The Tidal Sanctuary.
"Ugh... the magic feels thin..." Sephiria curled up on the coral bed, muffling her voice.
The sparse magical energy around her made Sephiria feel as though she had altitude sickness — her whole body caught in a persistent, grinding discomfort.
In truth, as a dungeon, the Tidal Sanctuary's magical concentration was anything but sparse — it should have been denser than the outside world. The reason Sephiria felt it as thin was purely because the magical concentration inside the mist illusion had been utterly absurd.
Casting high-intensity magic in the mist and being bathed in that concentration had thrown her senses off balance, producing the symptoms of magic withdrawal. Fortunately, the time spent inside hadn't been long — it was a mild case, and with enough rest she could readjust. She'd just have to suffer through it for a while first.
Outside the Tidal Sanctuary, the sea had been swallowed by the mist.
The mist, when you drove it back as it advanced, was like compressing a spring — a stopgap that treated the symptom, not the cause.
They had forced their way back to the Tidal Sanctuary by brute force with the [Ocean Scepter], but the path they'd cleared was swallowed by the mist again not long after.
Large stretches of floating fungal mats had vanished from his awareness as the mist consumed them. How far would it advance this time?
At this rate, it probably wouldn't just shimmy along the shoreline and retreat like before.
The losses to the sea mats were severe. The one consolation was that the dungeon itself remained safe.
Even with the surrounding seas blanketed in mist, the white haze had stopped at the Tidal Sanctuary's doors.
What little mist seeped inside would simply break down into high-concentration magical energy and diffuse throughout the dungeon. The mist apparently couldn't force its way in.
Honestly, if the mist ever did break into the Tidal Sanctuary, Lin Jun would have no choice but to stuff all the mermaids and fishmen into the seventh floor of the Puchi underground city and seal the rift shut.
The seventh floor had decent space, but packing all of them in there would be a tight fit.
He remembered the Reaper saying: "the Mist doesn't matter."
Lin Jun, however, could see absolutely nothing unimportant about it. This was a full-on world-ending crisis.
To prepare for the possibility of the mist reaching land, the Mushroom Fortress had set everything else aside and shifted into full preparation mode.
Aside from the mist crisis, that illusion from earlier was also quite mushroom-worthy of thought.
The foundation of a mist illusion was the memories of those trapped inside it.
So whose memories was that wealthy merchant's scenario based on?
Mermaids lived to about a hundred and twenty, and all three of the ones with him were fairly young.
Surely it wasn't his own?
A special case?
And that ghost ship the merchant had called "the Reflection" — this was his second encounter with it. Gunpowder, cannons — aesthetically, it felt completely out of place with everything Lin Jun knew. He had no idea what it was.
And then there was the portrait.
Jumping straight to the conclusion that the figure in it was Vera was probably wrong — but there was at least a fifty-percent resemblance. Lin Jun refused to believe there was no connection.
A descendant? Or something else?
Descendant felt like a stretch.
Seven or eight generations back from Vera, even if just one of those ancestors had been a noble, Vera should have a family name attached — something like "Saint-Clair," the way Inanna did.
Surely it couldn't be that Vera was an ancestral throwback, sharing a face with some ancestor from who-knows-how-many generations back.
Asking Vera was pointless. Lin Jun had wandered through the man's dreams thoroughly. There was no way he was hiding some great secret.
As for the Sacred Tree...
Given that old geezer's usual attitude, even if it knew something, it would probably just speak in riddles.
Infuriating old geezer. Someday...
---
On Lin Jun's orders, Little Pig selected many elite squads and put them through short, targeted intensive training — cramming them with knowledge about the mist and how to deal with it.
Afterward, Little Pig deployed them to establish small forward positions along the southern coastline.
Against the mist, throwing an army at it would only add to the casualties. Elite squads were the right answer.
These positions were organized into three defensive lines, meant to hold temporarily when the mist accelerated, giving rear forces enough time and space to maneuver.
