Maddy plunges one of her daggers into the tree which should have left a deep scar, but the instant she removed it the tree regenerated. She becomes slightly annoyed and plunges it in a second time, but the result is the same.

"It looks like that isn't going to work, whatever these trees are they are actually powerful." I too become rather frustrated with this forest.

"Birds, try to fly out of the forest and see if we can make our way deeper." Maddy gives a command to the ten elite shadowbirds who quickly follow it.

"Child of Earth, please heed my calling, and grant me your strength." My incantation calls forth a small earthen golem. "Ceres, please see if you can find a way deeper into the forest." Using Ceres should be better than trying to use my own spiritual energy to detect things.

Maddy and I sit down as there isn't much the two of us can do.

"This forest is really annoying." Maddy appears visibly frustrated as she says this. Some strange sort of spell is surrounding this forest, and I am not nearly skilled enough to detect it let alone destroy it.

"If we can somehow get deeper into the forest we may find some sort of treasure. Why else would such a powerful spell be surrounding this?" I open up with treasure to try and cheer her up, but her frustration only lifts slightly.

After about an hour the shadowbirds return, but not of their own volition.

"We are. Sorry. We could not. Go further." They try to tell us what happened with their broken sentences.

"It's fine, I expected it would be like that." I attempt to dispel their unease with a few words, but they are still visibly upset.

'Ughh the mood is not good at all.' Mentally I call out to Ceres to ask what they found. After training for a bit I learned that a sort of telepathic communication between my familiars was possible. It turns out Ceres was able to find a path to the center.

"Maddy, Ceres found a path that will let us get to the center!" I call out cheerfully to Maddy whose face fills with hope.

"Let's go!" Maddy jumps up and I lead our group down a strange maze sort of path. Were we to turn too early or too late then we would immediately become disoriented and get lost within the forest.

Ten minutes quickly pass as I follow the path Ceres sent to my mind. Reaching what we believe is the center of the forest we find a stone shrine in a rather wide opening. As we enter the clearing my connection with Ceres is abruptly cut off.

"Ceres!" I call out and turn around to gaze behind me, only to find everyone else to be stopped mid motion. A immense sense of dread comes over me. I attempt to spread my spiritual energy out to at least cover the clearing, but I seem to be unable to release any of my power.

"Too weak, much too weak. I thought since you weren't trapped in my ability you could put up some sort of a fight." I look towards the direction of the voice to find an ancient looking man, his existence looks incredibly weak. His body is not even fully formed, instead it's a translucent green.

"Wh- who are you?" I try to gather myself and communicate with the spirit like man.

"Hmm? I guess you could call me a druid saint, not that it matters. I would tell you more, but you are still much too weak." The old man strokes his long beard while shaking his head in disapproval.

"I'm not sure what you mean, but I do wonder whether or not you will be allowing us to leave this place." This old man is really too strange for me to understand, but I do understand he is at an unbelievable level higher than me.

"Let you leave? I guess I could do this. Well I won't stop you when you try to leave, but this forest has more than me here." The old man chuckles and slowly fades away. As his ethereal figure vanishes I feel the immense pressure around me vanish as well.

Right after his spell fades I turn towards Maddy who appeared just as she had before the man appeared. Detecting the look of distress on my face she checks to see if I'm alright.

"Are you okay Jordan?" She seems both worried and confused.

"I guess you couldn't tell what just happened huh? There isn't anything here for us right now, we need to leave." After I say this the confusion on her face increases, but she quickly realizes the danger after the forest trembles slightly.

Before she can ask what was happening the crimson-leaved trees of the forest began to glow and tremble. Appearing from the trees are a number of relatively small plant spirits. Rather than the cheerful spirits which one might imagine these spirits are incredibly pale and adorned with crimson colored clothes. While a regular plant spirit may cause someone to become calm these spirits spirits have an incredibly ominous aura.

Immediately after emerging from the trees the spirits begin to attack. Around half of the spirits launch a large amount of vine attacks in order to bind us, and the other half concentrated their spiritual energy into orbs of dark energy and fired them at us. Maddy and the shadowbirds create a circle and cut away at the vines. My mental connection with Ceres was re-established after the druid's spell was released. In attempt to block the dark energy Ceres creates a wall of stone, but it is quickly destroyed under the combined attacks of hundreds of nature spirits.

Under such a huge force we appear to have reached a stalemate, but their power doesn't seem to be decreasing. I begin thinking of the number different abilities I can use. The most obvious is a wide scale fire attack, but my understanding of fire is quite low. My other option is to use [Nature Manifestation] and hope to call a controllable yet powerful beast. If I summon a monster that I can't control it could attack Maddy, this is something that I can't let happen.

I reach into my bag and pull out a vial of an experimental concoction. I developed it to make up for my lack of understanding in combustion. The chemical inside is extremely flammable, and I should easily be able to harness it for fire manipulation. I throw the bottle into the largest crowd of them and it shatters, spreading the flammable substance over a large number of the nature spirits. I also reach into my bag and pull out my staff. It's length is several times longer than the bag, but that doesn't matter with a magic bag. Part of my focus goes to concentrating an enormous quantity of oxygen into the air, while removing some from our area. Then I use light manipulation to start the reaction. With the combustion reaction stimulated a huge explosion covers the area with the most concentrated nature spirits, and Ceres creates a bit of a wall to prevent the fire from hurting us.

"Let's go!" Breaking through the opening Maddy leads us out of the clearing and away from the largest amount of spirits.