CHAPTER 154:
The morning sun had not yet crested the eastern mountains when Lucas slipped through the Hidden City's western gate, his silver hair hidden beneath a traveler's hood and his katana wrapped in cloth to avoid drawing attention. The guards on duty barely glanced at him as he passed, and within minutes he had left the city's outer defenses behind and entered the open grasslands beyond.
He did not run at first. The journey ahead would take him across borders that had been contested in the recent war, through territories where strangers were viewed with suspicion, and past cities whose rulers owed allegiance to Hidden Cities that would love to capture an agent of the Sky Empire. Speed would serve him better than stealth once he cleared the empire's outer provinces, but for now, he needed to conserve his strength.
The grasslands stretched before him, golden in the early light, their gentle hills rolling toward the horizon like waves frozen in time. Lucas walked at a steady pace, his mana suppressed to the point of near-invisibility, his senses extended outward to track any approaching travelers. He passed farmers driving carts toward market, merchants leading pack animals loaded with goods, and the occasional cultivator moving between towns on business he did not bother to investigate. None of them paid him any attention.
By midday, he had crossed into the borderlands where the Sky Empire's direct control faded into a patchwork of minor kingdoms and independent city-states. The architecture changed here, the familiar stone walls and tiled roofs giving way to wooden buildings with steeply pitched roofs designed to shed snow. The people dressed differently as well, their clothes cut from heavier fabrics in darker colors, and their accents carried a musical quality that Lucas associated with the northern territories.
The afternoon sun had begun its descent toward the western hills when Lucas left the road and began to run.
He had cleared the last of the Sky Empire's allied territories, and the terrain ahead was wilder, less traveled, and empty of the patrols that might have challenged him. He increased his pace gradually, letting his muscles warm, and within minutes he had reached his target speed: one hundred and twenty meters per second, the pace he had set for himself without using mana or spells to enhance his body.
The landscape blurred around him.
Fields gave way to forests, and forests gave way to hills, and hills gave way to mountains whose peaks scraped the clouds. Lucas ran through it all without stopping, his feet finding purchase on rock and root and packed earth, his breathing steady despite the hours of sustained exertion.
Days passed.
He ran through the night, the stars wheeling overhead, and he ran through the following morning, the sun rising at his back. He crossed rivers by running on them, and leaping from stone to stone, and he climbed mountain passes where the air grew thin and cold, and he descended into valleys where the warmth returned and the trees grew thick.
On the third day, he passed the last of the independent kingdoms.
On the fifth day, he entered a forest that stretched from the foothills of the mountains to the distant line of the horizon. The trees were ancient here, their trunks wider than houses and their branches interlaced so tightly that the sun's light filtered down in scattered gold coins.
The beasts here were different from those near the Hidden City. They were larger, more aggressive, and their mana signatures burned brighter in Lucas's senses.
On the sixth day, the forest began to thin. The trees grew shorter, their trunks thinner, and the undergrowth gave way to open spaces where grass and wildflowers grew in profusion. The air smelled different here---salty, carrying the distant tang of the ocean that Lucas had never seen but could now sense somewhere beyond the treeline.
He stopped at the edge of a wide clearing and looked up.
The sky was enormous, larger than any sky he had ever seen, because there were no mountains or cities or walls to interrupt its sweep from horizon to horizon. Clouds drifted across it in lazy formations, their undersides catching the light of the setting sun and glowing with shades of orange and pink.
Lucas stood there for a moment, and then he walked into the clearing.
Ezra was sitting on a fallen log near the center of the clearing, his red hair catching the fading light and his red eyes fixed on the path Lucas had taken. Which Ezra had reached the Golden Stage of his Mana core.
Beside him, Myles sat with his legs crossed and his eyes closed, his wild orange hair and orange eyes making him look like a flame given human form. He wore the same simple clothes he had worn .
Myles opened his eyes. "You are late."
Lucas "I said two weeks. It has been one."
Ezra snorted. "You said maybe less. That is not the same thing."
Lucas ignored him and looked at Myles. "You said you found a way to enter."
Myles nodded slowly. He rose from the log, stretching his arms above his head, and his orange eyes swept across the clearing as if he were seeing it for the first time.
Myles said. "A woman who can also transform, like me. She entered the hidden realm by mistake, years ago, when she was exploring places this forest."
Lucas's eyes narrowed. "Where is she now?"
Myles shrugged, a gesture that carried more indifference than the question probably deserved. "The woman loves traveling, I do not know where she is. She could be anywhere on the continent."
Myles replied. "Getting in is the easy part. Surviving the entry is the hard part."
Lucas waited.
Myles walked to the edge of the clearing and pointed toward a gap in the treeline where the path seemed to end. Beyond it, the forest resumed, dark and thick, but something about the space between the trees felt different. The air shimmered slightly, as if heat were rising from the ground, though the evening was cool.
"The entrance is there," Myles said. "It is not a door or a gate. It is a place where the boundary between this world and the hidden realm has grown thin. If you step into it, you will be pulled through."
"And if I survive?"
Myles looked at him. "Then you will appear somewhere else."
Lucas considered this for a moment. "You said your friend entered by mistake. How did she leave?"
"She walked out," Myles said. "The same way she walked in. The boundary is thin in both directions, though the exit is not always in the same place as the entrance."
Ezra folded his arms across his chest. "So we step into the shimmering air and hope we do not die."
"That is the summary," Myles agreed.
Lucas looked at the shimmering gap between the trees.
He reached up and removed his goggles, tucking them into a pocket of his coat. His Mana Eyes, now fully active, glowed with faint cyan ocean suns that reflected off the shimmering air ahead.
He walked toward the gap.
Ezra fell into step beside him, and Myles walked behind them.
The air grew warmer as they approached.
He stepped into the space he was seeing.
The world vanished.
There was no sound, no sight, no sensation of falling or flying or moving at all. There was only pressure, immense and crushing, pressing against him from all sides at once. His lungs emptied and his bones groaned and his mana core flared so brightly that he saw its light even through his closed eyelids.
Then the pressure released.
Lucas opened his eyes.
He was lying on soft grass, looking up at a sky that was not the sky he had left behind. It was deeper, richer, a blue so pure that it seemed to glow with its own light. Clouds drifted across it in formations that shifted too slowly to be real, their edges soft and their centers bright.
He pushed himself up and looked around.
The forest was beautiful.
There was no other word for it. The trees rose around him in shades of green and gold and silver, their leaves shimmering with colors that changed as he watched. Flowers bloomed at their bases in clusters of red and purple and blue, their petals releasing scents that Lucas had never encountered before. A stream ran nearby, its water clear and cold, and the sound of it was the only noise in the silence.