The Mushroom Fortress would judge whether to hold until the mist retreated, or relocate eastward to avoid the worst of it, based on the mist's intensity at the time.
When he thought about it — the mist was nearly rampaging onto the continent, and he still hadn't unified the forces of all the races. Embarrassing.
The Demon King was the root cause of it all.
If Mortis were still in power, Lin Jun could have found an opportunity to use [Soul Touch] to ignore the level gap and deal a severe blow — or simply finish Mortis off — then devour the Empire and lock in his dominant position.
Instead the Demon King had arrived. The man had his soul split into many fragments. Lin Jun could crush one or two of them and still not kill him.
Then there was the business with slimes consuming the fungal mats, holding up the unification.
The Demon King claimed to want to save the world too. Lin Jun was quite curious to see how the Empire would handle the mist when it hit land. If they fumbled it and wasted what little vitality the Empire had left, Lin Jun wouldn't be showing any mercy. When the time came to march, he'd do it with loudspeakers blaring the Demon King's incompetence.
Lin Jun hadn't forgotten the alliance he'd just formed, either. He had Little Pink relay the news of the approaching mist to the Kingdom's top brass.
Lorenzo and Alama, after confirming the report several times over, looked absolutely grim.
The new defensive lines had been built for fighting the Empire. Against the mist, they were useless.
But if they pulled everyone out, the magical runes across the mist-covered zones would inevitably be damaged — warped by the high-concentration illusory magic, destroyed for one reason or another. Repairing them afterward, even once the mist retreated, would be enormously difficult.
And the mist actually reaching land...
The doomsday crisis the Mushroom Fortress had warned them about once felt distant. Now it was right on their doorstep. It was impossible not to worry. Sophia, on the other hand, seemed relatively composed.
For one, she had spent her time in the archipelago dealing with the mist for so long that she'd had some mental preparation for this.
For another, as the Hero, she'd been told the very first day she was summoned that her purpose was to help humanity through a crisis. The crisis had simply shifted from demonkind to the mist. The mental adjustment required wasn't all that great.
While humans, demons, and Puchis all faced the threat of the mist, the elves and dwarves were entirely unaffected.
The elves, hearing the news from the United Kingdom, at least dispatched a few people to assist the Kingdom. The dwarves were fully absorbed in their own internal conflict.
The clashes over the infection issue, stoked by interested parties, were no longer confined to the general population — they had spread into the armies and clans. Senior members of the four major dwarven clans had already been assassinated over political allegiances. The clan leaders were accusing each other of using underhanded means, to the point of mobilizing clan militaries to face each other down.
To ease the tension, the Dwarf King had been calling meeting after meeting, with little effect.
Rather amusingly, even amid all this, the dwarves' trade with the Mushroom Fortress — dragons exchanged for grade-up magic crystals — had barely been affected. Even the anti-mycelium faction had no desire to stop the trade. In fact, another dragon had just been delivered to the Puchis not long ago. The precious S-rank magic crystals obtained from the deal were the kind that actually reached every single clan's hands.
The Mountain Dwarves did have an undeniable advantage when it came to hunting dragons.
Perhaps because they were used to living on Dragon Ridge, even during the Dragon Strife dragons tended to seek out high mountains as temporary roosts. The Mountains were the highest elevation around, so dragons gathered there in especially large numbers.
The dwarves were smart about it too. They never engaged dragons head-on. They waited until two dragons had battered each other to near-exhaustion in the Dragon Strife, then stepped in to "intervene."
Good luck meant catching two. Bad luck, just one.
As it happened, Badul — a dwarf who had retreated to a city deep in the Mountains to escape the recent internal chaos — came across a blue dragon and a red dragon fighting from the mountaintop all the way down into a ravine. Dragon roars echoed through the peaks, and one of them was already growing noticeably weaker.
Badul didn't waste the opportunity. He picked up his axe, gathered his elite fighters, and headed toward the ravine.
This time, however, the dwarves had run into a tough one.
(End of Chapter)
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