The rest of the trip to the forest went smoothly. Wisteria’s dragons didn’t swoop down and gobble us up, and Reagan didn’t come with Mark to kill us. The trip took three days.

Hui Ming lifted the flap in front of the carriage, “We’ve arrived, master. The carriage can’t go further.”

Jing’s animals cheered in unison and lept out. I climbed out after them. I faced the White Dragon Forest and its impossibly gigantic trees. Trees as tall and thick as skyscrapers formed a wall of darkness. The forest’s canopy shut out the most of the light, hiding its plant and animals in its shade. Rays shined through the canopy, painting thousands of stripes onto the sheet of black.

According to the books, this forest was one of the world’s unbreakable mysteries. Filled with both dangers and treasures, it was a place only the bravest could adventure.

Jing’s animals disagreed with the books. They sprinted at the forest as if they forgot the meaning of “caution.” “Come back in thirty minutes!” Jing called after them.

I took off my shoes and stepped onto the grass. I sent my mana into the grass. Each bunch of grass had roots that touched its neighbors. My mana went through those connections and spread to every nearby plant. Traveling via the root systems, my mana shot at the forest. I identified and took control of the first trees I reached.

I had to dull the overwhelming raw data from identifying the trees, so I wasn’t able to sense everything from them. But I could feel the bigger things, like the meter long insects prowling the forest. “Hey… this forest is dangerous. Are you sure you want those children running all over the place like that?”

Jing smirked, “They’ll be fine. Watch.”

All of the tiny creatures transformed into enormous beasts. Even that annoying chicken grew to three stories tall. It’s feet tore up the earth, and dirt and ripped grass rained behind it. It pecked at the ground, unearthed a worm longer than I was tall, and swallowed it in one gulp.

Lemonade helped Brian out of his carriage. His carriage shined like a polished gold nugget. Precious metals coated the wooden carriage. Blue ribbons attached to the top of the carriage wiggled from the wind. Windows made of glass let Jing and I see into the interior of the carriage, which was just as lavish as its exterior. His soldiers emptied out of the other carriages.

I glanced at mine. It was normal. The only part of it that wasn't wood was the five blankets Jing brought for her animals. Hui Ming was staring daggers at Brian, but he was too blind to notice. Jing didn’t look like she cared. I didn’t care either, and Brian probably knew that.

“Let’s leave our stuff behind and keep going on foot,” he said, “There’s too much underbrush. Unless you want to move it aside.” Lemonade must’ve told him what the forest looked like.

I scratched my chin with my index finger, “Do you have some blood to spare?”

“I don’t want to keep cutting myself, but I have some extra hair,” he replied. “Why?”

“We need to maintain our link with the human world. I’m going to set up an outpost around here, so I need a few soldiers to guard it.”

“I’ll give you as many as you need,” he said. “You don’t need to ask about these kinds of things, by the way. I’ll always be willing to help. You’re already multiplying my soldier production speed, and we’re doing this together. This project expands our influence, so I’m extra willing to help.”

“Thanks,” I turned my attention back to the forest. Something squirmed against their roots. It was a worm as long as two school buses. “Oh, gross.”

“What?” Brian asked.

“There are a bunch of gross insects in these trees. They’re big ones too, like, bigger than you and me.” I jumped forward, landing at the base of a tree. The Jing and Hui Ming followed me on foot. A horse scooped Brian onto his back and galloped forward. He and Lemonade arrived at my side in seconds. I shook the trees. Caterpillars fell from the leaves, covered with bright colors and intricate patterns. They looked small as they fell. But one landed in front of me, and it was longer than my arm. An orange-ringed tarantula flew off the tree and scampered away. A millipede hiding between pieces of bark rushed down the tree and tried to flee.

Jing’s animals treated the trees as a buffet line. The giant chicken ate a caterpillar. A turquoise tarantula, the same tarantula I had helped put to bed a few days ago, snatched its orange ringed brethren between its fangs and crushed it. The spider’s carapace cracked open like an egg, and its juices sprayed at us. Lemonade threw up a shield and the droplets bounced away. I made a face.

“I know it’s icky,” Jing said, “The children think so too. They’d much rather have them cooked, but I told them they had to eat.”

The density of Qi in the forest was insane, allowing the insects to grow to incredible proportions. It would only grow denser when we went deeper into the forest.

