New Eden: Live to Play, Play to Live-Chapter 1082: Reaching The Formation

Sitting under the blazing sun, resting from the longest part of their climb, Alexander looked up at the sky and cursed.

"She wasn’t kidding about the heat. This is mid-summer blistering sultry heat," he complained, sweat coming from every inch of his skin.

And he wasn’t the only one falling prey to the sweltering sun rays as he looked around at his teammates. Everyone was dripping in sweat, hair sticking to their foreheads and cheeks, clothes clinging to their bodies.

Looking back up, though, he already knew what was causing this.

Above them, in the sky, clinging to the mountain like a halo of invisible inscriptions, an enormous circle array, spinning slowly around the mountain’s three-quarters point.

The sun’s rays passing through the array were magnified, increasing their heat and deadliness, on occasion, when the correct symbols caught the sun at a certain angle.

He could imagine this was part of the ’Formation,’ as the Zhong Kui called them, making it a double-sided spell array, the lower part forming a deterrent and the upper part a trap, if he believed the words of Kujaku and David.

As far as he was concerned, this was incredibly advanced magic and could not have been made by anyone born in this century. It was a miracle that anything like this even functioned on Earth, given its lack of natural mana before New Eden’s appearance.

David had told him that it was powered by the Earth’s own mystical energy source, wearing different names worldwide, but Alexander still couldn’t feel any of these sources nearby. If they were present, they were out of his area of inspection.

He imagined they were probably something like the Ley Lines in New Eden, as Aberon had once told him that every planet in the known universe held its own system of veins to carry its life force. But the Ley Lines in New Eden were so much closer to the planet’s surface.

It made no sense that the ones on Earth were so much deeper. Unless something had happened, forcing the world to bury them deeper within itself to protect its energy. ƒгeeweɓn૦vel.com

But this was all conjecture. There was no point in dwelling on something he had no actual knowledge about at this moment.

They had more pressing concerns. Like the increasing heat, the closer they got to the formation, blocking their path upward on Huashan Mountain.

He had already tried getting closer to the formation using his wings, but had promptly stopped when he noticed two birds fighting in the distance above him, flying through the floating sigils.

The moment they touched the invisible formation, they suddenly stopped beating their wings, and crashed into the ground, dead.

This had killed his enthusiasm about breaking through the formation by flight, assuming it was one of the defences in place in the massive spell array, to keep people from getting in wantonly from off the hiking path.

Yet another hurdle on their path.

Violette and Jonathan occasionally helped with the heat, working together to blow a chilly wind on them to beat the heat back. Still, David kept admonishing them, telling them to keep their mana for later.

He was on high alert constantly, glancing in every direction, almost like he expected someone to jump at them from hidden spots and for a fight to erupt.

Alex could tell that being in enemy territory was working on his psyche and making him nervous, even though he had boasted to the Zhong Kui last time that he and Alexander could wipe them out with just the two.

It was evident in his demeanour that the threat had been nothing more than that, at the time—something to get them to reconsider their attack on them.

Now that they stood on the very mountain that he promised to raid if they insisted on trying to kill Alexander, his temperament was a lot tamer.

’Seems he wasn’t kidding when he said the leader of the Zhong Kui is powerful. I wonder how much, though,’ he mused, his itch for battle acting up.

Looking at his group again, he clapped his hands to gather attention.

"Alright! Break’s over. Let’s keep moving so this sun doesn’t cook us alive, shall we?"

Grunts and groans echoed as half the group complained tiredly, while the other half got to their feet quietly, picking up their backpacks. For the quiet ones, it was pointless to waste energy complaining when their difficulties were only starting.

They would rather conserve their strength.

Resuming their hike, Alexander led the march upward, ensuring he kept his mana vision active at all times in case anything hidden escaped their eyes. They hadn’t found any traps or signs of, yet, but it was never a bad idea to stay cautious.

The path up the mountain wasn’t incredibly arduous, up to now, and they had been making a decent pace, all things considered. Aside from the heat slowing them, and the general alertness of their hike lead, everything was going smoothly.

It took them another hour to reach the point where the formation blocked their path forward. And just past it, Alexander could barely see ten feet before him.

The cloud that rested just beyond the formation’s limit formed a dense fog that obscured their vision. Alex knew the true challenge started now.

Pulling a pair of earplugs from his pocket and a pair of lensless glasses, he pursed his lips.

"I hope these work like she said," he mumbled.

He quickly plugged his ears with the earplugs, ensuring they were well inserted, before slipping on the glasses. This would have seemed pointless and dangerous to onlookers, given that the low visibility made their ears their best sense here, but everything had a reason.

In their meeting, Kujaku explained that the formation around the mountain’s peak was mostly there to mislead hikers and was never meant as a trap. So, it was built with distraction and misdirection in mind.

The fog obscured their sight as much as possible while the formation made sounds to catch their attention, until they either turned around willingly, or got misled into returning to the entrance.

To that, she added that, through experimentation, they had figured out that it wasn’t just the sounds at play. An almost imperceptible melody was played, containing traces of hypnotic tunes meant to entranse their prey into turning back.

Focusing out the noises themselves didn’t work on its own. That’s why she had given them all earplugs.

The second item, the glasses, was much more intricate.

Alex could feel the enchantment on them, even though it was very subtle. And once they were over his eyes, he understood their function.

The fog before him, which had been incredibly dense, lightened up quite a lot, letting him see fifty feet into it. It didn’t seem like a lot, but quintupling his vision range was already a blessing of its own.

Especially since the fog had something in it that blocked his magical detection range. Sadly, that part wasn’t restored with the glasses.

Seeing him put the items on, the rest of the group followed suit.

Alexander looked to Kary, who nodded at him, and he stepped forth. They had agreed beforehand that he would be the one to enter first, in case anything dangerous happened, and scope out the nearby area before returning to them.

As he stepped through the formation wall, half expecting to feel it attack him, as it had done to the birds that flew in earlier, he inched forward until he was entirely past it.

The slow wind caressing his cheeks on the mountain path vanished, the air becoming eerily still, as if time had stopped in this formation. There was no bug, bird, or animal in sight to add to this eery atmosphere, and he shivered slightly.

Taking a few steps forward, Alex looked over his shoulder, trying to see the mountain path behind him, but there was nothing but fog.

He knew he had barely moved away from it, so it couldn’t have vanished, but the fog hid the entrance like a solid wall. The glasses did nothing to shed it away, even though he stood mere feet away from it.

"Kujaku was not kidding when she said this part was dangerous... It would be so easy to get lost in this fog, if it weren’t for the glasses," he mumbled.

Returning his focus to his task, Alex walked around a little, scanning his vicinity for any hidden traps, magical or otherwise, but his search came back void.

"I guess they at least haven’t booby-trapped the path in case civilians come here. They don’t want the attention that comes with en-mass disappearances," he chuckled to himself.

He walked back on the path, following his traces on the ground, and walked through the fog leading him outside the formation.

Wincing from the return of the blinding sun, Alex looked at his group, who were eyeing him with anticipation.

He gave them a thumbs-up, since everyone had their earplugs in. He didn’t want to scream, which would defeat the purpose of trying to be sneaky.

Nods responded to his gesture, and soon, they were filling into the fog, one by one, following Alexander’s footsteps, until none were left.

With only the barren road and their footsteps in the dirt path attesting to their passage here, the wind whistled by, erasing the traces, like a broom over dust.

They were on their own now.