The next day, we stopped hugging the outskirts of the mountain and started heading directly into the mountains.
Once we left the outskirts of the mountains, I started to notice that the essence in our surroundings was very… odd. Rather than simply drifting about, the essence in the mountains seemed to surge and ripple at constant intervals. It almost looked like a machine - every single rhythmic pump of the essence in our surroundings reminded me of the giant industrial mixer we had seen alchemists under the city using. There was a very specific order and rhythm to it that was hard to notice at first, but became increasingly obvious the more I paid attention to it. I had no idea how the essence was being manipulated to move so precisely, but it was obvious that someone or something had fundamentally altered the way essence behaved in this area for some reason.
Most interestingly, however, was the presence of manifestation essence. It was faint, but I could definitely detect little specks of manifestation essence mixed with the binding essence in the area. The ratio of binding essence to manifestation essence was probably around 9:1, so there wasn’t exactly a huge amount of manifestation essence here. But considering the fact that manifestation essence wasn’t native to this world at all, seeing so much binding essence in one place was clearly unnatural.
Felix was incredibly interested in our surroundings. He constantly stared at the binding essence in our surroundings, frowning and squinting as he glared at it.
<Does anyone else think the essence here is weird?> asked Felix, after a moment. <It seems… almost like some sort of giant machine, but it’s made entirely out of essence. I don’t understand what it’s doing, or how this is even possible.>
<I also get the impression it’s kind of like a giant magical machine,> I said. <But that’s as much as I figured out.>
<Maybe Old Mo knows something?> said Sallia. <The people of this world have probably spent at least some time investigating these mountains. Maybe they figured it out?>
“What is the essence in this area doing?” I asked. “And what’s up with that… weird essence?” I wasn’t sure if people of this world had a specific word for ‘manifestation essence,’ so I opted to call it ‘weird essence’ for now.
Anise’s father nodded at my words. “The area feels… wrong to me,” he said as he shivered.
I frowned, and mentally poked at a little blob of manifestation essence with my mind. There wasn’t anything ‘wrong’ with it, at least in my eyes. It felt exactly the same as the essence we had encountered in our previous world. Perhaps Anise’s father just found manifestation essence itself weird?
A few moments later, I got a deeper understanding of what he meant when he said the essence felt wrong.
The local laws of reality in this dimension didn’t support manifestation essence at all, which was why it didn’t naturally form here. This didn’t strike me as particularly unusual - after what we had already seen during our time in the Market, I just took it for granted that some dimensions had certain kinds of essence and others didn’t. But when I felt the manifestation essence in this area, it felt… almost like it was rubbing against something in a way that wasn’t supposed to happen.
It was similar to water and oil, in a sense. The manifestation essence itself wasn’t what was weird here - it was the fact that the manifestation essence was somehow interacting with the laws of reality. I was surprised Anise’s father managed to pick up on the fact that the laws of reality were being distorted in this area, when even I hadn’t noticed it immediately.
It also opened my eyes to several new possibilities and ideas that I had never considered before. I now had at least some idea what the ‘machine’ made of essence was doing - it was very slightly altering the laws of reality itself in the area. However, that made me think even harder about what we were walking into. Somehow, a person or group of people in this area had created a massive machine-like thing entirely out of essence, and that ‘machine’ was manipulating the laws of reality itself.
I hadn’t even been aware that manifestation essence and binding essence could interact with the laws of reality - I had assumed that was a property exclusive to alteration essence. But clearly, I was wrong.
I didn’t know exactly what law of reality was being tweaked in the mountain area, but I suspected it was related to the fact that manifestation essence was present here. In any case, the laws of reality in the mountains wouldn’t cause my organs to instantly collapse or come to life, at least. If the laws of reality in the mountains did that, there was no way Old Mo would have led us here.
<Felix, I think the essence here is messing with reality itself somehow,> I sent. <Kind of like the living universe from our last life, although it’s considerably less terrifying.>
Felix didn’t say anything - he just stared even more closely at the ordered pumping of binding and manifestation essence in our area, as if he wished to swallow everything in the area whole using only his eyes.
“Nobody knows what the essence in this area is doing,” said Old Mo. “Dozens, or perhaps hundreds of great scholars and alchemists have studied the mountain ranges of our continent and tried to figure it out. At its height, the Zelyr empire controlled most of the continent - and every single mountain range they controlled has a similar mixture of binding essence and the weird essence. Some scholars even claim that the surges of essence in this area are random, and just appear to be ordered.”
Old Mo shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know if I buy that. The Zelyr did a lot of feats that seem impossible, according to our modern understanding of alchemy. We’ve learned how to do a lot, especially over the last few decades. We’ve created factories, iron ships that sail as well as wooden ones, made potions an object that can be mass-produced by the gallon… but we still can’t figure out how the ancient Zelyr did half of the things they did. We still have no idea how to create artificial life, while the Zelyr did it with ease, for example.”
I resisted the urge to glance at Felix the artificial life form.
I wondered if Felix’s body was made with some number of ancient Zelyr artifacts - we had rescued him from a facility that was probably dedicated to the study of ancient Zelyr artifacts, after all, and we had found all sorts of other weird artifacts when we rescued Felix. If Old Mo felt that artificial life was beyond the bounds of current technology to create… that might indicate that Felix had a deeper connection with the ancient Zelyr than I had anticipated.
“Is it dangerous?” asked Anise’s father, his fingers unconsciously creeping towards the gun he had clumsily strapped to his waist.
“Almost certainly not,” said Old Mo. “Hundreds of scholars have visited the mountains and studied them over the years, and nothing particularly interesting has happened. I highly doubt that we’re unlucky enough to run into these old essence machines breaking down in the middle of… whatever it is they’re doing, and they definitely don’t respond to people just walking through the mountains. In fact, they don’t even respond to alchemists trying to manipulate them with binding essence - anyone who tries just ends up feeling like they tried to push a mountain. These essence patterns have far too much power in them for an entire army to disrupt them, much less our little group.”
I frowned in thought. Normally the essence machines probably wouldn’t respond to anything - but we currently had Felix the first artificial baby with us, and Sallia and I were also frequently using manifestation and alteration essence as we moved along. If an ancient empire had some knowledge of manifestation essence, and even found a way to make it ‘native’ to a certain area… perhaps they had some sort of knowledge of other essences too? Or perhaps the essence patterns would react to a proper manifestation essence user? I decided to be on my guard, just in case.
At the same time, I also started using my spatial perception to investigate the area around us. Given the potential link between the Zelyr and Felix’s creation, I was very, very interested in investigating ruins of this ancient empire. I… wasn’t quite sure whether the non-Market members of our group would be quite as enthusiastic about ancient ruin exploration as I was, but I hoped to check out a ruin or two if we got the chance. Given how strong our group seemed compared to the threats on this planet, we could probably even explore an ancient ruin without horribly dying at the end.
I smiled at the thought, before I frowned. I needed to keep my guard up. Even though most of the people of this world weren’t very threatening without guns and numbers on their side, the Zelyr empire was rather strange. Aplos, which had probably also come from the Zelyr empire, might not have been able to threaten us that severely - however, it had still posed some threat to our group. If we were cornered by ten or fifteen of such creatures, I wasn’t sure if our group would survive. I needed to keep my guard up.
After a few more minutes of watching the weird essence, Anise’s father seemed to calm down a little bit. We took our first step into the mountains, and into the midst of the strange manifestation and binding essence swirling through the air.
And almost immediately afterwards, Anise let out a mental gasp of surprise.
<My orb is heating up!>
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hesk0oa· Mar 9, 2024