I flattened my palm and chopped at the tree. The force of my control and chop combined, and the tree split in half, cracking like thunder. I didn’t have enough mana to build a castle from scratch, so I had to use the already grown trees for wood. “Give me thirty minutes.”

I should’ve used my ability this day since the day I got the subjugate skill. This is what a cultivator does after all. A cultivator takes what was already there and turns it into something far better.

I chopped the wood a few thousand times. It broke into smaller pieces that I could shape and combine. I stacked the pieces against each other and melded them back together. The wood bent to my will, turning into a dome-shaped fort. The fort was a stout, bulky half-sphere, about five stories tall. Gravelly bark covered its outer walls, backed by another four meters of solid wood.

The door was just a one inch thick flimsy sheet of wood. The wood was still four times tougher than metal, but at this point, not being at least five times tougher than metal was flimsy. A short fence formed its perimeter. The fort was still alive. When we came back, it should have a set of roots anchoring it to the ground.

This outpost was our connection with the outside world. Once this outpost expanded, this fort would only be a shoddy outer defensive tower. But for now, this was good enough.

I polished up the interior and walked back to my family. Brian was talking with Jing about the applications of religious philosophy(or something like that). They got along, despite everything.

“I’m done. What do you think?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Brian replied. He pushed Er Yi at me. “Here, have some military power.”

She bowed.

That’s awkward. She had been acting like my friend for some time. Now she was bowing in front of me. I guess this is something else I have to get used to. Er Yi was just another one of Brian’s soldiers, and she wasn’t even one of the more powerful ones. “Guard that outpost while we’re gone.”

“Yes sir,” she dashed into the fort.

Brian took his knife and randomly cut off two tufts of his hair. His hair was already uneven from the other times he’d done this, so it didn’t make him look any worse. The two tuffs turned into two generic looking muscular men. They ran after Er Yi. “You lizards. You too,” Brian said. The lizards pulling the carts headed at the fort.

“So we’re finished, right? We can leave now,” Brian said.

“Yep,” I slammed a foot into the ground. The ground broke apart, and I shot like a bullet, disappearing into the dark forest. The rest of our group followed.

I was actually moving very slowly, so Jing’s group of animals could keep up. Brian’s horse galloped beside me at a leisurely pace. I took control of a tree every now and then, leaving a trail so we could find our way back to the outpost. “Is the forest beautiful?” Brian asked.

“Yeah. It’s a natural paradise.”

“Can you describe it for me?”

The forest may be a mystery to others, but it was an open book for me. I had no trouble describing it. “It’s dark and moist. There’s moss everywhere, and everything is gigantified. A line of ants are crawling in front of us-oh, we passed them. They were tall enough to reach my knee. The canopy is thick, but some light makes it through. The forest floor is carpeted with leaves. The trees aren’t normal ones from our world though. Besides being a lot taller, fruit of varying sizes hang from them.” I paused, not sure if he wanted me to continue.

“Go on.”

“Vines thicker than your head climb up the trees and dangle fruit that look like cranberries. You can hear a clicking sound in the distance, and you’re probably wondering what it is. They’re from a group of scorpion-like monsters with huge mouths and jagged teeth. They’re clicking their teeth together, making that noise. Ah! A winged snake just flew over our heads. It had blue scales and-”

“Do you think I’ll be able to get my eyes back?”

So that’s what this was all about? “If you let them heal naturally, it’ll take around a hundred years.” People could regrow entire limbs in this world, but eyes were different. Their complex structure made them nigh impossible to regrow. It took a hundred years, even in optimal circumstances. But he knew that. He was asking what I could do. He probably guessed the answer though. I hadn’t brought this up with him before, which was an unspoken message that I couldn’t heal him. He just wanted to confirm. “Using medicine from this world, you can speed that up to fifty years. But I’d say I can heal your eyes in about twenty years. I’m still improving my medicine, and I’m not very experienced, so those aren’t perfect estimates.”

He sighed, “Twenty years, huh? That’s longer than I’ve been alive. And I’m guessing I won’t be able to make sudden movements during the treatment period either?”

“I don’t have enough experience to say for sure, but I’d assume so,” I said.

“I see.”

“Mhm,” I replied.

