Angie’s army had finally reached something that tested their discipline. Despite their continuous progress into a force that was as deadly as Trgl’s while being so completely different that it boggled the mind, their control was challenged when they encountered something they thought to be impossible. They were approaching the horizon.

From all the records I had access to I was able to figure out what was happening, but the cannibals had no idea about their situation. All they knew was that the white wall at the edge of their vision that bled into the black of the sky was closing in on them. And they had orders to approach it.

The length of time it took to approach the wall of white was long enough that the actual effect on the army would be difficult to see with their methods of sight, but having access to their wills allowed me to see the utter chaos that was behind their eyes. Angie alone was actually as unfazed as she made herself appear to everyone else. A massive portion of why was the fact that I’d told her she could design her own avatar. With my refinement, of course. The entirety of her processing power that came from the will-core orbiting mine was devoted to the task, ignoring everything else as she was almost as enthusiastic about being the first avatar and being right there to watch in person as I developed a new magic that defied her understanding as she was about getting to choose how it was made. She’d be the first to gain a second body, the one that drew the most of my attention of everyone I would ever give a second body. Even the risk of having a less capable avatar than later versions mattered very little to her in comparison.

Her enthusiasm in exploring my understanding of circuitry as she tried to develop the ideal body was boundless. I’d never seen one of my worshippers devote their consciousness so entirely to the will-core orbiting my own. I wasn’t sure if it was because she was a cardinal or because that was where the connection she was getting all the information from was. Either way, her fleshy body had only the barest sliver of her attention. A sliver that was larger than the whole of her attention had been prior to my advancing her will-core circuit into the sixth class, but still a comparative sliver. I hadn’t anticipated the changes to her consciousness that happened after advancing her will-cores in class. The way her consciousness flitted between will-cores was much more similar to how my will could move effortlessly across space than how a will-core functioned in my case. It was as if her will-cores were all in the same place and any resources available to one were available to all, but they remained intact in their separate state. I wasn’t sure if this was the difference between forming your own will-core circuit and having one branded on you, but I could never have separated myself into separate will-cores and functioned as a single individual. Not with how my will functioned without being connected to the will-core by a principle I still didn’t understand. I was excited to see how it worked when I drew some of her will from each core and transplanted them into a third body, if she would retain the self that spanned two bodies into three or fracture into three…or split into the mixed will-core and the two origin would retain their self…anything could happen.

The sliver in her body was utterly unfazed by the approaching horizon. She may not be able to see into my will as I did hers, but she didn’t care. That her life was mine to do with as I saw fit was so engraved into her will that if the white wall actually was an annihilative force that would erase her from existence she’d walk into it with a smile knowing she was fulfilling her purpose. Probably expecting another avatar as the body was annihilated, but that didn’t cheapen the sacrifice. Much. Also, knowing that she was chief among my believers helped. A surprising aspect of becoming a cardinal, or advancing to sixth class, was that she was able to feel within my maelstrom of worshippers. She knew she was the only cardinal, though the number of priests ensured that despite being first she wouldn’t be the only one for long. The largest reaction I’d seen from her since she became a cardinal was when she felt the goliaths join the ranks of priests. That phase of rabid need to enter the next phase for her own superiority was worrying, but it had passed in a day or two. The remnants of that rabid need remained, but she’d managed to suppress them. For the most part.

Her calm curiosity now was exactly what I’d expect from my cardinal. The circuitry she used to try to answer the question was also exactly as I would have done if I didn’t know what was happening. Her first idea was that the trees were doing something, so she explored their cores, branches, and feet. She couldn’t see anything different between before they’d seen the horizon approach and now, however. Even the rate at which the feet moved the trees away from the horizon was unchanged. The slithering grass was similarly unaffected. She didn’t have the will-based sensory experience to actually notice the changes in the greenery that surrounded them. 

At least, she hadn’t discovered yet that she had the will-based sensory ability to actually notice the changes in the greenery that surrounded them. I’d noticed tendrils of her will acting in ways that suggested she’s been getting information from them, but she was far from the ability to freely manipulate and understand her own will as I did mine. She may gain the ability to understand intent, though. That shouldn’t be too hard for her to understand. It would probably start as a slight discrepancy between what she understood someone as saying and what they actually said. Given how little she interacted with people…that could take her a long time to understand and use deliberately. Maybe she’d never discover she had that ability. Maybe I should stop reading her cardinal will-core and force her to project her intent to communicate with me. That would provide more than adequate incentive for her to learn. Maybe when the ability to communicate with intent would allow her to communicate better with anyone apart from myself.

