If you ever find yourself in the middle of the Central Safe Zone and start walking exactly 40° northeast, after about fifty days, youāll leave the protection of the Central Monarchās Spiritual Pressure and enter Kandara.
On your left would be the Northern Safe-Zone. And on your right would be the Eastern Safe-Zone.
But if you still keep walking 40° northeast in a straight line, after a little more than two days, youāll reach the end of our supercontinent.
In front of you, for as far as your eyes could see, would be a vast stretch of Northern Ocean (also known as the New Arctic Ocean).
And floating somewhere in the midst of that frigid water, youāll find a broken archipelago of snowy peaks and frozen glaciers. This chain of islands was known as theShattered Isles. Our destination.
If youāre wondering why we didnāt land directly inIron Height, there were two reasons:
One ā according to our sources, an Awakened there had the ability to emit strong EMP waves that fried most electronics long before they ever reached the warzone.
So taking a high-tech private jet there would be a hilarious way to commit suicide.
And two ā the entire East had declared a total lockdown on its airspace, which meant any unauthorized aircraft flying too close to the borders would be shot down on sight.
That meant we couldnāt simply fly across or around the Eastern Safe-Zone to reachIron Height.
We had to approachIron Heightfrom the sea.
Thankfully, we had a lot of ships thanks to Vereshia.
Her fleet had left her familyās docks in the South several days ago. Rather than sailing east around the southern edge of the continent, they had gone west first, stopping at the Western Safe-Zone to pick up my familyās army. You know, since this wasourfight.
From there, the fleet had continued sailing north.
It might sound counterintuitive.
Why sail all the way around the supercontinent just to reach the East? Because the said supercontinent was fucking enormous.
And the southern route wasnāt actually the shortest one.
The Eastern Safe-Zone stretched much farther south than the Central and Northern regions, but the southern ocean around its tip was very difficult to navigate.
The waters there were violent and unpredictable and filled with vicious Spirit Beasts.
The northern route, on the other hand, allowed the fleet to follow the coastline of the Western and Northern Safe-Zones before turning south into Eastern waters.
If all this information is too much to process for you, just understand that instead of going:
South ā East ā Iron HeightNew chapters come out on NovelPing first.
The fleet was going all around the world like this:
South ā West ā North ā East ā Iron Height
It may look like a ridiculous route on paper but it was a much easier one in practice.
Our destination was the Shattered Isles in the Northern Ocean. We had planned to land there and rendezvous with the fleet before making our way towardIron Heighttogether.
Great plan, indeed. All credit to Vereshia.
But you know what wasnota great plan?
Dropping me out of a hovering jet at ten thousand feet without a parachute!
A ramp had been lowered from the back of the military jet, exposing the freezing night air outside. Vereshia was holding me out by my nape like I was a puppy.
My feet were dangling several thousand feet above the ocean. I was screaming and crying and flailing like my life was on the line... because it was.
"Please! Please, please, Lady Vereshia, please! Iāll be good! Iāll strive to be a model Cadet! Iāll open a shrine in your name! Iāll attend my classes and even read the rule handbook! Just please donāt drop me!"
"Youāre lying."
"I swear on my mother!"
Vereshia paused as if considering my offer, then clicked her tongue in rejection. "I think Iāll enjoy throwing you out more. Besides, you shouldāve behaved in your victory speech. This will be your punishment now."
I lost it. "You crazy woman! Iāll die! Iāll die!"
I was yelling as loud as I could, yet my voice was immediately getting swallowed by the howling wind.
"Donāt worry! Gravity will handle the down part!" Vereshia yelled back, amused as if this was some kind of joke.
Aarav joined in. "Sam, think of this as your training. You need to learn how to properly use your Spiritual Pressure. Right now, youāre using it only as armor on instinct. When you learn to control it, you can achieve a variety of things like flight and telekinesis and fear inducement."
"JUST TEACH ME IN A CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENT FIRST!" My voice disappeared into the wind.
Vereshia leaned farther out of the ramp. "Iām sorry, what was that?"
"YOU HEARD ME!"
"No, I didnāt."
"YOU ABSOLUTELY DID, YOU BITCH!"The source of this chapter is novelping(.)com.
Aarav was laughing again. Fucking traitor, that guy.
"Listen, Iāll give you a rundown on how it works," he said, his voice distinctively clear. "There are two ways to achieve flight. One is hard, and the other is harder. Which one do you want to learn?"
Was this guy serious? "The easy one!"
"Iāll teach you both," he nodded sagely. I wanted to punch him. "You already know what Spiritual Pressure is, right? Itās a physical force exerted on reality by your soul. The bigger your soul gets, the more it grows in weight, and so the more force it applies to the world around it."
Why the fuck was he giving me a lecture here?!
"As your skills improve, you can extend this pressure away from your body, wrap it around objects, and pull or push them. Thatās telekinesis. Theoretically, you can use this same application on yourself. You can treat your own body as an object and pull or push it. This is very hard, because we naturally think of our body as the center of our Spiritual Pressure. Instead, weād have to imagine that our pressure is a second body surrounding us. Getting into that mindset is hard when youāre starting out. Youāll also need to consciously adjust the directional vectors and maintain an extremely stable pressure field around yourself. Itās a lot of math. But over time, you learn to do it subconsciously. As I said, this method is very hard, but it lets you fly at speeds unimaginable!"
I had stopped listening to the fucker. The moment he mentioned math, I tuned him out and started calling upon my Origin Card.
Call me delusional, but I was pretty confident I could take on both Vereshia and Aarav alone.
Maybe the cold was getting to my brain.
Maybe the fear of imminent death had pushed me past the point of rational thought.
Or maybe I was just fucking stupid.
Either way, I called upon my Origin Card.
It didnāt come.
I somehow managed to stretch my neck and peer over my shoulder. And what did I see there if not two Cards with glowing red and black runes floating above Vereshia.
Bitch was using some kind ofDebuffCards to suppress my innate ability! What the fuck? Wasthisnot against any protocol now?!
And just to add to my frustration, Aarav continued his lecture like he was a professor and this was his class. "The second method is much easier conceptually, but much more demanding physically. You use your Spiritual Pressure to push against gravity itself. Just create a concentrated field of Spiritual Pressure beneath yourself and push downward with enough force to counteract your own weight. Once you can maintain that pressure, you can gradually adjust the direction of the force and move through the air. This one is so simple."
Of course! Everything is simple when youāre not the one being thrown out of a plane!
Before I could curse his ancestral line, however, Vereshia lowered me a bit.
"Class is over. See you down there."
"Wait, wait, wait! Let me tell you something! Let me tell youā"
She let go.
My stomach dropped. And then I did too.
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