The Charland, as I had begun to refer to the burned industrial park, was fascinating. A part of me, the rational part of my mind, was insisting it was completely impossible. Too large, too many enemies and far too much energy, all packed into a slice of reality that shouldn’t be able to contain it all. And yet, despite the misgivings of my rational, scientific part, reality obviously didn’t agree with me, nor did the system, or so it seemed. There was no indication the system considered the area anything but ordinary and after repeatedly bashing my head against the cognitive wall of things I considered possible, I had decided to spare myself the headache and go with the flow. Or rather, go with the copious amount of EXP we could harvest in the Charland, alongside the materials that made a crafter’s heart pound with excitement. At least it did so for Alex, Lia and myself.

Sure, the only way we had to manipulate metal was my Crystal Magic and that took a fair amount of Astral Power while being limited to essentially cold forming which greatly limited what I could do in terms of precision and sharpness but that was only part of the problem. The bigger problem was that Alex and Lia needed to work with the metal in a malleable state without involving magic, and that was where I had to completely tap out. For that, they’d need a crucible or forge or something along those lines, a place that could produce intense heat without direct magical induction. Or, in other words, it needed something possibly hidden in the Charland, which meant we had to be somewhat careful while exploring, as the destruction of such an appliance would be incredibly annoying.

Luckily, I wasn’t as limited when it came to my enchanting. I only had to find the right sort of metal, with the correct inherent magical biases, form it into a suitable shape and start enchanting. Of course, it sounded far easier than it practically was, meaning I had to sift through the various bits and pieces of metal, bone and tooth we looted, looking for something that wasn’t inherently a mess of Fire and Poison. Not that those two elements were evil or anything the like, but I had a feeling they’d be perfect if I wanted to make some sort of enchanted ammunition or maybe even for blades that were enchanted later. Essentially, they were great for items that did bad things to enemies, less so for items that enhanced your allies.

It was a good thing that the Charland seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of both enemies and metal, so we only had to kill enough of the first to get the right kind of metal, which, thanks to their suitably high level meant we just had to farm the area. Killing dozens, if not hundreds, of the critters was an exciting prospect, knowing that we had come across a possibly unique area that could increase our powers would always bring a smile to my face.

For about a week, we had ventured into the Charlands each night, making sure we didn’t venture in too far, instead trying to figure out how big they actually were by staying near the edge and killing everything that was attacking us. The EXP were good, giving me multiple levels though the progress was already slowing down now that I was level seventy-six but four levels in a week were incredible progress, six if I counted that first day.

My skills didn’t go up as much, though I did get a few points in Ice, Water and Wind Magic, mostly because I used Wind and Water to carry the chill from my Ice, trying to circumvent some of the defences the local creatures had. Similarly, my Mind Magic nicely combined with my Darkness Magic, allowing me to bring confusion to my enemies, making them easy prey for the others. All those skills, and their respective Rune Masteries, gained a few levels, though none had any real, quantitive changes.

The only somewhat significant change came from having my Agility reach thirty-five, thanks to Dragon-Touched, which, in turn, came with a Trait called Balanced that increased my, well, balance by a small amount. Not enough to be readily but it was nice to have and given that I had been perching on unstable structures quite a lot, the trait was very welcome.

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Sadly, while gaining skills and levels was great, I also wanted to get information, mainly information on how the Charlands worked and what they were. In that regard, the only real progress we managed to make was to increase our confusion as things didn’t work out as we wanted, though we did note down a few interesting observations. None that made sense but they were interesting nonetheless. Or maybe especially because they didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

The first experiment was to have Luna, Silva and Alex wait outside, while Lia and I moved into the Charlands to see what they’d see as we entered. It turned out that our forms rapidly became blurry before vanishing. Not even Luna’s divinely granted sight could pierce through the effect and when we changed the pairing, with Alex and myself waiting outside while Lia, Silva and Luna moved inside, I could only watch them disappear in a heat haze. No magical effects were visible, nothing that hinted anything was going on. Well, nothing but the obvious things we could observe but not figure out how it worked.

Another experiment we tried, once it became obvious that the Charlands were bigger on the inside with a fairly unrestricted transference from inside to outside, was having me move a certain distance within the Charlands but along the edge before leaving it again, trying to get an idea of the relationship between inside dimensions and outside dimensions. It turned out, that moving five or ten metres inside brought me to roughly the same spot outside, though when Lia and I moved together inside, before splitting to get a direct comparison, it turned out that there was a difference but not a large one. When I moved a longer distance inside the Charlands, easily crossing a kilometre, my exit point only moved around fifteen metres.

From that, we began to presume that the inside dimensions were simply so much larger than the outside, so the previous small measurement was just too small to register without a direct comparison and better tools.

So, we tried to have Lia move in one direction while I took the other direction, hoping that we’d get a better idea of the factor between inside and outside dimensions. We both tried to move the same distance within the Charlands, both shooting for a thousand steps of comparable length, but when we stepped outside, it turned out that I had moved fifteen metres while Lia had only moved five. When comparing the length of the used steps, we could only agree that the difference in length was minor, so to have such a big difference in the factor meant it wasn’t linear, setting our observations back once more.

Another thing we tried was having me carry a length of rope, well a vine conjured by Luna, into the Charland, while Luna held on to the other end, hoping that we’d be able to get an idea about the difference between the inside and the outside. Again, we were met with failure, there was a roughly five-metre-wide zone that marked the boundary between the inside and the outside. When I carried the vine across the zone, it first stretched before tearing apart quite violently, snapping in ways that a normal vine couldn’t.

Luna, when asked afterwards, reported a strange, stinging pain that came as feedback from her Astral Power, something I could confirm when I tried something similar with a conjured Icicle. Physically connecting the inside and the outside seemed to be impossible, at least with our current means.

Similarly, trying to observe the exact boundary was impossible. We tried to repeat our previous experiments and have Lia move on the boundary, with Luna observing from the outside and me observing from the inside. It didn’t work out, the idea was that Lia would stop as soon as she saw me inside, before turning back to check if she could see Luna outside but there was no point at which both was possible. Just the act of turning around seemed to shift whether she was considered inside the effect or outside, an observation that only added to our collective headache.

At that point, Lia suggested we focus on killing more enemies within the Charland and increase our skills instead of spending hours testing things only to get more confused with every experiment that failed to yield the predicted results. I wasn’t quite ready to throw in the towel but even I had to admit that a part of me wanted to stop trying and simply kill everything that moved, hoping that the Charland would eventually start to make sense.