Tsaimath

Chapter 885

The monotony of our journey was interrupted when we came across the next major city. Or rather, another major city, if we had tried we’d have been able to visit other cities with only a day or three of detour, but neither my children nor I had been terribly interested. But now, with the dark remains of a skyline stretching across the gloomy night sky ahead, we’d have to detour if we wanted ...

Chapter 884

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 ...

Interlude: We've got fun and... books?

“What is all this?” Tank asked, after squeezing himself after their wayward witch. The entire place looked like something right out of a fantasy novel, or maybe a movie about rings, kings and small people living underground in very nice holes. This might just be one of those comfortable holes, made to be lived in and enjoyed, even if it currently lacked the furnishing and, maybe most import...

Interlude: Welcome to the Jungle

If an environment was to be judged by the number and vociferousness of the curses uttered while traversing said environment, the jungle that had sprung up near a certain city would rank near the top of the list. Or the bottom, depending on whether more and louder curses were deemed good or bad.

Either way, as a small group of five people was moving through the dense underbrush, the entire...

Chapter 883

“So, does anyone think they can accomplish something more in this forest?” I asked once everyone had sat down for our evening meal. It was something akin to breakfast for Lia, though she primarily ate for the taste, taking her nourishment from my blood, dinner for Luna and something in between for me. It was also the one meal we all shared as a family, and thus the best time to discuss thin...

Chapter 882

Maybe letting Luna play in the forest of murderous plants hadn’t been the best idea I’ve ever had. On the one hand, her life magic went through the roof from what she told me, gaining quite a few skill points and even adding an interesting special ability to her repertoire after communing with Hecate. It allowed her to control the plants she grew with her magic to a far greater extent. Now,...

Chapter 881

Sadly, even a full day of rest didn’t make matters more obvious. When I returned to the clearing the night after we defeated the dungeon, the hotel remained gone. I had no idea if that was a function of us defeating it, something akin to the lock-out we had experienced after repeatedly clearing the other dungeon, or if it was something else. Given that the entire clearing was covered in grass...

Chapter 880

Looking at the notifications, I got some answers though they weren’t terribly informative. The obvious ones were a pair of level-up notifications, bringing me to sixty-five, one that told me that my Darkness Magic had risen to fifty. Additionally, there was one telling me that the Dungeon Explorer Title had been ungraded because we earned it again, increasing the amount of EXP we gained when ...

Chapter 879

As I hesitated over my own actions for a moment, Lia and Silva tore into the moving plushies, likely happy to have something to tear apart after hours of cautious trudging and avoiding traps. Both of them were beings of action and being subject to repeated attacks that they couldn’t fight back against couldn’t sit well with them, but now, they had something to take their frustrations out on...

Chapter 878

As we continued through the Waldhof Dungeon, it kept its theme constant. From the laundry room with its shifting tiles, we moved back to the kitchen at Alex’ urging, where they used some of the chemicals and kitchen appliances to remove the stupidly sticky grime from the key we had found. Cleaning it gave us another portion of EXP, enough to push me to a level up and level sixty-three, bringi...

Chapter 877

Looking into the laundry room, we still couldn’t see any danger. That might be because there was none, or because the danger came from traps or similar hazards we had yet to detect. It was just like this entire place, eerily quiet and filled with an, now moist, air of foreboding. Even without the mist I had just conjured, there would be a chill in the air, one strong enough to send shivers do...

Chapter 876

Repeated attempts on the door yielded no result. After almost ten minutes of fruitless work, and trying to keep the strange slapping vine from causing us bodily harm, we gave up and decided to check out the rest of the place. Maybe we’d find the bloody key somewhere and could open the door that way.

After a moment of consideration, we moved to the singular open door first, looking into ...

Chapter 875

After circling the building once, just to make sure there was no backdoor or anything else we had missed, we stood back at the front entrance. The brush growing out of the interior was still there and now, from up close, I could see that it was a thorny mess that one didn’t want to tangle with. Not unless one was forced to or had some incredibly sturdy equipment, anything else would get torn ...

Chapter 874

If anybody had been watching while we performed our next set of tests, they’d have thought us monsters. Given that we had no idea what the grass around the hotel might be, the first thing we needed to do was make sure the area was safe to approach and we wouldn’t die outright, simply for stepping into it.

Catching a squirrel without damaging it was surprisingly easy. a simple blast of...

Chapter 873

After circling the clearing the impossible hotel was on once we returned to the spot we had started from. The clearing was just that, a wide area of grass with the hotel sitting smack-dab in the middle. The building itself was overgrown with various vines and some strange plants were peeking out from multiple windows, but curiously I couldn’t make out anything else through those windows, the ...

