Chapter 123

The days when Turan was a shepherd now felt like a distant past.

While herding sheep, Turan would often look toward the east.

That was because he believed it was the place where the world he imagined existed, something vast and incomprehensible.

He never imagined that a few years later he would end up exploring almost the entirety of that vast world, and even find it too small, causing him to turn his gaze beyond the west.

*

“So this is Turan’s hometown.......”

In the early morning, Bije, carrying Turan and his group, finally landed in a valley of Hisaril Hill.

There was a faint tremor in Meisa’s voice as she looked around.

Solif, brushing aside the grass on the ground, spoke.

“Do you think my Father and Mother can live well here? There’s really nothing here.”

The land was dotted with short weeds that barely reached the ankles.

The hills and valleys stretching out in the distance were all bare, with scarcely a few trees growing here and there.

“As long as it’s a place where sunlight reaches so I can pray, I’m fine.”

“As long as we have food and water, it doesn’t matter. I’ve already spent an entire year locked in a room.”

At the calm words of the Varaha couple, Solif let out a short sigh and shook his head.

“Well, we picked up plenty of entertainment along the way through various cities, so you won’t get too bored. Even if this place is poor, it’s not so bad that nobles would worry about food.”

Even Keorn used to roam around here hunting wolves.

Not to mention, the appearance of a leopard magical beast meant that quite a few animals lived at the foot of the Sky Mountain Range.

Of course, humans can’t live on meat alone, so they would also need a water source and farmland.

But this was something Turan, who had roamed this area since long ago, had already prepared for.

“This is the hideout I had in mind.”

The place Turan led them to was a small basin a few kilometers south from the landing spot.

Not only was it deeply carved into the land, but the upper cliffs twisted in such a way that it was hard to see the inside from above, and even the entrance was concealed.

“How did you even find a place like this?”

“What else was there to do around here besides herding sheep and wandering around?”

He might have been a shepherd, but Turan was a noble. Even during his weaker days, he could easily run dozens of kilometers in an hour.

There were virtually no terrains in this area that Turan didn’t know.

Upon entering the basin, the group let out gasps of awe at the open space.

Despite being surrounded, the sunlight reached well, the land wasn’t sloped, and the finely grown grass made it look ideal for farming.

“It’s really nice. We just need a water supply.”

“Groundwater?”

“Looks like we’ll have to put in some work again.”

They had already gotten used to earth-manipulation magic through land reclamation work in the south.

They immediately began digging into the ground outside the basin.

With the overwhelming magic power of the nobles, tunnels dozens of meters deep appeared all around in an instant. No matter how barren the wasteland, it didn’t take long to catch a few veins of groundwater.

“Here, water! It’s pretty thick!”

“Good. Stop working and let’s redirect it from over there.”

A short while later, they drew the groundwater to create a small well within the basin.

It was clean enough to use not only for washing and watering crops and livestock, but also as drinking water.

Next came the task of building homes to live in.

Of course, all usable timber in this area had long since been cleared out by others, but Turan, being a local, had anticipated this.

“Both of you, step aside. I'll place all the pillars here."

“Who brought the straw?”

“Here, this is it, right?”

While passing through various cities, they had purchased a wide range of materials needed for building houses.

From wooden pillars and doors to glass windows, roof tiles, and bricks, things hard to come by in such remote areas.

Of course, a house couldn’t be built just by having the materials, but none of them were amateurs when it came to construction either.

Of course, they had experience rebuilding a village that had once been burned down, and even during the reclamation project, they had built housing for the influx of settlers in no time.

They packed down the earth and used Telekinesis Magic to neatly place the prepared materials. Any missing or misaligned parts were adjusted on the spot with magic, so the buildings quickly went up one after another.

"Our son is good at building houses too!"

“Though he seems to be doing the least work......”

At his wife’s praise of Solif, Godis spoke gruffly, only to get smacked lightly on the back and avert his gaze.

After several hours, a decent-looking brick house stood right in the middle of the basin.

It was three stories tall with about ten rooms.

There was, of course, a bedroom for the Varaha couple, and the design was spacious enough to accommodate more guests in the future.

Not to mention, Turan’s group would need to sleep here tonight as well.

“Building and decorating a house ourselves is kind of fun. I didn’t know I’d like this kind of thing.”

“Yet when it came time to pick out furniture, you just goofed off.”

Solif, who had been whistling as he placed down a bed, chuckled awkwardly and slipped away without a response.

Turan turned his gaze to the well outside the window, and suddenly voiced a thought that came to mind.

“What if we just make a small pond and put some fish in it?”

“How would you bring them in?”

