The more I learned about the burned industrial area, the more fascinated I became. After the Fireshell Tortoise died, we left the area to take shelter and during the day, with a nicely cool parasol made from Ice and Darkness, Luna, Silva and I explored the surrounding area a little more. Lia, in the meantime, had to stay in the shelter I dug, Alex staying with her as company and because the two of them wanted to experiment with the materials we had found.

Keeping our distance from the charred area, the three of us started to walk, occasionally looking into the area to see if there was anything interesting. When we didn’t see anything by the time we had to turn to follow the outer fence, I was a little disappointed but we continued. The disappointment continued, there simply was nothing to see but burned-out buildings and broken equipment, until we reached the next corner of the complex. And that was when I began to realise that something strange was going on here, namely, the dimensions didn’t seem to fit. Unless my sense of orientation inside the area had been completely shot, we had moved further through the area than its outer circumference should allow. It should be impossible unless something was strange with the spatial dimensions inside the area. Or maybe outside the area, by now I wasn’t convinced that simply because the internal dimensions didn’t match the external it was the internal part that was wrong. It might be something else entirely, but my previous idea about it being a dungeon sounded more likely now. Only, there hadn’t been any indication of one while we were inside, no notification nor any additional EXP from killing enemies. At most, the enemies had given a large amount of EXP but nothing too out of the ordinary, nothing that proved it was a dungeon.

“Can you check if there’s anything strange about this area?” I asked Luna, though I had a feeling that the answer would be negative. When she nodded, I tried a few more tests myself, first I simply studied the boundary between the outside and the charred area, and then I began to observe while moving objects across it. Sadly, all my tests came back negative, I was unable to observe any real effect. The best observation I had was that plucked leaves, thrown over the boundary, seemed to lose their lingering vitality a little faster than they normally would. The difference was minute, just a matter of seconds, but I thought it was there. To get better data, I’d have to repeat the test with multiple, identical leaves but after a moment of consideration, I decided against it. Simply not worth the time or effort, not if the observed difference was so insignificant.

By the time I came to that conclusion, Luna had finished her own tests and observation, looking a little perturbed.

“There’s something there, that much is obvious,” she explained, trying very had to talk maturely. I had to hide a grin at her efforts, my munchkin looked incredibly adorable when she tried to be all serious about something, but I wasn’t about to destroy her efforts. Especially as her observations were quite good, mostly focused on what we could actually observe, like the increased temperature inside, the difference between internal and external dimensions and the incredible monster density inside compared to the completely peaceful outside area. All those should be impossible unless there was a reason for the monsters to remain within the area, a reason other than the increased temperature.

Or maybe the temperature was all there was to the area, I doubted it, not with the amount of critters running around without attacking one another, but I couldn’t really know. More observation and exploration was required, if only to harvest the insane amounts of EXP we could get. This was, so far, the best spot to quickly gain levels since I had out-levelled the Shattered a few days after the change happened. Here, I could push my advantage and I’d do so as long as I could before seriously searching for similar areas.

“Say, Mom, wouldn’t the access road normally have signs out front?” Luna asked, making me facepalm at my own inattentiveness. If we wanted to find out what this area used to be, checking the sign was such an obvious action, I couldn’t believe I had missed it.

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After petting Luna’s head for a moment, we moved back to the access road, only to come across another strangeness. The signs near the industrial area were completely destroyed. Not only were they defaced by heat, but they also looked as if they had been ground away by sand or some other mechanical tool. That effect was even visible outside of the charred area, though only for the closest signs. When we followed the broken road to the next crossroad, we came across another shield, telling us that the industrial area used to be a foundry and machine parts manufacturer.

Sadly, the information didn’t really tell me a whole lot, sure, it made sense that there were warehouses and machine shops in an industrial area focused on metal but other than that? The foundry also might be the focus of the Fire energy that had led us here but without a plan of the area, there was little I could do with that information. From outside, I hadn’t been able to identify anything that told me it might be the foundry, no large chimneys or cooling towers or anything of that sort. Maybe because they had been destroyed at some point or because the dimensional shenanigans going on made them impossible to see.

Either way, while we had new information, it didn’t actually help us out. Nonetheless, knowledge was better than ignorance, even if the knowledge didn’t have an immediate effect.

Thinking of the coming grind, I decided to invest my remaining free points and get another Trait for my Intelligence. Those were always useful, especially as I continued to have an almost impossible growth rate of essentially one Intelligence per level.

Trait gained

You gained the Trait: Increased Astral Density

For having 65 Intelligence at your level, you gain a fitting Trait. The Increased Astral Density Trait slightly increases the amount of power each point of your Astral Power has, increasing the impact of all magic with a proportionally increased need for control.

For a moment, I found myself confused as to why I had an increased destiny until I realised my mind had switched letters up and I had an increased density. Getting dense, heh. The realisation made things clearer, though I wasn’t sure how it would work in practice. If each point held more power, I’d have to use less Astral Power to get the same effect but at the same time, I wouldn’t be able to use the same precision as before, simply because I couldn’t ‘count’ as precisely as before. Though I never really had tried to feel out the individual points of Astral Power, instead, I had simply pushed power into my spells and made them work, the superfluous energy being just that, superfluous and thus wasted.

Maybe I should try to improve my precision and make the most out of the power I had, while I was currently able to simply wing things and make them work, I doubted it would last forever, especially once my power was great enough that I couldn’t easily interact with weaker beings. I didn’t want to let things get to the point where I began to hurt people simply because my control over my magic was lacking. If I hurt people, I wanted it to be because of my intent, not because I was sloppy.

With that determination made, Luna and I continued on our path around the charred area, mostly to make sure we hadn’t missed anything. It didn’t take long to walk around it, making it completely obvious that it was larger on the inside and I, once more, began to wonder how that worked. I now had seen two places that were dimensionally expanded, one where the outside had grown larger but without changing its physical relation to the rest of the world, as impossible as that should be and here one that seemed to have kept its outside dimensions but was larger on the inside.

Neither effect should really be possible, though the second one felt more reasonable, though that might simply be my brain conceptualising things using video-game concepts. An instanced dungeon was a known concept, though none of the ones I had visited had been as blatant in their incongruence as it was the case here. Only, it wasn’t an instanced dungeon, nor was there any indication of how this area worked.

Somehow, I already knew I’d get a headache or five out of my attempts trying to understand this area. And yet, despite that conviction, I also knew that it wouldn’t stop me in the slightest. Maybe I should ask Alex to prepare some headache medicine or something like that.