Chapter 1414 – Sneaky Spirit

I’m going to be honest, it takes me a while to find out where those vibrations are coming from. Too long, if you want to be strict about the clock, which I should be. Once I start chasing down that tingle, it becomes almost impossible to ignore.

It’s tricky to get at it. The source seems to be moving? At the same time, it isn’t. Something fishy is most definitely going on, but as long as I keep moving forward, as long as the sense in my antennae keeps getting stronger, then I know I’m moving in the right direction.

The fifth has a weird layout. The first stratum was a mess of tangled little tunnels, some small, some large, which intersected and branched off each other just as often as they came together in huge caverns. So far, the fifth is similar in the sense that it’s just tunnels, but these are all massive. The smallest I’ve seen was the first, one kilometre across, and the largest is the one I’m currently in, possibly as many as three across.

They are huge.

And in each and every one of them, there’s a… flow, a sense of movement, of motion. The mana, thick, toxic and dangerous as it is, never stops moving, like it’s a living, breathing thing.

At times, especially like now, when I’m exploring off on my own, there’s a strange sense of being inside an enormous living creature. As large as I am, I feel like a germ, invading the body of another organism.

It’s unsettling, to say the least.

I push all of that to the back of my mind as I keep trying to sniff out the sneaky little so-and-so who’s tickled my senses. I double back a few times, confused, and eventually find myself staring at the side of a tunnel that I’ve walked past three separate times, scratching at my head.

Everything my antennae are telling me says that what I’m looking for is right in front of me. Yet, there’s nothing there. My eyes, my mana sense, smell, everything is telling me that this is just a chunk of rock, exactly the same as every other chunk of rock, and that behind it is nothing, except for more rock.

And yet. AND YET.

There’s tiny, little, waves. The slightest of gravitational disturbances, tickling and aggravating at the edge of my awareness, like the finest roots dangling from the end of a vegetable just pulled out of the dark earth.

Stupid tree. I know you’re in there!

Unsure how to proceed, I decide to take a simple approach, and open my mandibles wide so I can begin charging a truly potent Void Chomp.

After a few seconds, the rock… morphs into… not rock, and then just peels back, parting like water to create a narrow tunnel. I close my mandibles with a soft snip and then walk forward. The tunnel is just wide enough for me to enter, but I have to fold up my legs as tight to my body as they’ll go. It’s uncomfortable, but I suppose that’s the point.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author’s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

After a while, I find the source of the maddening sensation, and just as I suspected, it’s roots. Feeling smug, I reach out to them with my mind.

[Found your own little hidey hole down here, huh? How long have you been living in the fifth?]