“There’s a lake about four hundred kilometers from here. If I use Fluid Manipulation Magic to bring the water and the fish together......”

"Come on, we'd definitely get caught passing."

“Yeah, I guess so.”

It seemed he’d gotten carried away with how fun it was to build a residence with magic.

After the hideout was complete, the five people and one golden eagle shared food and drinks in the small garden in front of the house, commemorating the end of their journey.

*

As the feast was winding down, Turan quietly got up and started heading to the back, prompting Solif to ask,

“Hm? Where are you going?”

“I thought I’d drop by the house I used to live in.”

“Want me to come?”

“It’s fine. Look after your parents.”

Considering they’d be separated again soon, he needed to cherish the time spent with his parents.

Knowing this, Solif nodded and turned his head back around.

At that moment, Meisa quietly approached from behind and said,

“I want to go too.”

“It won’t be very fun. I’m just going to take a quick look and not draw attention.”

There were a few villages nearby where people lived, but the reason he had gone out of his way to build a house here from scratch was clear.

It was in case someone came looking for his whereabouts later and visited his hometown.

If he settled in a village, his identity would be exposed easily just by asking around.

“It’s nighttime anyway, so we won’t be seen. Two people should be fine, right? I just want to see it. The house you lived in.”

At Meisa's words, Turan smiled as if he had no choice and pulled her along.

A moment later, the two of them gently persuaded Bije, who had been patting her belly after eating a pile of jerky, and took off from the basin.

After flying together for about a minute, they saw a sheep farm situated on a low hill.

“That one?”

“Yeah. It hasn’t changed at all, even after all this time.”

Had it been a little over three years? Not quite four?

It was too short a time for major changes if someone else had moved in.

Focusing his senses, Turan could feel the presence of three people and two dogs inside the house.

They were probably keeping shepherd dogs, since, unlike Turan, they couldn’t use magic to control the herd.

“They fixed the broken fence from before, and it looks like they butchered the one that was sick...... Looks like the village chief brought in a proper shepherd family with some skill. I thought he’d just pick some punk from the village and send him up.”

Turan was explaining what he saw when he noticed Meisa staring at him intently and turned his head.

“What?”

“It’s just, hearing you talk like that makes it really feel like you were a shepherd. Honestly, it didn’t feel real before.”

“Is that so.”

“Anyone would think you’d lived your whole life without ever doing any hard work.”

Turan, who had been brushing his hand across his face, gave an embarrassed smile and shook his head.

After taking a look around his childhood home for the first time in a long while, Turan walked to a cliff about a kilometer away from the house.

There, a small gravestone stood.

“This is......?”

“My mother’s grave.”

“So you buried her here, not in the village cemetery.”

“If I buried her there, I figured the villagers would dig it up later. We didn’t exactly get along.”

Perhaps recalling the past he had once confided, a look of pity flickered in Meisa’s eyes.

Turan tidied up the neglected and weathered grave, then stood before it, clasped his hands together, and closed his eyes.

And in his mind, he recalled everything he had been through, the secret histories of his mother and father that he had come to learn.

‘Why didn’t you tell me, Mother?’

Of course, the answer to that question came from within his own head.

At the time, Turan had been too young and weak to bear such secrets.

And it was likely that Bizella had no idea how much potential Turan possessed, or how powerful a wizard he could become.

“If my mother were still alive, there’s so much I’d want to ask her.”

“Like what?”

“What kind of person my father was, why she ran away in the first place, stuff like that......”

But the dead could not return to life.

Turan suddenly recalled the soul magic he had been training in so diligently lately.

Didn’t it say that someone who had awakened Spiritual Perception could see and talk with the soul of someone who had recently died?

At the very least, “recently” probably didn’t mean several years.

As he spent a few minutes in silence, Turan opened his eyes at the presence he felt nearby.

Bije was standing beside him, eyes closed and head deeply bowed toward the grave.

“You.”

*

After spending a day back at the hideout, Turan’s group began preparing in earnest to climb the Sky Mountain Range.

In truth, there wasn’t much to prepare.

They had already bought almost all the survival essentials on the way and stored them in the Large-Capacity Pouch.

It was enough to have Bije hunt down a few deer from a distance to stock up on fresh meat.

“Well then, we’ll be off.”

“Please, don’t overdo it. This place alone is a fine enough place to live......”

“Don’t worry, Father. We’re just going to take a look. Just a look.”

Despite Solif’s confident assurance, the concern on the Varaha couple’s faces seemed to deepen.

After once again reminding them that this wasn’t such a dangerous endeavor, Turan boarded the swing tied to Bije’s leg.