Her next idea was that it was an air-based phenomenon and started investigating that. This investigation bore fruit. She noticed that the air was sluggish to respond to her circuitry, as if there was another force mixed in that worked with different circuits. She triumphantly exclaimed her genius and presented me with her discovery. “Indeed. What you’re feeling in the air is called water. We’re approaching an ocean. Their movement is so slow that no cities have been swallowed by oceans since near the beginning of the Conclave, but they’re unstoppable and as such the Conclave has very recent records of cities forced to relocate due to their influence. Many get exterminated in the process, but some survive.” Her awe at the breadth of my knowledge warred with her irritation at being forced to discover the answer for herself before I shared my information, but she realized the worth of her effort in moments and had yet another reason to feel awe.

I hadn’t expected her to pick up on the fact that I gained more information by allowing her to learn the answer herself as her method revealed more about the phenomenon than the investigative reporting the Cannibal Conclave did. There was more overlap with my own investigations, but the specifics of her method had allowed me to realize that the trees were different. I wouldn’t have even considered that the mist was a byproduct of something the trees were doing. Especially since I already knew it came from the ocean and wasn’t looking to answer how it got there.

Her sharing her new knowledge with the army did little to assuage their terror. Faced with a phenomenon so massive it made chickens look small, it was small consolation to know that others had encountered it before or understood how it worked. That effect was amplified when the mist thickened enough that it was hindering their direct ability to see possible enemies in the surroundings, an irrational line to draw as the trees had been thickening at a faster pace and inhibiting their ability to know their surrounding more than the mist was. At that moment.

The local fauna being cautious was as new an experience for me as the flora being relevant. The creatures themselves were often unchanged, the majority being bears or hounds, but their timidity was very different. I didn’t need to clean any creatures out of the path of the army because everything avoided contact in the first place. The mist deadening senses probably had a large portion of the blame for that. Not only sight but also smells and sounds had difficulty penetrating the mist. Most surprising of all, the diffusion of the leaking mana from each of the monsters was suppressed to an amazing degree. The abnormal silence broken by the creak of leather and stomp of feet that failed to echo as it should was extremely unnerving for both men and beasts. It wasn’t even something they understood. Merely the fact that every sound was crisp and ended more abruptly than it should were used to send the animal part of their processing into overdrive. The differences between will-based thinking and brain-based thinking were rarely so obvious. A good portion of their brain-based processing was stuck on trying to listen for sounds that weren’t there. To the extent that the sound of their heartbeats and the flex of their own flesh started sounding loud to them.

I was too amazed at the trees to care much about the state of the army. They had circuitry! Trees! The first things I’d investigated after the earth itself, and deemed to be too simple to continue my investigation. They drew mana from the water in the air, which is why they had bled out their circuits entirely by the time they approached anywhere near Adrian. And the types! Their circuits were entirely different from anything I’d encountered before. The way they fed mana through their circuit-system was different as well. A fundamental shift in method. Even the runes were separated by more than type, as if they were a different branch of circuitry entirely from almost all the circuits I knew. As different from human circuits as human circuits were from will circuits. The variety of runes…many based on entire branches of circuitry that neither myself nor any human had investigated. First and foremost, the suppression of everything was split between the mist and the effects of the trees’ circuitry. The suppression of mana was the most impacted by the trees, followed by sound and smell, the deeper we went the greater the suppression. The most amazing part was that it affected only the passive movement of mana, not inhibiting circuitry in the least. I could power through the forced-calm state I could impose on mana, but it was an inconvenience. An inconvenience that the tree-based circuits didn’t produce. Had the Cannibal Conclave fed forests in their cities, there probably would have been many more wizards as the interference of all the leakage was the primary reason it was so hard for them to discover their own talents.

Unfortunately, the stilling of mana didn’t prevent it leaking out of a closed system. No creatures we encountered were abnormally powerful for their race. The new creatures were interesting, though. The trees that had consumed enough water to become self-aware were rare, but they existed. And stilled at the passage of the army. The grass creatures that formed from the grass slithering into a matted bunch and getting stuck working together also stilled. Neither escaped my notice, but I had no ideas of how to convert them. They had no lungs. They made no sounds. Their wills were entirely bound within their bodies. How could I make such a creature worship me? They didn’t even have the correct materials to form a brood construct from their corpses and convert the offspring. 

As we passed into the next area of the approach to the ocean I had all the thoughts of questioning the greenery forced from my mind. The mist had been thickening until it was difficult to see the nearest member of the army, each form of suppression overlapping until it was even getting difficult for me to get a clear understanding of the surroundings when it was all suddenly gone, along with the trees that were the source. 

Before me was open air so clear it seemed even easier to see through than outside of the mist. The trees also formed the same line, as if by agreement, leaving a perfectly open plain. Only the grass seemed out of the loop, covering the plain before us with a matted, green, writhing surface. All of that was insignificant before the massive wall of water. Water that wasn’t a taint on the air, but pure water in its true state, untainted by air. Water so clear and dense I could see into the ocean and the magnificence within. 

