Chapter 182 : Chapter 182

Ryan lifted his head and looked upward.

There was nothing to see there.

Only that hazy gray light, with no telling where it came from or how high above it was. It fell to the ground, onto the vines, onto the people, dragging all their shadows out long, long behind them.

The stone dome was hidden somewhere within that gray haze, invisible.

But Ryan knew it was there.

Pressing down above all their heads.

Some things could not be seen, but they were there all the same. Pressing on you, pressing on everyone, crushing the breath out of you, while you did not even know what they looked like.

He lowered his gaze and looked back at the door.

The dark red light still pulsed, once, then again, like a heartbeat.

Like the heartbeat of something alive.

Ryan suddenly wondered what exactly lay behind that door.

Where was Allen now?

That fool who smiled with a flash of white teeth, who had drunkenly drawn secret signs on the table with a fork, who had talked about marrying into a noble family—

Was he alive now, or dead?

Or had he turned into those motes of light and scattered, leaving nothing behind?

Ryan did not know.

All he knew was that the door was still there, and that dark red light was still flashing, once, then again.

As if waiting for something.

As if counting something.

As if—

Counting down.

At the same time, elsewhere.

The Sea of Trees.

The silver-gray giant trees speared into the sky one after another, their layered canopies sealing it shut. Sunlight leaked through the gaps, breaking into countless scattered beams that fell on the moss, on the trunks, and on the vines crisscrossing through everything.

A figure moved through them at blinding speed.

Fast.

Extremely fast.

So fast that the naked eye could barely follow it. One instant, she was on that trunk; the next, she had already crossed dozens of meters and landed on another jutting branch. Her robes streamed behind her in afterimages, like a bird skimming the treetops.

Forty or fifty meters per second.

If this had been an open plain, with the aid of magic, that speed would not have been particularly shocking.

But this was the Sea of Trees—trunks packed densely together, layers upon layers of branches and leaves overhead, a place where the slightest mistake would send someone crashing straight into wood. And yet that figure never slowed in the slightest. Every leap, every turn, every shift in direction flowed as naturally as if she were running on level ground.

Even stranger was where she landed.

Those trunks—some thick enough for several men to encircle, some no thicker than a wrist; some growing straight across, some slanting out, some hidden behind layer upon layer of branches. Yet no matter how narrow or awkwardly angled they were, the moment she stepped on them, they did not sway at all. They seemed as though they had been born solely to support her footing.

No.

It was not that she was searching them out.

Every time she leaped into the air, the trees themselves seemed to move with intent. The ones that needed to extend, extended. The ones that needed to angle out, angled out. They appeared beneath her feet exactly when she needed them. The branches and leaves did the same, parting when they needed to part, lifting when they needed to lift, as if the entire Sea of Trees were helping her run.

Ilis thought that this must have been what it felt like to come home.

The trunks were her road. The leaves were her hands. The wind was her breath. The entire forest was telling her the same thing.

You are back.

You have finally come back.

She landed on a broad, sturdy trunk and came to a stop.

Sunlight filtered through the canopy and fell across her.

Black hair. Violet eyes.

She stood there, breathing faintly, her chest rising and falling. Sweat slid from her brow, tracing the line of her cheek before dripping away. She raised a hand and wiped it off.

If a high-ranking mage had seen her now, they would have been struck speechless.

This was Nature Magic.

Not the sort of simple trick that merely let one communicate with trees, but true natural affinity. This was not a mage commanding nature, but nature itself moving to assist the mage. Those trunks were not merely being stepped on—they were extending themselves for her to step on. Those branches were not being pushed aside—they were moving aside of their own will to let her pass.

This degree of affinity could no longer be explained as mere skill.

It was talent.

Something carved into the bloodline itself.

The magical system of the continent was complicated to explain, but in essence, it was also simple.

Most people could learn most elemental magics—fire, lightning, earth, wind, water, ice. As long as they worked hard enough, they could cast them. Ryan, for example, could use all the basic elemental magics. When he needed fire, he gathered fire elements. When he needed wind, he summoned wind elements. What mattered was his control over the elements and the support of his own magic power.

A smaller number of people were born with affinity for a certain element.

Take Lillian, for instance. Her ice magic was distinctly stronger than that of others at the same level, not because she worked harder, but because she sensed ice elements more keenly and could communicate with those ice-element spirits more easily.

Or take Eleanor’s family. They excelled in combining wind and fire, and that, too, came from an affinity passed down through generations.

That was talent.

Above that was higher-order magic.

Spatial magic was the clearest example.

Blinking, displacement, teleportation, spatial lockdown—these were not simply built from stacking elemental power. They required perception of space itself. Not merely seeing an object, but sensing its exact position within three-dimensional space; not merely feeling the wind, but sensing the movement of air, the change in humidity, every tiny disturbance.

That kind of perception could not be trained into existence.

It chose its wielder.

It was like the difference between an ordinary archer and a master one. An ordinary person saw only the target. A master marksman saw the wind, the humidity, the heartbeat, the slightest tremor of muscle. Spatial magic was the same. It required an instinctive grasp of spatial dimensions.

And Nature Magic—

Was even rarer than spatial magic.

The last recorded Natural Affinity wielder had been a sage who studied ancient magic three hundred years ago. After that, there had been no more.

Because this was not a magic humans were ever meant to wield.

Its creators.

Its users.

Its true masters—

Were the elves.

On this continent, there had once been a race capable of communicating freely with everything in nature.

The magic elements floating in the air—fire elements, water elements, wind elements, light elements, dark elements—they had wills of their own, languages of their own.

Humans needed incantations, runes, and magic circles just to barely communicate with them and persuade them to obey.

But to elves, those elements were like old friends, summoned with a thought and dismissed just as easily.

No incantations were needed.

No magic circles.

No elaborate rituals.

Only a single thought.

Burning fire. Freezing ice. Howling wind.

In their hands, such things were no different from clay in a child’s grasp. They shaped them into whatever form they wished.

What glory that had been.

So when humanity first discovered that the magic elements floating through the air possessed their own awareness, they named them after that great race—

Spirits.

To commemorate them.

To honor them.

To remember that there had once been a race able to speak with all things.