The Sabi Race (6)

That night I caught Alkema tossing and turning, unable to sleep, and started pressing her with one question after another.

"So under Mt. Veltical, it's water flowing, not lava?"

"Yes. The life that flows through the flesh of the earth is drawn to this place, and climbs through the interior of Mt. Veltical. The life gathered thus becomes the water of the gods in the Holy Land."

"And that piles up for six months, until around the start of the rainy season, when you hold the Water God Festival and dump the whole of it?"

"That is correct."

Just how much water was there, that they had to go to such lengths? From what she told me, Mt. Veltical was hollowed out inside like a crater lake at its summit—a full fifty kilometers across, and so deep no one knew where the bottom lay.

"It is always joined to the depths below, so the water never runs dry, and once the Water God Festival begins, the volume surging upward swells beyond measure. The moment it gathers to its limit, the water pours down as if a volcano had erupted, raising a wall of waves that drives upon the lowlands……."

Even granting it was a crater lake atop a mountain tens of kilometers high, I doubted it could turn a span of thousands of kilometers into a sea of water. But the Phase World was full of hidden realms that defied natural law, and demon-lands where aberrants spawned in droves. Places where water burned like fire. Places where flame held, year-round, without a scrap of fuel. Places where gravity ran backward. Sealed spaces that shone bright as day. Next to all that, a little extra water was hardly worth remarking on.

"And yet the divine beast's eruption a few days ago was of a scale that even the eldest elder of our race had never witnessed."

Well, of course. Baekcheong had pitched that fit meaning to die with everyone else. It wasn't a part I particularly felt like explaining honestly, so I brushed past it and asked something else.

"Why hold the Water God Festival at all? Can't you just leave it alone?"

"We are told that if the Water God Festival is not performed, a far greater calamity descends. The tales passed down say that within the reach of that calamity, nothing living can survive."

"Bigger than this time?"

"Th-that, I do not know well myself."

Fair enough. She was only in her tenth year, and her priestly training had begun two years ago. There was only so much she could know. While we talked I probed this way and that—about territories, about where the races that served other divine beasts lived, about which direction Orvinci lay—but all that came back was that she didn't know. I studied her face, wondering if she might be trying to fool me with claims of ignorance, but it didn't seem that way.

"Haa. You're no help."

Grrrr…….

"I-I am sorry!"

Whether she was afraid of me or of the Toxin Black Alligator glaring behind her as if it meant to eat her alive, Alkema had gone rigid. I left her there and got to my feet. Pressing her any further wasn't going to yield anything useful. Time to head back.

Then I turned and looked at the Toxin Black Alligator, blinking its great eyes. The creature had spent a long while staring at what remained of the dead red serpent after the other subspecies had picked it apart, then crept up behind me while I spoke with Alkema and flattened its belly to the ground. Now that I was looking, it lifted its eyes a fraction and met mine.

"What are you looking at."

Krruuu…….

There was feeling in that gaze, and in the rumble in its throat, but Darky—the only one who could translate—wouldn't wake no matter how I prodded him, sleeping like the dead. I couldn't read the exact emotion. My knack for reading others only worked on races like humans. I couldn't parse the mood of a reptile I'd barely ever seen from its eyes alone.

I watched him a moment, and he quietly turned and went back to the red serpent's remains—a half-smashed skull and a few bones. Had he been grieving over that thing? I hadn't killed it, and I hadn't been fond of it either, but watching him left me thoroughly uneasy.

Whether she'd overheard my talk with Alkema or not, Franc spoke the moment I climbed up.

"Once we have disposed of Baekcheong, we shall have to begin wandering."

"Yeah. Looking down at the land from the sky has its limits unless you go all the way out to space, so reading the terrain is hard……. First we ought to find the coast and follow the shoreline until we know where we are."

I said as much, but a hollow feeling had settled over me, and as I sat blankly atop Franc's chest, an enormous hand glided up, faltered, and sank back down. With a difference in size like this, even an affectionate touch was out of reach. The frustration was starting to build.