The humans couldn’t, the mist had blocked all of the sunlight making the plain a black expanse with a black behemoth that stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction where the light of torches, circuit-based lights, and night-vision abilities failed. The ocean, to their eyes, was a black earth that stretched into the sky. A black earth that called into question their very idea of smoothness. So smooth that light bounced off and reflected themselves back at them. One that their orders would have them walking into. Or up. Or across. How could one even cross such a thing? How could Angie’s explanation be true? How could such a behemoth move? It was ridiculous. As if the earth itself was capable of movement. An idea that would be denied as the ravings of a madman even if presented in a perfectly reasonable tone.

They couldn’t see the wonder. The marvel. They couldn’t see the behemoths within the ocean that made chickens look smaller than the infant-state of bears. They couldn’t see the cities built with the flesh and bones of everything from behemoths to stone-like creatures more similar to trees than anything else…except when they weren’t. Cities carried on the backs of behemoths or carved into their bodies. Cities without air holding them to the earth. Cities so high that the air would crush them to dust before they even hit the ground outside of the ocean. The population of those cities, strange hybrids of the behemoths and humans, unbound by which way was up. Free in every direction, fighting in every direction…everything unbound by the idea of up and down. Civilizations built on the backs of monsters that fought, crushing years of development with every blow. Screams and bellows that broke buildings and left dead creatures bleeding until their blood slowed.

Everything in the ocean was unfathomable. So unfathomable the ideas it could produce would be marvelous. Monsters so large a single step could take them from Adrian to the sun could be possible if I could understand how a behemoth creature so large a city could be built on its back could be class four. The world was so different in the ocean that it undoubtedly had the answers to millions of questions I hadn’t thought to ask. Answers that would lead to yet more questions, unanswerable outside of the ocean. An entirely different world, encapsulated in a wall of mist and isolated from everything I’d ever understood.

The closest to something I understood would be the other cities that warred against the monster-based cities, cities that burrowed into the earth to hide their lack of mobility in the water. Even then, the entirety of what I understood was that they were locked in directionality. Why did they spread green into the water? What was the difference between their plants and the rock-like creatures that the hybrids utilized? Both were inert, until they weren’t. Reacting with extreme aggression to some things while ignoring everything else entirely.

Why did they use them at all? Their green living weapons that floated until they reached the edge and dropped onto the plain before rapidly righting themselves and rushing into the forest, before losing the vast majority of its mobility as it found the air outside utterly lacking in mana density. Greenery frozen as it crawled in hope of finding another body of water, desperately clinging to every bit of mana the ocean had managed to fill it with before it left the water. A fate they couldn’t even understand if they did develop a will because all of their mana was spent on the suppression. Until they left the mana-rich mist and entered the last phase of their lives as a mindlessly wandering tree, struggling to pull enough mana through their leaves to power more than the slow movement of their feet. The only effect developing a will would have on them would be that they gained the ability to experience their starvation.

The mana was so dense in the water that I could see the entire ocean without difficulty. See it with the clarity of the humans’ vision with the smallest portion of will barely in contact with the surface of the ocean. The flood of information from such a massive source…it would have paralyzed me for months if my brain nexus wasn’t advanced to the eighth class. It was almost like whatever kept the water together wanted will to explore it. Wanted will to be able to explore it. As opposed to air and earth that actively inhibited it. Perhaps I could interact with the core will of water without being assimilated. Feeling the vastness of what the ocean was, however, screamed caution. The ocean had far more mana than all of my cores put together. It may be friendly and weak in comparison to earth and air, but it was far from actually being weak. And friendly was merely an assumption based on how easily my will could interact with the water and had nothing to do with the actual entity that kept the water in one piece.

Feeling my way through the impossible environment, I was faced with a question I’d never had to think about before. Everything within the ocean was limited to the ocean. The size of the behemoths was impossible, but their defense was extremely lacking. They had no circuitry to resist the air outside. If they left the ocean they’d die. No matter how advanced their class. The hybrids as well, their form of mobility was miraculous in comparison to walking, but it wouldn’t work in air. The ground-dwellers were the only real option, but they were a species I’d encounter regardless. Elves and humans had a long history, with every form of interaction from war on sight to coexistence for centuries. Should I enter the ocean at all? Should my army experience this biome? If I decided to avoid it…would I wait for them to walk around it? The ocean was massive on a scale it was difficult to express. I could tell that it was approximately five thousand leagues across and two hundred leagues deep, but coming to terms with how large that actually was…that was a different problem altogether.