Once we stepped out of the shadows at Jademoon Tower, Luna let out a relieved gasp, stumbling a little as she pulled out of the grip Lia and I had on her arms.

“We need to come up with a better way to travel,” she asserted, looking at me with expectation in her eyes. Sadly, I had to disappoint her in this case. I wasn’t able to simply pull out a better way to teleport people across continental distances, or any distances for that matter. But if Luna, who should have relatively few problems due to the link she shared with me, was suffering this much due to stepping through the shadows, I wasn’t sure how somebody else would fare. Someone like Sigmir, once she was back with me.

Maybe creating a better way to travel should make my list, even if I had no idea when I’d get to that particular spot. Instead, I shook my head and focused on the present; there’d be time to consider Luna’s request later.

“Noted,” I nodded, “But first. Lia, can you check the tower and the immediate surrounding area? Remain unseen, just in case. And Luna, take your time to recover. Once you pull yourself back together, help your sister, but please stay inside.” I gave out my directions before starting to make my way up the stairs, undoing the various seals I had placed on the tower. This way, my daughters could accomplish the tasks I had set them, while I had my own work to do.

In this case, my work was to check the local environment, scrying farther out than the check Lia was supposed to run later. For that, I was making my way to the top of my tower, where the Oculus sat, still acting as a beacon, shedding dim light on the surrounding area. While it wasn’t as useful during the day as at night, the Oculus was a potent tool for investigating the local situation and far too useful to ignore.

Doors opened smoothly when touched by my magic, though I noticed some dust on the furniture and ground as I went up, reminding me that we’d have to clean the tower at some point, especially if we wanted to spend some extra time here. It would depend on our findings. If things were annoying here, we might just travel back to my new tower and spend the winter there, despite the lack of entertainment in its environment.

Stepping out onto the platform atop my tower, I quickly had to shroud myself in darkness, warding off the blinding light of the Sun. It looked like Lia wouldn’t be able to scout the surrounding area, not with a clear, bright blue sky above us and the Sun burning down, getting reflected off the pristine snow all around us. Even normal humans would get blinded by this much light, let alone somebody like Lia and me.

Reaching out with my magic, I sent out a burst of largely uncontrolled Ice Magic, pushing all the snow on the platform away from me and off the edge, letting it rain down into the area around my tower. There was more than enough snow down there, though I noticed the snow here was a lot lighter than it had been at our new tower. Which shouldn’t be a surprise; the new tower was in the coldest place in a wide area, which was why the Nexus had formed there. Granted, a good chunk of that was due to the deep crevice the Nexus had ultimately been in, but even outside that crevice, the area around the Nexus Tower was bitingly cold. As one would expect from an alpine area just south of the Arctic Circle, though, the Nexus likely pushed the issue to another level.

It would be curious to study the long-term influence the Astral River and Magic would have on the climate. My initial instinct was that the overall climate wouldn’t be all that affected, at least as long as nobody deliberately messed with it like I had on Mundus. The Nidhögg and I had channelled enough freezingly cold Ice Astral Power into the upper atmosphere to disrupt the Jet Streams, causing untold damage in the process. On top of that, the Nidhögg had, as far as I could recognise in hindsight, added his own touch to the air, meaning any rain that fell after getting touched by that power would effectively be acid, adding to the pain and suffering. In hindsight, I wondered if I had gone too far, but at the end of the day, my actions had accomplished what I had intended. However, I could see that my intentions had been influenced by the perception that Mundus was merely an artificial world, created by Pantheon Entertainment for just that purpose, entertainment.

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Looking back, I had to chuckle a little at the numerous clues nobody had picked up on, all hinting that something more was going on with the capsules and Pantheon Entertainment. Or maybe people had picked up on it. However, the actual truth had been so far out there that people were more inclined to believe that the government was turning the frogs gay, running child-sex trafficking operations out of pizza places or manipulating human migration for their own personal benefit than they were to believe that a group of extra-dimensional, divine beings came to Earth to publish a video game.

Maybe people had noticed but acted just like I did, simply ignoring the clues; I certainly had been unwilling to see them. And so, everything threatening the bliss I experienced with Sigmir had been ignored. The small, strange occurrences were pushed aside. At most, I had reported a few oddities to the company, letting them handle them. I had never even tried to look deeper, trusting the regulatory bodies that had given this new technology their stamp of approval. It made me wonder how that had been done, as the capsules were, as far as I understood it, not technology as the civilisation before the change understood the term.

For a moment, I wished to have the internet back. With the lens of hindsight, it would undoubtedly be fascinating to observe. Additionally, I’d love to take a gander at the various conspiracy webpages. It would be intriguing to see if people had noticed but were simply disregarded, ignored, like some modern-day Cassandra.

Sadly, modern civilisation and all its numerous achievements, like the internet, were gone, though on the flipside, I was pretty sure the system had also cleared up much of the damage modern civilisation had done to the planet. The way roads and buildings had decayed pointed in that direction, though the real question was what had happened to the millions of tons of garbage sitting in landfills or just floating on the ocean? Maybe visiting a landfill would prove educational and possibly profitable. I’d have to check the maps and find out where such locations were in the local area before the change, then we’d be able to check one out.

But first, I took my place on the throne, still sitting here. Sure, I had to clean off the snow and some dirt that had accumulated in my absence—a risk one takes when building a throne out in the open—but the connection between it and the Oculus made it worthwhile.

After sitting down, I closed my eyes and let my mind shift into the divine construct donated to us by Lady Hecate. No longer was my sight blocked by my closed eyelids; instead, my mind was receiving these images directly, allowing my gaze to roam across the local environment with a clarity my own eyes just couldn’t replicate. At least not yet, maybe I’d be able to match the divine construct someday, but that day wasn’t just yet, at least not when it came to looking into the distance.

My observations confirmed some of my expectations while disproving others. Some of the communities, especially those centred around Maggy and the large one from where Jack and his buddies had come, were still there. By now, those looked less like the ramshackle refugee camps they had looked like when we first came here; instead, they had taken the form of simple but clearly established villages. The building material was a little strange in a few cases, but overall, it was evident that they had managed to rebuild and develop new communities, finding a new life after the change.

Other communities, like the one I had named Idiotville, had less luck. Only rubble was left of that place, buried in the snow. It made me wonder just what had happened there, and I made a mental note to check it out at some point, or maybe ask Maggy once we met again.

However, the biggest surprise I encountered was unexpected. Further up in the mountains was a new community, with the Sunwheel of Sunna displayed in a position of pride and prominence. Somehow, I had that weird feeling these people were here for us. Or maybe just for me, it was possible they didn’t know about Lia, depending on what the locals had told them.

At least the winter here wouldn’t be boring.