For two days we made for the summit of Mt. Veltical—more than twice the height of that enormous mountain on Mars—scaling cliffs, leaping sheer ravines, slaughtering winged maggots as we went. At last a portion of the peak entered my Spatial Perception. At the same time, I noticed the Phase Power suspended in the air growing steadily thicker. To exaggerate a little, it was like walking into the blast of an industrial fan cranked all the way up. The density kept rising until even taking a step felt faintly stiff.

It peaked when we passed through a corner of the rim that had collapsed into a V and stepped onto the summit of Mt. Veltical, the place they called the Holy Land. Phase Power lay pooled in the crater like smoke. Every time I moved, it shoved outward in all directions, then flowed back in. The place was so overwhelming that Spatial Perception's sense for Phase Power became useless, and I was on the verge of feeling the power caress my body. I spun my Mana Sieve to dull the sensation, driving the Phase Power into a brisk circulation—and as if it had been waiting, it plunged into me.

"So that's why they call it the Holy Land. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Spin the Mana Sieve and Phase Power pours into you without end. If somewhere else recovers one point an hour, this place gains twenty or thirty?"

"It is…… remarkable. It feels precisely as though one were gliding through water."

Franc seemed to feel the stimulation too. A faint flush had risen in her face, and the Phase Power within her moved briskly, drawing in what surrounded her. The amount, though, was not so great. Hmm. Spend a few years in a place like this, and a person could probably fill their Phase Power to its limit without ever hunting an aberrant of their own grade. How could a place like this even exist? I didn't really understand it, but I took it as Alkema had told me a few days ago: Phase Power was drawn up along with the water and pooled here.

We had to wait until Baekcheong arrived, so I did my best to grow used to the Phase Power stimulating my body. Once I'd grown somewhat accustomed to it, the lake finally registered—an enormously ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠vast caldera, clear and transparent as a blue sky. I looked up. It was broad daylight, and yet the sky was dim, a few stars showing through. Deeply mysterious.

As I looked back and forth between sky and lake, Franc gazed at the same places and spoke.

"How ought I to express this feeling…… It is as though we stand upon a star adrift in the cosmos."

"Yeah. It's incredible. Dark as night even though it's day, and bright at the same time. A really strange place."

"Yes. Small wonder the lizardfolk take it for the land of the gods. And the lake looks large enough to hold the whole of Seoul and still have room to spare. Truly……."

She couldn't finish, her voice full of wonder, and I agreed.

"They said Mt. Veltical was over four hundred kilometers wide. The mountain itself is the size of the Korean Peninsula, so it figures. But I never felt it was that wide. That's a little odd."

And if only some ninety thousand of the Sabi were scattered across a mountain this vast…… did word even travel among them? Then again, a Dilaik covers a hundred kilometers in a little over ten minutes, bounding across rough ground. Not impossible.

While I was turning all this over, Alkema arrived late, riding her Dilaik, and explained as she ran a hand down scales that the Phase Power made seem to be staining blue.

"Because of the great flood not long ago, the lowlands of Mt. Veltical are entirely underwater. Our people very nearly were swept away as well."

"I see. So you were already up on Mt. Veltical."

While Alkema explained with a perfectly straight face, the Dilaik was panting as if it might die. It clamped its mouth shut, swallowed hard, and with an irritable shrug dumped her off.

"Hyaak?!"

Whether she went rolling across the gravel or not, it trudged to the shore and drank with noisy laps. Quite a bit of feeling had built up toward Alkema, by the look of it. I'd thought its temper was easygoing and unfussy. Put it under a little stress, though, and the nastiness came out.

"Ah, uuuugh~! Karunyak~!!"

Unhorsed…… unlizarded? Alkema shook her head from the shock of hitting the ground, then, thoroughly furious, charged the Dilaik, grabbed its tail, took a smack from that same tail, and went tumbling again.

