Chapter 287 – Moonlake City (I)

Chapter 287

Moonlake City (I)

Nope.

No, no, no, no.

I’m seeing things.

I must have eaten some bad mushrooms in my sleep and entirely hallucinated that thing just now.

Yup.

How else, pray tell, would there be a thing costing one billion points? No way. It’s too early, and it’s some haggard corner of the world where nothing of import ever happens. So, there’s no way an entity so massively strong could exist here.

Nope.

Recalibrating my mind, I focused back on the journey–as we slowly made our way across the barren dirt, and as more and more people flew past us aboard one vessel or another, my resentment of this place just continued to grow. I mean, I’ve felt the effects of slightly opaque discrimination (as well as a pretty transparent one) from the day I arrived here, but the more I live, the more I realize that, most of the time at least, it’s not so much ‘climbing against the heavens’ as it is ‘navigating very manufactured and discriminatory rivers put in place to keep the divide between the poor and privileged very much there’.

As the night fell, we decided to camp yet again–and I watched as the lake underwent its transformation. The dull, still waters began to silently churn beneath the surface, and with the first sign of moonlight, colors erupted like fireworks and began to spread out across the water as though it were a canvas.

It started with the forming of the concentric rings, but with the few cries of the wind, they’d been broken up, colors fanning out into shapeless forms across the lake’s surface.

It was beautiful and transfixing in more ways than one, as my eyes remained glued to the lake over the sky awash with glistening stars.

… I never much believed in the spirituality of nature, truth be told. I always figured that, if it were so magical, we wouldn’t have spent tens of thousands of years figuring out how to get away from it. And, in some ways, I still don’t much believe in it–but there are these moments when I feel a hammer taken to the back of my knees by the sheer beauty of something, and I find myself, if momentarily, wondering if I’m wrong.

As the spastic light danced across its surface, I saw something shift in the water–luckily, it was just a loose piece of rope, and it floated onwards, undisturbed.

“Here,” Long Tao appeared at my side, startling life out of me for a moment, handing me a small parchment. Holding back a yelp, I furrowed my brows as I took it.

“What is it?”

“The list of things we need to find in the lake.”

“…” Reading through it, it really was just that–a list of… things. Some were herbs, some were ores, and some were just random words whose meaning eluded me. “What for?” I asked further.