Molting the Mortal Coil

Dark Reach was far too gloomy for Sage’s taste and he did not enjoy associating with the fish-people there. The few he’d met with were likely bad examples of their race, but when combined with the eternal realm of darkness he didn’t want to spend any more time there. He left Dark Reach, traveling through a Transportation Formation towards the next area of the Depths he was interested in. After a flash of light he resisted the after effects of the transportation, recovering in less than a second from the shock to his system. The longer the distance that was traveled, the more harsh the effects of the transportation. The distance he’d just moved was likely enough to kill a normal mortal, which helped explain why there were so many normal people living in such strange locations. They were likely the descendants of those who got trapped in one of the cities and couldn’t leave without becoming powerful and earning a fortune. After thinking about it, Sage realized that for those who wished to live the life of an ordinary mortal, the Depths was a very nice place. The ban on fighting removed at least one of the worries a mortal might face. If they could get past the feeling of confinement, living your whole life in a single city, then was it really that bad? At least they didn’t have to worry about getting murdered for serving tea that was slightly too cool to an angry cultivator.

His own curiosity stopped him from ever wanting to settle into a single city like that. Maybe a local might find the extreme diversity of cultivators and people that left and entered the city to be a perfect sampling of the greater world, but Sage felt like it would only make him more curious.

Leaving the transportation room he found himself in a large hall that reminded him of a viking longhouse. There was a pair of long trough-like fire pits, splitting the room into thirds. Each third of the room seemed like a different location. To the left was what seemed to be shops, they used long tables and chests to separate themselves from the foot traffic that was moving near the fire pit. To the right were sleeping areas, with sidewalls to delineate separate rooms, but only curtains in the front to allow the heat from the fire to reach them. In the center were various restaurants, using the fire pits for their cooking. It was especially an interesting sight when he took a closer look at the fire pits. They weren’t using wood or coal, and instead the flames were coming from some sort of oil.

Sage walked forward, traveling past the many street-stall style restaurants that seemed to be permanent fixtures. After about a hundred yards he found out that there weren't just two fire pits. The two troughs came to an end, creating a path for travel between the three paths of this huge building. Then another set of fire pits continued the pattern. Looking ahead, the interior of this great hall was thousands of feet long and he was amazed by how many people were packed in here. He traveled down the length of the building and finally reached the end. There, he traveled through a set of doors and felt a wave of coldness rush over him. More amazingly, he realized he was still inside the building. He’d just entered a foyer type area that isolated the heat of the interior from the exterior doors. After passing through a second and then third set of doors he stepped out into an arctic forest.

It was an extremely unusual place. At first it looked like a boreal or snow forest, but upon closer look he realized that the trees were immense. They appeared to be simple spruce or pine, but were actually more akin to redwood. They towered into the sky with their lowest boughs being tens of feet off the ground. This height allowed the snowfield below to thrive. The trees were sparse enough that powerful winds blew snow in from the sides and covered the place with a dense layer of white. Behind him, he realized that the building he left was buried under a giant mound of snow. Unlike the other cities of the Depths that he’d visited, this one wasn’t at the bottom of the sea. Walking forward he found that this city consisted of seven other mounds of snow that were longhouses just like the one he’d left. At the center of these eight buildings was a single huge tree that people were walking towards.

It was bitingly cold here, but Sage had long mastered a body refining technique to make even the cold of the deep sea perfectly comfortable. It was quite a bit colder here on the surface with the ice and biting winds, but his cold resistance technique was advanced enough so that he was merely uncomfortable. Getting closer to the huge tree he saw that it had doors set into its outer surface and there was a pathway heading into the center of the huge tree. He followed along with the others and found that at the center of the tree was a room with a large circular hole cut into the ground. There were people hanging around near the hole looking for others to group up with while those who climbed out of the water moved to one of four strange archways that were set up to the north, south, east and west. These archways seemed to be some sort of Magical Tool that rapidly dried anyone who walked through them. Once they stepped through, those people then left through the exits, eager to get to one of the longhouses.

Sage found someone selling information and bought everything they had, sending it to the Inner World so he had ‘instant’ access to the knowledge. Without delay he hopped into the hole which he now knew was not in the ‘ground’, but cut into the ice. He descended through the layer of ice that was more than a hundred feet thick and into an extremely blue layer of ocean. All around him the roots of the huge trees above sunk into the icy water. The roots reminded him of mangroves in a swamp, except this place was not warm and the water was especially blue and gel-like rather than dark and murky. A whole ecosystem had formed around the roots of these trees and despite the freezing temperature, there were many plants and animals clinging to the roots of the huge trees.

He also knew why this city was not on the bottom of the sea like many of the others. The basic informational scroll explained that the ‘Sea Empress’ had her home nearby and any settlement on the sea bottom was found to be an eye-sore and destroyed immediately. She was too lazy to care about a few explorers and hunters, but she did not tolerate any settlements. Since the resources in this area were still extremely lucrative, they had to suffer in the arctic surface area and travel a comparatively longer distance to reach the richer resources.

The people of the Gelid Blue had to suffer a long and very cold commute.