Chapter 1352: Surging Currents

A few casual words with a friend helped Wickliffe, who had just returned to the surface from the medical ship, recapture a bit of his old self. He exhaled softly into the chilly wind of late winter turning to early spring, his gaze drifting toward the newly constructed military camps outside Ruby City. Vehicles of all kinds busied themselves between the encampments. With a tone tinged with awe, he murmured, “People often say the Cecilians are like gods when it comes to infrastructure, but it wasn’t until I saw these camps and roads spring up around Ruby City in just a few days that I truly understood what they meant. Everything else aside, how on earth did they manage to build so many barracks stretching all the way from the city walls to the edge of the forest in such a short time?”

“Dropped straight from the sky,” Camilla shrugged. “While you were waiting for the doctors to screw in your new arm, they sent over two more flying fortresses from the rear—something called ‘frontline engineering ships.’ They were packed like crates with these square ‘container houses’ and just air-dropped them onto the plains…”

Wickliffe was dumbfounded. After a long pause, he rubbed the bridge of his nose with his metal hand, feeling the cold contrast between metal and skin, muttering to himself, “I guess I was being narrow-minded…”

Camilla’s eyes, however, remained fixed on the human king’s mechanical arm. She studied the sleek plates, joints, and connecting tubes with genuine fascination. If not for his status as the Great Chief, she might have already blurted out, “Take it off and let me play with it.” Her unabashed stare didn’t escape Wickliffe’s notice. The king chuckled and waved his arm in front of her. A neural signal triggered a mechanism in the mechanical limb, and with a soft hum, a plate near his wrist popped open. Instantly, an energy blade glowing with arcane light materialized in midair. The bright radiance sparkled in the orc chieftain’s eyes.

“Whoa—!” Camilla exclaimed dramatically.

Wickliffe laughed again, flicking his wrist to make the blade vanish. Then his mechanical palm split open, revealing a ring of runes and a crystal array inside. A small arcane missile launcher appeared before Camilla’s eyes.

“This thing’s way better than your battle axe,” the human king boasted. “The doctors said since I’m a powerful supernatural, I can handle higher mana consumption, so they packed a bunch of experimental weapons into my mechanical arm. You’re no match for me now.”

“Whoa—” Camilla gasped again, then narrowed her eyes. “Hey, can I borrow it for a couple of days?”

“Absolutely not,” Wickliffe said without hesitation, quickly restoring his arm to its original form. He pulled out a pipe, placed it in his mouth, and sparked it to life with an electric arc from his fingertip. “Once it’s installed, it’s connected to my nerves and skeleton just like a real arm. I’m just showing you…”

Camilla’s ears twitched, and a look of disappointment crossed her face. She glanced down at her own arm and muttered softly, “Maybe I should just cut off my own arm and get one like yours…”

This time, Wickliffe didn’t respond. He casually glanced at the orc chieftain. As a fellow member of the “Five Kings” and a longtime friend, he knew Camilla’s mind was always jumping from one thing to another. Aside from swinging her axe, she rarely held interest in anything for more than three days. He’d find something else to distract her soon enough, and she’d forget all about this.

For now, it was best to change the subject.

“Our communications with Ancestor’s Peak have been restored,” Wickliffe said suddenly. “On one hand, the Cecilians’ airborne communication nodes are up and running. On the other, the chaotic mana environment that’s been shrouding the western continent is gradually stabilizing. Apparently, with the new nodes, we can now contact most regions within the country…”

“Yeah, I got a message from Stella at Ancestor’s Peak today,” Camilla said, her mood brightening as she forgot about the mechanical arm. “All the aberrations moving toward the peak have been cut off. Stella’s preparing to send a golem unit to support the front lines—of course, without weakening the peak’s own defenses. Commander Duke Bertram has approved it. Maybe soon we’ll see the fairies active in the mountain barrier.”

Wickliffe nodded, his gaze drifting toward the rolling mountain range to the east. He opened his mouth to say something, but before he could, a sudden glow appeared between the mountains and the sky, interrupting him.

It was a shimmering curtain of pale purple and teal light, like a vast veil hanging from the clouds. It spread from the far side of the mountain barrier, slanting across the wide sky, reaching over the Ruby Forest. It appeared so suddenly that there was no warning even seconds before. Within the undulating light, faint sparks flickered like lightning, weaving through the clouds in a sprawling display.

It looked like an aurora—but how could there be an aurora in the heartland of Ogure?

More and more people noticed the unnatural spectacle. Soldiers and civilians below the city walls pointed and whispered toward the sky. Wickliffe finally registered it and turned to the orc chieftain. “Camilla, what is that? Could it be some new Cecilian device? A kind of shield?”

“I haven’t heard anything…” Camilla stared at the spreading light with wide eyes, murmuring, “No reports of new equipment tests… And look over at the camps—the Cecilian soldiers and officers seem just as surprised…”

Before she finished, the glowing curtain silently vanished, along with the crackling sparks, disappearing without a trace just as suddenly as it had appeared.

The whole event lasted less than a minute, but the strange phenomenon was etched deeply into the minds of all who witnessed it.

“This feels wrong…” Wickliffe’s expression darkened. “You’re right, it probably isn’t something the Cecilians made. And it started spreading from the eastern side of the mountain barrier—that’s the direction of the Wasteland. We should consult Duke Bertram. Maybe he knows something…”

…

“This feels wrong.”

Atop the towering peak of Ancestor’s Peak stood a massive white tower crowned with a huge crystal. Around it, numerous arcane devices and monitoring instruments hummed with activity. Stella, barely palm-sized, fluttered her wings and hovered before an open-air sensor, watching the data and shifting patterns projected from the focusing crystal. The fairy queen, one of Ogure’s “Five Kings,” furrowed her brow.