Chapter 872

“It should be somewhere nearby,” Lia grumbled, looking around once more. As so often these last few nights, it was only Lia and myself out here. Alex had decided to remain behind and perform some experiments on the somnus grass, as we had dubbed the grass that constantly spread magical sleeping gas, in an attempt to harness its effect, while Luna and Silva simply couldn’t keep up with us....

Chapter 871

The last few days had been quite interesting. Exploring the forest and its… fascinating flora was something else, making me wonder about the speed of adaption in regards to the system. It seemed to me that some of the simpler organisms had rapidly adapted and became something wholly new, as the Withering Fungus and the magic algae in the lake had done. Similarly, the carnivorous plants here i...

Chapter 870

With a wide grin on my face, I pushed off the branch I had taken a short break on, flying through the air to reach the next. There was a lot of forest to explore, far more than I had thought possible. It would take us days, maybe even weeks, to explore it all, and that was with the fairly insane speed Lia and I could use to traverse it. It was something I had done on Mundus, though with quite a...

Chapter 869

Having the munchkin by my side made things far easier than it should have by any measure known to me. There was something about her presence, something beyond the skills and affinities she had been blessed with that made working magic flow smoother, as if an unknown obstacle was removed. The change wasn’t truly major but it was noticeable, her presence adding just that little extra to make me...

Chapter 868

Softly whistling to myself, I opened up the space beneath the giant tree. There was an almost impossible warmth to the earth here, it was teeming with vitality and power, making me wonder if I could use some of that power for my own purposes. Images painted by the words of a brilliant writer, later adapted into excellent movies, flittered through my mind, describing a wonderful hole in the grou...

Chapter 867

After hearing the howls of Gravehounds while in the shadows, we moved as quickly as possible without completely abandoning our vigilance. If the hounds were after us, we didn’t want them to happen upon us while we were in battle, that might be the one case where they could cause us serious harm. Otherwise, they were simply too fragile to withstand concentrated strikes from my Darkness Magic b...

Interlude: Survivors 404 - Not Found

Sometimes, important events don’t start with a bang. There was no announcement, no explosive incident, nothing to indicate that something fundamental was changing, just a single whisper, passed from one person to another.

In this case, the single whisper went something along the lines of, ‘Have you heard what that insane witch living in the old brewery did?’ and continued from there...

Chapter 866

Maybe it was for the best that things worked out as they did. There was no real need for us to stick around, especially not if the people at the farm didn’t want us nearby. No need to make things difficult for them, at least as long as they honoured their debts towards me and gave us some additional supplies. We might not strictly need them, we had looted plenty, especially considering our re...

Chapter 865

My conversation with Luna continued for a little longer, the focus of it shifting from her worries to a more practical thing, namely the question I had been pondering before. What did she want to do and how sad would she be if we left the area behind?

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that she didn’t really mind leaving. If anything, she welcomed it, as she felt like an o...

Chapter 864

After returning to our lair, I started to, once again, consider the current state of affairs. What were we really doing here, near the farm? How useful and practical was it to stay, compared to going out and exploring? My biggest concern in that regard was Luna. If we started to travel, she’d lose the friends she had made, few as they were. Making friends was difficult for her, something I co...

Chapter 863

Looking around the area we had been in for the last few days, I decided there currently wasn’t anything else to do. The lake, while interesting, was currently beyond my capabilities to explore. I had bottled some of the water in a glass bottle, hoping that I could perform some experiments on the algae later, but that wasn’t a real priority. Similarly, the large creature in the lake wasn’t...

Chapter 862

Knowing that there might be beasts behind us, or at least that there were beasts out there, baying for somebody’s blood after we killed a few of their number, was enough to motivate us to leave with haste. It wasn’t that the Gravehounds were dangerous in open combat, but their ability to avoid attacks and who knew what else by partially phasing into the shadows made them far more dangerous ...

Chapter 861

There was something weird about the graveyard. It wasn’t just that a good portion of it had gone into the river thanks to a landslide, though that was part of it, no, there was something else at work. Some of me was convinced that it was magical, to the point that I had to constantly taste the air and my eyes started to glow a little from the amount of focus I put on my magical sight, but the...

Chapter 860

As we made our way upriver, I realised just how fascinating the area we were in truly was. Not only did the lake provide ample water, but the water also had a fairly interesting effect on the local wildlife, something I hadn’t noticed before due to their relative weakness. A beast around level thirty, unable to detect us before Lia or Silva could strike, wasn’t even a minor threat, even if ...

Chapter 859

Sitting in our nicely enlarged cave, I was trying to figure out how to proceed. The marsh and its inhabitants weren’t at a level that would grant me a lot of EXP, only Luna stood to gain any if we hunted in the area, but that was only for the creatures we had actually seen. The larger plant-creature in the water might have a higher level or it might have some special circumstances that grante...