the forest of wonky dimensions, as I had taken to calling the damned place that messed with my mind in ways I didn’t appreciate, was strangely boring. On one hand, there wasn’t anything really new, just open fields, a few small- and medium-sized towns and a few forests. Those, luckily, hadn’t been messing with their dimensions to become larger than they had any right to be, at least not in ways I could detect, but it also meant they were fairly boring. A few squirrels, some wild cats, various birds, rabbits, weasels and foxes, nothing that was willing to do anything but flee when noticing us. We occasionally harvested some of them for food, just like we did with the various produce now growing in the wild, but that wasn’t interesting, either.

On the other hand, there was the sheer impossibility of the forest we had left. By getting larger, it should have shifted roads and everything, given that it hadn’t taken over space that had been there before, and thus there should have been some evidence of that. But there wasn’t, it was as if the forest had always been its current size as if the land hadn’t changed at all. Which was impossible and my inability to figure out how that could work, even on a simple, geometric level, annoyed me greatly. I wasn’t even trying to understand how the expansion could be done magically or physically; just understanding its geometry would be enough to assuage my curiosity, but I wasn’t able to get that, either. It was an enigma and one that I hated with a burning passion, to the point that I considered going back and setting the entire area ablaze or something, maybe freezing it and turning it into a glacier or letting the shadows swallow it all up.

Alas, as amusing as thoughts of retribution against enigmatic areas were, I wasn’t about to invest days, maybe weeks, of time and untold amounts of effort into senseless destruction. There were better ways to use my time and more important things I wanted to destroy or needed to achieve. We might manage to solve the enigma at some point, but for now, I was content to leave it as an inexplicable phenomenon and move past, and away, from it.

We saw a few smaller communities on our journey north but none were as developed as the people around Apple Gate Farm had been. I considered approaching them but even from a distance, I could see that these people had nothing of interest to us, at best they’d need our help and at worst they’d attack us because we were different or some stupidity like that. I didn’t want my daughters, well, I didn’t want Luna, to see us kill humans, people, at least not until she had a bit more time to mature. So, until we encountered a community with some magical and racial diversity, I wasn’t about to approach anyone, not unless I felt they could give us something.

And so we kept moving north, away from the forest we had left. For a little over two weeks, we simply kept moving, travelling during the night and spending our days in some sort of shelter. Either taking over a somewhat intact building and using that as shelter or by swiftly digging a hole into the ground. By now, I was quick enough with my Earth Magic that I could dig a shelter in some twenty, maybe thirty minutes. Those weren’t the most comfortable places to spend our time but it worked, the Sun couldn’t get to us and Silva and Luna could take a bit of time to enjoy outside.

That much time spent walking gave me ample opportunity to lose myself in arcane considerations, especially in regard to the Void Crystal. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to make something similar to Lenore using the two items, though I doubted I’d manage to actually make life with them. But a permanent scrying construct, that I might be able to accomplish, maybe even a way to grant me the ability to fly but I was much more doubtful about that one. Creating a specialised construct that I could shift my mind into and go exploring was fairly simple, especially with the materials I had on hand. But to make one that I could shift my entire body into, that was much, much more difficult.

To accomplish either, I needed a medium, though not necessarily a physical one. Instead, I spent quite a bit of time each day, as we were running, with my hands hidden in my sleeves. That way, I could focus on weaving the shadows within my sleeves together, knitting them tightly into something resembling a fabric. It wasn’t really one, nor did it have any physical substance, it was less and yet so much more. As long as it was handled with Darkness Magic, and later wrapped around the Void Crystal, it was able to block everything, be it a physical object or magical energy. Sure, if it was pushed with a physical object it reacted like any other unattached cloth-like substance and wrapped itself around the object, but penetrating it? That’d need some serious magical oompf, we tested it against my Icicles and even Lia’s cleaver and the results were quite interesting. It took Astral Power, quite a bit of it actually, but the shadowy Cloth I had woven was able to withstand either, making me think that it wasn’t really cloth but that it absorbed energy in all forms, as long as I provided the Astral Power needed to neutralise the energy. Thus, an object hitting the cloth caused the kinetic energy of that object to be absorbed, effectively neutralising the impact. Magical attacks hitting the cloth, same difference, it was energy and could be neutralised.

This made me think that wrapping the cloth around the Void Crystal worked to preserve it while I wasn’t working with the cloth. The crystal was concentrated Darkness Astral Power, allowing the cloth to leach just a little of that power into itself to resist the continued influx of energy from outside of it, be that heat, what little light could get through the fabric of my pack, and so on.

Amusingly, the more I learned about the strange non-physical cloth I was making, the further away I got from using the Void Crystal and Lenore’s Feather to create something interesting. The fabric took up too much of my time and effort, to say nothing of the fact that I needed the Void Crystal to keep it stable while I wasn’t actively using my magic to keep it stable.

The idea of stability was what gave me the next direction when it came to the Shadow Cloth, I had creatively named the fabric that the system couldn’t recognise just yet. If I tried to Inspect the fabric, I didn’t get any results, making me think that it was not permanent enough just yet, similar to the way the system wouldn’t give results when trying to Inspect conjured Ice. Unless I put enough power into the Ice to make it last for a while, as I had with the Frozen Shuttle and a few of the frozen blades I carried around with me, just in case I needed a sharp weapon.

Now, my idea was to combine Ice Magic, especially in regards to the concepts of permanence, eternity and stillness, all of which I couldn’t access with my Rune Magic as they were high-level concepts, with the Cloth I had created. I wasn’t sure what I might create by doing so, but I hoped that I’d either get something similar to the Void Crystal or a permanent non-physical fabric. The fabric would likely open up some very interesting avenues, especially when it came to magical bags and concealment cloaks, but that was all theoretical for now. And would remain that way until I managed to create the stuff I could only imagine at the moment.

My work on the cloth and trying to combine it with my Ice Magic had some measurable benefits, as had the repeated creation of underground shelters. The shelters brought my Earth Magic up by another point but as I worked I continued to use my Earth Rune Mastery in the work, increasing it by another two points, bringing the skills to twenty and fifteen respectively.

But those gains were relatively minor in comparison to the gains I made with Darkness Magic, Darkness Rune Mastery and Ice Magic. Darkness Magic went up by only two points, nothing too major but considering that it was now at fifty-two I wasn’t complaining. Similarly, the Rune Mastery gained two points, reaching level forty-nine and I had a feeling it would soon reach fifty, allowing me to learn yet another Rune. Ice Magic only got a single point, bringing it to fifty-four, but that was okay, if I managed to actually use the concepts I couldn’t express with runes just yet, I’d get a huge boost.

Lastly, trying to create a purely magical fabric seemed to work wonders for my Enchanting Skill, maybe because the fabric would be magical in its own right or something like that, I wasn’t sure. Whatever the case, my attempts brought my Enchanting Skill to ten, giving me some extra confidence when it came to unravelling and understanding the enchantments on items we had found in Dungeons. Sadly, so far that project hadn’t borne any tangible results, though I had high hopes for it. Someday, I’d get it right.