Another flutter of wings sounded nearby. A young fairy technician responsible for monitoring the peak’s arcane network hub flew over to Stella. “You noticed the abnormal readings too, right?”

Stella turned to the approaching technician—a young fairy with long lavender hair, also no bigger than a human palm. Floating beside her were two golem “arms” roughly the size of an adult human’s, crafted from mythril, purple copper, and secret silver. Each held a maintenance tool, moving with surprising dexterity.

Fairies are a tiny, intelligent race, their small size limiting their ability to use most tools and devices created by other races on the continent—including standard Cecilian arcane equipment. But the fairies have their own solutions: as the most dexterous and magically gifted tribe in Ogure, they excel at crafting golems and intricate magical mechanisms. Years ago, they established their kingdom atop Ancestor’s Peak with the help of a powerful golem army. Even facing the new era’s arcane technology, they rely on these handy magical “tools” to remain the continent’s top arcane engineers and rune experts.

“When did the readings start fluctuating?” Stella asked the technician seriously. “Was it like this before communications were restored?”

“No,” the lavender-haired fairy replied. “The readings only started rising abnormally after communications came back online. As the chaotic mana environment near Ancestor’s Peak gradually subsided over the past two days, the readings peaked—though they’ve started to fall again, they’re still high.” She gestured with the golem arms. “We’ve checked the main tower’s Hohm crystal and the conversion matrices connecting to the mountain’s arcane network. It’s not a malfunction causing false readings.”

“…The data shows a powerful mana flow passing between several network hubs, but the source isn’t any known arcane array,” Stella glanced back at the device’s readout. “No idea what it is… Have the Cecilian tech experts said anything?”

“They’re still in meetings trying to figure it out—I don’t think they understand it either,” the fairy shrugged, her golem arms mimicking the gesture. Then her expression grew tense. “Your Majesty, could it be that our recent experiments disturbed the ancestral spirits sleeping within Ancestor’s Peak?”

Stella waved her hand emphatically. “Impossible. A hundred years ago, when we activated the ‘Super Strong’ device atop the mountain, the energy overload struck half the peak with lightning and still didn’t wake the ancestral spirits. This is nothing.”

“…That makes sense,” the technician said, nodding. “But how do we explain these abnormal readings now?”

“I don’t know. For now, send the data package to the Cecilians. After all, they invented this system,” Stella said, waving dismissively. “Let’s see what they can figure out.”

The lavender-haired technician nodded, then looked up at the towering white spire standing proudly atop Ancestor’s Peak. This massive structure, built under Cecilian leadership, powers most of northern and central Ogure’s arcane network and serves as the continent’s largest arcane hub. Several metallic rings floated around the tower’s upper section, slowly rotating in the clear daylight. A low, pleasant hum echoed through the high air. Everything seemed normal—yet beneath the surface, something was stirring.

Yet, beyond the sight of the fae, in a dimension beyond the reach of current technology, a vast torrent of blue magical energy surged deep within the ancestral peak. Tendrils of this immense flow pierced through the mountain itself, spilling into the atmosphere and weaving through the vicinity of the Arcane Network’s central hub. Above the “Ogure Sanctuary,” a land profoundly shaped by the deep blue ley lines, an invisible ripple of magical fluctuations traveled all the way from the distant ruins of Gondor, crossing the entire continent and spreading outward across the planet…

…

At the same moment, in the southwest of the Loren continent, an endless ocean stretched out.

Towering waves rolled in from the horizon, while the darkened sky shimmered with curtains of aurora-like light and streaks of lightning. Howling winds whipped the sea into a frenzy, waves crashing relentlessly against the steel bows and hulls of massive warships. Each vessel raised protective shields to withstand the storm’s fury and activated rune matrices etched into their hulls to stabilize the currents and steady the ships themselves. Through sheer technological might, they transformed into immovable iron mountains amid the raging sea.

Inside the command center of the Imperial fleet’s flagship, the Winter’s Chill, Byron stood on the captain’s platform, eyes fixed intently on the holographic sea chart before him. After a long pause, he finally turned and asked, “Lady Cassandra, are you sure we’re still on the right course?”

“…Honestly, I was certain five minutes ago,” replied Cassandra, the black-haired sea witch with a teardrop mole at the corner of her eye. She paused thoughtfully, then admitted, “But now, I’m starting to think something’s off.”

“General, we’ve clearly run into chaotic turbulence—this kind of thing should only appear in the open ocean,” said a naga navigator behind Byron. His dark green scales shimmered, and his serpentine eyes scanned the instruments hanging around his neck, alongside deep-sea runic talismans. “The fleet may have been pushed off course by the storm, but it looks like the storm’s intensity won’t increase any further. Our best bet is to hold position and wait it out.”

“…That’s all we can do,” Byron said with a sigh. “The Winter’s Chill and the other ships’ defenses can handle this level of storm. We’ll max out the shields and wait for it to pass before reassessing our position.”

Having given the order, the Imperial Navy Marshal turned to the red-haired woman standing beside him. “Asalina, you should head back to your quarters and rest. Once the storm clears, we’ll likely need you and the dragon riders for aerial reconnaissance.”

“I could take to the skies now and have a look,” Asalina said casually. Now serving as the “Dragonborn Commander” sent by the Holy Dragon Principality, she had led one of several units dispatched to the Alliance frontlines after the war broke out. Her forces had been integrated into Byron’s expedition fleet as its carrier-based air support. Originally, they were meant to reinforce the southern front, but now they were trapped at sea by this storm. “I think I can handle this kind of weather.”

“Don’t be reckless. I trust you can fly in these conditions, but there’s no way you can land safely—not with this storm’s unpredictable duration,” Byron shook his head. “Follow orders. We’ll wait here until the storm passes.”

(End of chapter)