"Can you guess how those who entered the Misty Pins died?" Luo Wei shook her head. "There are plenty of people smarter than us, and those who dare to venture out to sea are always well-prepared. Yet they still perished in the mist, which means there’s something even more terrifying lurking within."

  Everyone who sets sail knows how easy it is to get lost at sea. They prepare barrels of compasses, but in the end, not a single one returns with a compass in hand.

  "I agree with Miss Luo Wei. The Misty Pins are definitely not that simple," Hol said.

  Hol specuted, "I suspect the mist might be poisonous. Inhaling too much could cause unconsciousness. It’s only because we stayed for a short time that we weren’t affected."

  When they were on Jormungandr's nose, they had fallen asleep in such a dangerous situation, which was indeed peculiar.

  Moreover, the first to wake up was Luo Wei, whose body was the weakest among them. Hol strongly suspected that the stronger one's physique, the more they were suppressed in the anti-magic zone.

  "I’ve got it! We can build a glider!" Luo Wei stroked her chin for a while before suddenly coming up with an idea.

  When magic falls short, science steps in.

  While she couldn’t sustain long flights, a glider could make up for that shortcoming. However, building one would take quite some time.

  If they could find magnetite nearby, they could also make a few compasses. Whether they would work or not, it was worth trying.

  With a clear goal in mind, the three of them got to work immediately.

  Chopping wood, weaving vines, hunting, crafting magnets, cutting coats to make glider wings...

  By the end of the afternoon, all three of them looked much more primitive.

  Luo Wei was slightly better off, retaining an undershirt and long skirt. Hol and Theodore, on the other hand, had sacrificed all their clothes, transforming completely into two wild men cd in grass skirts.

  As night fell, they used palm leaves and branches to build a tent by the fire. Curling up inside the makeshift shelter, they drifted off to sleep.

  The fire crackled as damp branches popped and hissed. Inside the tent, the youths closed their eyes, their breathing gradually becoming steady and even.

  Waves gently pped against the rocks and sand, like the deep tones of a cello, drawing out a soothing melody in the tranquil night, lulling them to sleep.

  "Hol?"

  "Theodore?"

  In the middle of the night, Luo Wei called out softly, then quietly crawled out of the tent.

  The fire was dying down. She added a handful of wood, gnced back to confirm that Hol and Theodore were sound asleep, and then spread her wings, flying toward the interior of the continent.

  With three hundred pounds less weight to carry, Luo Wei flew swiftly.

  In five hours, she covered over 700 kilometers, seeing rolling mountains, vast primeval forests, endless grassnds, low pins, and hills.

  She had no idea how rge the Fog Empire was, but within this 700-kilometer range, she hadn’t seen a single sign of human habitation.

  The Fog Empire seemed like an untouched nd, lying dormant before her eyes.

  Luo Wei nded in a forest on the edge of an alluvial pin. Amidst the desote wild grass and sprawling vines, she discovered a crumbling altar.

  The bricks and stones of the altar had weathered over time, with pnts growing wildly in the cracks. A massive fir tree, requiring two people to encircle it, had burst through the stone sbs at the center of the altar. Its towering canopy, over forty meters high, almost reached the clouds.

  Luo Wei ran her fingers over the tree bark’s texture. This tree had been growing here for at least three hundred years.

  She searched around the altar and gradually found many traces of human presence: animal bones, fragments of pottery, rusty arrowheads, charcoal marks, and the decayed floorboards of treehouses...

  Long ago, someone had lived here.

  Of course, they might not have been human. It could have been other intelligent beings, like elves.

  Haisya had said that no humans had ever appeared in that sea area; they had only encountered an elderly elf.

  That sea was calm, rich in marine resources, with wide, ft beaches and forests devoid of rge predators. It was baffling that no humans lived there.

  Luo Wei leaned more toward the idea that this continent had never had humans at all.

  This nd had originally belonged to elves, who lived here for generations. Preferring forest life, they hadn’t built cities.

  After the Tree of Life withered, they lost their source of vitality. Gradually, they vanished from this continent, their traces covered by rampant vegetation, their civilization fading into the river of history.

  Luo Wei cleared the stone sbs around the fir tree’s altar, using a dagger to carve the patterns she had memorized before entering the Magic Beast Mountains.

  She didn’t know if she could restore the teleportation magic runes, but she wasn’t willing to give up the chance to cim such a vast nd.

  Sweat dripped from her forehead onto the cold stone sbs. Luo Wei gritted her teeth, gripping the dagger tightly as she etched half-finger-wide grooves into the hard stone surface.

  She couldn’t replicate the teleportation runes of a Holy Magister exactly, but Luo Wei had a strong spatial understanding. Having studied advanced geometry in her past life, she found breaking down the runes straightforward.

  The only difficult part was that her magical power wasn’t enough to complete the rune.

  Luo Wei released one hand, quickly pulling out six magic stones she always carried, absorbing the high-concentration magical elements within to replenish her energy.

  A surge of magical elements flooded her body, making her feel as if her meridians were about to burst. Every inch of her skin and every vein throbbed with pain, as if they were about to split open.

  Finally, the simplified rune was complete. Exhausted, Luo Wei colpsed onto the ground, staring dazedly at the moonlight filtering through the fir tree’s branches.

  After resting for half an hour, she mustered the strength to get up, pcing the six slightly dimmed magic stones into the rune’s center to provide power.

  On her way back, she pnned to drop small teleportation runes at intervals along the route to serve as rey points for the main rune. Then she would carve a rge one in her room at Siria Magic Academy to complete the transoceanic teleportation.

  She wasn’t sure if her half-baked skills would work.

  Rationally, Luo Wei told herself this was pointless and would only waste six magic stones.

  But a voice in her heart urged her to try—what if it worked?

  Filled with conflicting thoughts, she flew back to the beach and quietly slipped back into the tent.

  Exhausted from a night of work, Luo Wei fell into a deep sleep as soon as she y down.

  In her dream, a giant serpent coiled into a circle before her, spinning endlessly.

  She watched until she became dizzy, eventually seeing the serpent’s coil as a clock, its ticking hands irritating her. She reached out to adjust it.

  With a loud "dong," she heard her heartbeat echo from a distant pce. A towering tree rose from the ground, its white buds blooming into flowers, releasing countless winged, fantastical creatures.

  These beautiful little spirits held hands, circling the tree and singing. But one day, the tree withered, and the spirits fell to its roots, aging and dying.

  Some spirits severed their nurturing buds and consumed them, turning into dark elves with white hair and dark skin. They retreated underground, falling into a deep slumber, eventually transforming into statues.

  Luo Wei found herself among these statues. As she touched the pointed ear of one elf, she suddenly noticed a faint breath at his nose.

  She stepped back and saw the elf open his bck eyes, despair fshing across his face. He pulled an iron arrow from his quiver and aimed it at his own chest.

  Luo Wei’s pupils contracted, and she instinctively grabbed his hand.

  """

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