We traveled for another few minutes, passing all sorts of alien creatures and phenomena. A tornado forming out of nowhere, a fishtail attached to the top of a gorilla’s head, a tree made of stone, mysteries even my attunement with the forest couldn’t unravel. The forest was an open book to me, but I had only read the first few chapters. There was still a lot to be explained. Following these lines of Qi, I couldn’t help but wonder where all this Qi came from.

“I’m sorry about what happened with your student, by the way,” Brian said out of nowhere.

“It’s fine.”

“I really am sorry.”

“Let’s pretend it never happened, ok? I don’t want to talk about it.”

The trees became taller and more powerful as we traveled deeper into the forest. The Qi became denser, the canopy thickened, and the forest darkened. I started using my connection with the forest to scout it out and protect Jing’s animals. Jing did the same.

Stranger, yet more familiar, sights began to appear. We passed over a herd of a hundred fire breathing t-rexes. I spotted a gorilla encased in crystal armor. There was no way it was the same one that attacked me five months ago, but it sure looked the same. The insects became larger as well, but it was nothing I wasn’t used to.

“Ooh look,” Jing pipped, pointing down at a few glowing berries. Bigger trees meant more blocked light. The forest floor had gone dark enough for the plants to begin advertising their fruit with light. “The glowy ones. We’re in the innermost part of the forest.”

“The lines of Qi are telling me there are still more powerful plants farther into the forest. Am I right?” I asked.

“Outsiders call this part of the forest the innermost part of the forest. But that’s only because they’re too afraid to go deeper. I mean, come on. Your helper, um, what’s her name?”

“Chen Wei”

“Yeah. She was almost killed here. And she was pretty powerful! Any further, and the truly dangerous monsters begin to show up,” Jing laughed, “Dragons! Chicken! Slimes! Elementals! And other Dryads!”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

“Well, Wisteria took all the dragons, but the others are still here. You can expect the power level in this forest to be higher than those in this city.”

“...huh?”

“You didn’t know? Esha said there are at least two hundred Dao Journey Stage monsters here.”

“Nobody told me that!” The books just told me that nobody sane went further than the innermost part of the forest. More than two hundred Dao Journey Stage monsters? That kind of army wasn’t something the human cities could hope to compete against. The Grand Flames City had less than twenty Dao Journey cultivators. The entire Raisin country could only muster a hundred fifty at most.

My identify skill let me feel what the plants around me felt. An enormous weight pressed against one of the trees I could feel. I gulped, “What in hell is that.”

“What in hell is what?” Jing asked. “...Oh,” she muttered after she sensed what I sensed. “Yeah. Those are pretty common.”

Far away from us, the legs of a hundred meter long centipede warped around a tree trunk. Thank god I didn’t wander into this section of the forest the first time I was here. With or without my defenses, I wasn’t prepared to fight against this type of insect back then. I could kill it easily now, but still. “What would it take to beat one of those?”

“Hm, just a ninth stage cultivator, I think. You shouldn’t be too surprised by it though. They’re common.”

The last strands of sunlight disappeared, leaving the job of illuminating the forest floor to the glowing fruit. They glowed in every color of the rainbow, like LED lights on a Christmas tree. Down here, everything was damp. Mold masses and worms devoured the dead leaves underneath us. There were armored ones now, with sizes that rivaled that of the centipede from earlier.

Jing seemed to know a lot about the forest. “Are you sure we won’t get ambushed?” I asked.

Jing jumped through the trees like a circus performer. “No no no, I would’ve warned you if that were a possibility,” she said as she spun in midair. She was having way too much fun with this. “I mean, there are animals that would ambush us, but we don’t need to worry about them.”

“Then we’ll keep following this stream.” Millions of streams of Qi flowed through the White Dragon Forest. We had started by following a small stream, but it merged with other streams as we got closer to the center.

We continued deeper into the forest until the trees stopping growing stronger. This was the most powerful part of the forest. “Stop!” I said. “We’re here.”

“We’re living here?” Brian exclaimed. Standing on the forest floor, the wet and moldy ground swallowed my feet up to my ankles. A half-exposed worm squirmed and disappeared underground. A droplet of water landed on my nose. I rubbed it off. It was damp, and I could smell the mold. It was ‘icky’, as Jing would put it.

“This is icky,” said Jing.

Thought so.

“Tough. We’re here now, and we’re going to make it livable. This place’ll look like paradise soon, so don’t complain about it.”