It felt oddly nostalgic for the three of them to be riding the swing together again.

“This is kind of nerve-wracking.”

“Same here.”

“Some tension’s good for the body. Let’s go, Bije.”

As the golden eagle took off with the swing, the Sky Mountain Range soon came into view.

Even from a distance, the terrain had seemed incomprehensibly massive, and now that it was close, Solif gasped in awe.

“Hey, you can’t even see the top from here? Are we really climbing that?”

“We’ll give it a shot. Upward!”

At Turan’s shout, Bije stopped approaching forward and began to ascend in a wide arc.

They passed the altitude at which they usually flew, several hundred meters, then 1,000 meters, 1,200 meters, 1,500 meters, and everything on the ground grew small.

“At this rate, we might actually get there pretty easily......”

As Solif muttered while looking down, it was as if Bije had been waiting for it, her speed began to slow.

Turan clicked his tongue softly and shook his head.

“Looks like it’s getting harder to keep climbing.”

Ever since he first flew through the skies on Bije, one of the things Turan had taken interest in was how high this bird could actually fly.

And after several test flights, he had learned that the higher they went, the thinner the air became, making proper flight increasingly difficult.

Even now, it was the same, no matter how much Bije flapped, there wasn’t enough wind for her wings to catch, so the swing couldn’t rise quickly anymore.

When Turan, Meisa, and even Solif joined forces and used Wind Magic, their ascent gained a bit more speed, but even that didn’t last long.

Just like how it’s hard to use Water Magic where there’s no water, or Fire Magic underwater, Wind Magic was difficult to use in a place where there was no air.

Worse yet, the thinning air began to threaten even their own breathing.

Of course, for powerful nobles like them, even a single handful of breath was enough to endure for several hours, so it wasn’t a serious problem.

“Bije! Head toward the mountain range!”

At the shout from below, Bije flapped with all her might, using every last ounce of strength to push her body toward the mountainside.

When Turan altered a portion of the cliff to create a space for the swing to land, Bije dropped the swing there almost like tossing it, then landed and gasped for breath.

“You did well, Bije.”

Though it had been a short flight, Bije was clearly exhausted, likely from exerting herself fully at the end.

Turan stroked her head, then let her rest atop the metal bar on her side.

“Now it’s our turn to climb.”

“If only we could tunnel through to the other side using Earthmover Magic.”

“If it were that easy, someone would’ve done it already.”

The surface of the Sky Mountain Range could be warped with Earthmover Magic, but once they began to dig inward, they’d soon run into an unknown material of rock that blocked the way.

Much like the structures of the Old Empire, it was nearly impossible to destroy through physical means, making such tricks unviable.

“Here, take your climbing gear. One by one.”

They quickly tied ropes around their waists to connect themselves to one another, then began climbing the mountain on foot.

Meisa, positioned in the middle, looked down and muttered.

“It’s so high... I feel like I’ll die if I fall.......”

“I told you, just falling isn’t enough to kill us anymore.”

One of the natural laws they had learned from the Librarian was that everything that falls has a terminal velocity.

That speed varies depending on things like volume, weight, and shape, but once the fall exceeds a few hundred meters, falling from even higher won’t make it any faster.

So none of them, not even the physically weakest, Bije had any reason to fear death from a fall here.

Compared to the toughness of their bodies, the rocks below were far too soft.

With that reassurance, they climbed for several more minutes.

Thanks to Earthmover Magic, which created footholds as they climbed, the movement itself was as easy as walking, but their breathing grew more and more labored.

“Ca... can’t... breathe. Damn it.......”

“Don’t... talk.......”

After covering Solif's complaining mouth, Turan took a deep breath, then carved out another hold and climbed upward.

Indeed, the Sky Mountain Range served as a barrier just like everywhere else.

Without a top-tier magical beast like Bije, simply reaching this place would have taken ages, and for ordinary people, this was a demonic zone where even breathing wasn’t allowed......

If there was any solace, it was that the summit was finally coming into view.

What could possibly lie beyond that?

With equal parts hope and fear, Turan led the way, using hands and feet to carve out new holds as he climbed the mountain.

“You... ran!”

“Al... most...!”

Even the voices of his companions behind him could hardly be heard now.

Perhaps it was because their breathing had become too strained, or maybe because there wasn’t enough air to carry their voices.

Still, since the rope tied around his waist remained taut, they were surely still following him.

Trusting in that, Turan did not look back and kept climbing the nearly vertical cliff, over and over again.

And at last.

“Ah......”

From the very top of the mountain range, he looked out across to the other side.

*****