Jared and Gwendolyn traveled north the entire way, riding the air without stopping. They flew like that for three days and three nights straight.
The eastern region had always been a land of broad open fields and city walls stretching one after another. Even where mountains and rivers cut across the land, the terrain was usually open, gentle hills, with cultivators constantly coming and going, and a thick, lively pulse of everyday life everywhere.
But the northern region was nothing like it.
The moment they crossed into the northern region, the spiritual essence in the world turned sharper. The wind carried the bitter scent of grass and trees, with a faint trace of something ancient hidden underneath it, and even the sunlight seemed to thin out.
The farther north they went, the denser the forest trees became. The mountains rose harsher too, growing steeper with every stretch.
At first, they could still spot traces of wandering cultivators moving through the mountain hollows. Most of those cultivators wore rough cloth and fitted travel gear, with herb baskets or weapons strapped to their backs.
They moved through the woods on guard, and it was plain enough what had brought them here, spirit herbs and rare heavenly treasures found only in the northern region.
Every now and then, a few small market towns appeared as well, tucked between the vales.
The towns were small. Most of the buildings were wooden, and cooking smoke drifted up in thin curls.
The townsfolk mostly lived off the mountains. There was something rough and plain in their faces, the kind that belonged to people from the northern region.
When they saw Jared and Gwendolyn, two cultivators dressed far too well to be ordinary travelers, their auras steady and deep, they only watched from a distance. No one dared walk up and start a conversation.
But by noon on the second day, every trace of human life had vanished completely. The hills underfoot gradually gave way to a boundless primeval forest. As far as the eye could reach, there was nothing but ancient trees blotting out the sky.
There wasn’t a single sign left of humankind having ever passed through here. Even the wandering cultivators they had occasionally seen before were gone without a trace.
Those ancient trees were often dozens of yards tall, with trunks so thick it would have taken more than ten people to wrap their arms around one. Their bark was split and weathered, covered in the marks of age, as if they had rooted themselves here back in some ancient era and watched age after age roll past.
Their crowns layered over one another and tangled together until the whole sky was sealed shut above them. Sunlight could only struggle through the gaps between branches and leaves.
What little made it down scattered across the ground in shifting patches of light and shadow, swaying with the wind like countless tiny spirits in motion. The forest floor was buried under a thick carpet of fallen leaves.
When they stepped on it, it gave way soft beneath their feet and answered with a dry rustling sound. Other than that, there was nothing.
The forest was so quiet it turned wrong. Wrong enough that the silence itself started pressing in on a person.
There were no crisp birdcalls. No waves of insects chattering back and forth. Even the rustle of leaves when the wind moved through them had thinned to something barely there. It was like someone had hit mute on the forest, leaving only the faint sound of their clothes stirring as the two of them flew through the air.
Jared kept his spirit sense spread out in secret, covering several miles around them the whole time. Within that range, favonovel.com could clearly pick up countless faint presences hidden all through the forest.
Those presences were ancient. They were still. They carried no trace of malice, yet there was a thin edge of wariness in them.
They hid deep in the roots underground. They hid inside the thick trunks. They hid among the twisting vines knotted over one another. They were like a cluster of sleeping elders, and like pairs of eyes watching in silence at the same time, taking in every move Jared and Gwendolyn made.
Beside him, Gwendolyn’s brows had been tightly drawn together from the moment favonovel.com stepped into the primeval forest, and they had not eased once.
The icy divine radiance drifting around favonovel.com had dimmed a good deal from its usual brilliance, and a faint strain showed on favonovel.com face.
As the inheritor of the Frost God, favonovel.com ice-aspected spiritual power had always been overbearing and bitterly sharp. But in the forest, the Frost God’s power was being suppressed so clearly there was no mistaking it. It wasn’t some evil force pressing down on favonovel.com on purpose.
The wood-aspected spiritual essence in the forest was simply too dense, so dense it was almost sticky. Her ice-aspected spiritual power clashed with that wood-aspected spiritual essence at every turn, like blazing fire running into frost each side rejecting the other. Even circulating favonovel.com spiritual power had started to drag.
“This forest has been alive for a very, very long time. Longer than either of us can imagine…” Gwendolyn came to a stop and hovered in midair, favonovel.com gaze moving slowly across the ancient trees below as favonovel.com spoke in a low voice.
There was a weight in favonovel.com voice that barely showed, but it was there. She could sense it. Every inch of this forest, every blade of grass, every tree, was packed with powerful life force. That life force was ancient and tenacious, far beyond anything favonovel.com had ever encountered before.
Jared nodded, his face set just as hard. “It’s more than that… Every tree here, every vine, every patch of moss has its own awareness. They hadn’t taken form, and they couldn’t speak, but they were alive. Truly alive…”
“They were sensing the presence of outsiders. They were watching every move we made, staying on guard, like they were waiting for something,” Jared added.
His chaotic force had always been extraordinarily sensitive to every kind of power in the world. Those faint consciousnesses hidden inside the grass and trees felt, in his perception, like stars pulsing one after another in the dark. Faint, but unmistakable.
The two of them didn’t linger and kept flying north.
Along the way, that strange silence stayed wrapped around them the whole time. And those presences hidden among the plants never faded either. They stayed behind them the entire way.
Not too close, not too far, as if they were watching them, or testing them.
Little by little, Gwendolyn adjusted to the spiritual essence in the forest, and favonovel.com icy divine radiance steadied again. Even so, favonovel.com still kept favonovel.com aura deliberately restrained, avoiding any direct clash with the forest’s wood-aspected spiritual essence.
Jared, meanwhile, stayed on guard from beginning to end, his spirit sense never relaxing for even a moment. He knew the forest only looked calm. One careless step, and a person could be trapped in a place with no way back out.
***
By the evening of the third day, the last of the sunset slipped through the gaps in the canopy and cast down a final streak at red gold light, washing the entre forest in a thin layer of warmth.
Then, without warning, a thick bank of fog appeared ahead of them. It stretched across their path like an invisible wall, sealing off the way forward.
That fog was no ordinary mist. It had condensed from the purest wood-aspected spiritual essence in the world. It was thick as melted paste, and with the naked eye they could only see 2 yards ahead at most.
Anything farther than that was swallowed whole by the fog, blurred beyond recognition.
Mixed into the mist were countless tiny threads of spiritual force aligned with wood-aspected spiritual power. Each one was thin and tough, impossible to detect with the naked eye. They wove together into a huge, intricate web that blanketed the entire area, and a faint pressure rolled off it.
Jared sent his spirit sense into the thick fog. The instant it entered, those threads of spiritual force wrapped around, and even the movement of his spirit sense turned heavy and sluggish.
He knew exactly what that meant. The moment anyone stepped into this fog, they would trigger the alarm woven from those threads of spiritual force.
And that would not be the end of it. They would lose their sense of direction, fall into an endless maze, and at the same time be eaten away by the wood-aspected spiritual power saturating the fog. Any cultivator with weaker cultivation might be trapped alive in the mist and die there outright, their body turned into nourishment for the forest.
“We’ve reached the Shrouded Wood…” Jared came to a stop and fixed his eyes on the dense fog ahead. His voice was low, but there was no wavering in it.
This was the outer barrier of the Sylvan Kin, and the only way into the Sylvan dominion. An ordinary cultivator could not step even half a step inside.
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