Chapter 287

  Moonlake City (I)

  Nope.

  No, no, no, no.

  I'm seeing things.

  I must have eaten some bad mushrooms in my sleep and entirely hallucinated that thing just now.

  Yup.

  How else, pray tell, would there be a thing costing one billion points? No way. It's too early, and it's some haggard corner of the world where nothing of import ever happens. So, there's no way an entity so massively strong could exist here.

  Nope.

  Recalibrating my mind, I focused back on the journey--as we slowly made our way across the barren dirt, and as more and more people flew past us aboard one vessel or another, my resentment of this place just continued to grow. I mean, I've felt the effects of slightly opaque discrimination (as well as a pretty transparent one) from the day I arrived here, but the more I live, the more I realize that, most of the time at least, it's not so much 'climbing against the heavens' as it is 'navigating very manufactured and discriminatory rivers put in place to keep the divide between the poor and privileged very much there'.

  As the night fell, we decided to camp yet again--and I watched as the lake underwent its transformation. The dull, still waters began to silently churn beneath the surface, and with the first sign of moonlight, colors erupted like fireworks and began to spread out across the water as though it were a canvas.

  It started with the forming of the concentric rings, but with the few cries of the wind, they'd been broken up, colors fanning out into shapeless forms across the lake's surface.

  It was beautiful and transfixing in more ways than one, as my eyes remained glued to the lake over the sky awash with glistening stars.

  ... I never much believed in the spirituality of nature, truth be told. I always figured that, if it were so magical, we wouldn't have spent tens of thousands of years figuring out how to get away from it. And, in some ways, I still don't much believe in it--but there are these moments when I feel a hammer taken to the back of my knees by the sheer beauty of something, and I find myself, if momentarily, wondering if I'm wrong.

  As the spastic light danced across its surface, I saw something shift in the water--luckily, it was just a loose piece of rope, and it floated onwards, undisturbed.

  "Here," Long Tao appeared at my side, startling life out of me for a moment, handing me a small parchment. Holding back a yelp, I furrowed my brows as I took it.

  "What is it?"

  "The list of things we need to find in the lake."

  "..." Reading through it, it really was just that--a list of... things. Some were herbs, some were ores, and some were just random words whose meaning eluded me. "What for?" I asked further.

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  "My grandfather's recipe," he said. "For an array that can cloak that flying artifact of yours."

  Hm? Isn't that, like, really good?

  "Your grandfather was a wise man!" I quickly exclaimed, pinning the parchment close to my chest, hiding it.

  Long Tao sighed and silently rolled his eyes before walking away; whatever, I don't even care. One issue of riding that thing now has a solution--the second one, the abject lack of Spirit Stones, though... well, I'll figure something out.

  I didn't go back to the tent, spending the rest of the night silently cultivating by the shore. With Enduring Eternity, I've found that my speed was neither quick nor slow--the limiting factor, however, was the number of cycles I could do before the friction would simply cause too much pain in my meridians to continue.

  I'd initially thought that meridians were sort of like veins or arteries, just for Qi instead of blood, but they really didn't have many similarities past just having a similar, broader function. Meridians weren't so much natural pathways for Qi to move at will as they were barriers that prevented it from seeping out--for instance, if I tried to pull 50% of all my Qi reserves into a singular attack, I'm pretty sure they'd burst and cripple me.

  It also sort of explained why even someone like Long Tao, body's talent notwithstanding, couldn't just shoot for the stars immediately--body needed time to rest.

  Two more groups of people sped past us during the night, one of them inspecting us with their Divine Sense. This was a reality of appearances--we looked like beggars (in more ways than one), and we were treated as such.

  Perhaps my relatively positive experiences with more senior cultivators of the world have painted my expectations slightly, but I have a feeling that this little trip might undo all of it.

  We departed after a quick breakfast--plain rice and some week-old bread--hurrying a bit as Lao Shun said we were just a few hours from the city.

  The terrain began to shift slightly toward the outskirts, growing a bit hillier, but past that it all really looked the same.

  About an hour past midday, I spotted the buildings coming up in the distance--a thin veil of fog and haze covered them, but they were still there, almost like beacons for the weary travelers.

  The sounds of the whizzing warships and flying boats grew louder and more numerous as we continued approaching, with Divine Senses sweeping over us from every which direction. Honestly, even I was getting pissed off at this point, yet we endured; if we stirred shit before even entering the damn city, we may as well just pack our bags and go elsewhere.

  Speaking of the city, as more of it came into view, the sheer scale began to reveal itself a bit more--it was actually larger than Silvercrest City, though not by much. What made it unique was the sheer absurdity of the design; there were literal hundreds of piers jutting out from the land and over the water, each stretching for at least a couple of hundred feet into the lake, and, far more magically, each having wooden shacks lining their sides, floating above water.

  Back on the land, the view was dominated by precisely four towers jutting out higher than everything else--they seemed to be made of sandstone, unlike the rest of the city, which seemed to be a mix of fieldstone and granite. Mottled stone of the latter was visible on the taller buildings, while the normal dwellings seemed to be largely made from the fieldstone, with occasional wooden shacks.

  It wasn't long before the trekked, dirt road became paved--with limestone, no less. They really decided to use every which stone they had access to.

  It was a beautiful city from the outside, with the almost gold-touched four towers looming over the rustic and almost weathered stones of the common dwellings, with the solid, mottled granite forming the bridge between the two.

  I couldn't much enjoy the view, however, as a window appeared next to me that made me almost sigh audibly.

  [--emergency quest detected]

  [Quest: Quiet Drain]

  [Difficulty: Legendary]

  [Context: the depths of the Moon Lake, as well as parts of Moonlake City, exhibit signs of Qi drainage that is unnatural. Discover the root cause of the ploy and liberate the inhabitants from the seeming curse that has been haunting them for a long while]

  [Reward: 1x 'Breath of a God']

  [Breath of a God (???) -- used automatically upon obtaining; all your Disciples will advance by 1 minor realm. They cannot achieve a breakthrough this way. Instead, those at the peak of their Realm will gain a guaranteed upgrade to the nature of their breakthrough when they do undergo it]