I watched the little comedy for a moment, then spread a Wall of Space into the sky, leapt up, and looked around. In any case, Mt. Veltical's caldera was a colossal crater lake more than fifty kilometers across. A fire-mouth lake—or should I call it a water-mouth lake? The caldera known as the Holy Land was exceedingly deep and wide. High-water marks reached almost to the tips of the peaks, right below where we stood, and far off on the horizon, summits faint as a mountain range rose as if to pierce the sky, ringing the lake.

Whether from the aftermath of the last great flood or not, the water that remained barely wet the bottom. And even so, large enough to hold all of Seoul and more……. If the Holy Land had a defining trait, it had to be a concentration of Phase Power this dense. But turn to the ordinary features of the place, and another singularity presented itself: at the center of the lake, a hole that could put the Great Blue Hole—that famous ocean sinkhole—to shame.

Only the heart of the clear, transparent lake was pitch black. Staring at it felt like looking into an abyss, and a faint chill prickled over me. The sinkhole was ten kilometers across. If water poured through a place like this with the madness of a volcanic eruption, it would easily raise a land tsunami on the scale of the first round. The thought came easily enough.

Stranger still, aside from a single kind of moss, I couldn't see a living thing anywhere around us. There was no soil, either. The floor was paved entirely in round pebbles. Without that pale orange moss, I would have taken it for a dead lake.

Franc and I were examining the caldera, with its staggering density of Phase Power, when she seemed to spot something and pointed.

"Over there. There is a hole in the slope of the peak across from us."

As we headed where she pointed, the Toxin Black Alligator roared behind us and drove the others ahead of him, chasing after us. The hole…… better to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠call it a colossal tunnel. The entrance, round as a full moon, sat at the highest point. The water moss hadn't covered it, which suggested the tunnel had been bored to match the waterline. The diameter was a hundred meters, the same as the one in the heart of Hebelt, and it had been cut with not a centimeter of error. Remarkable.

I looked over the area around the tunnel, and as far as Spatial Perception could reach, when Alkema arrived late, squared her shoulders with pride, and spoke.

"It is the sacred road linked to Hebelt. Wait only five days more, and Lord Baekcheong will show himself."

"Carried in on a litter by your people, you mean."

"…Yes……."

I turned from the bowed Alkema and peered into the pitch-black tunnel. Sunlight lit only the mouth and reached no farther. The inside, I thought, looked like a monster's maw.

When we had little of the summit left ahead of us, the Sabi party carrying Baekcheong—which had set out three days before we had—was only then passing the middle of Mt. Veltical. As Alkema said, they'd arrive here around then.

"From now on, your name is Dok-ak."

I called the Toxin Black Alligator over, and once I was sure he understood me, I gave him a name. The occasion was nothing special. After the red serpent died in a fall, he had kept a sorrowful face. I offered a few excuses that weren't quite excuses, and afterward he went back to his usual self. A sigh escaped me at that strong sense of camaraderie. What was I going to do with him later.

Anyway, I set him in front of me and bestowed the name, and Franc, seated behind, immediately wore a face that couldn't hide her pity.

What. Why. What. My naming sense has always been like this—what do you want me to do about it!

Krooo! Krauuu! Kauuuu!

The Toxin Black Alligator who had received a name from me—Dok-ak—flung his jaws wide and roared as if delighted. Behind me, Franc wore a slightly sulky expression, because the name she'd come up with hadn't been chosen.

"Hmph. It is only that the name Seoha gave is more to an aberrant's taste!"

"Franc's right. Poisondale was nice too."

"Heh."

Heh heh heh. That was a grown-up response just now, wasn't it?

Anyway. After we reached the summit I gave no further orders, and the high-rank subspecies we'd brought along scattered as they pleased and started wobbling about. It was Dok-ak who gathered those creatures—staggering this way and that as if drunk—and lined them up. He himself was drunk on the dense Phase Power, his red eyes darkened until they looked ready to weep blood, and yet, seeing him look after the others, I made up my mind. That one, I would take back to the real world.

So Franc and I discussed what to name him. I proposed Dok-ak—Poison Croc—and Franc, noting that his hide was rugged as a ravine with thick green venom flowing through the grooves, proposed Poisondale. We didn't squabble over it, but she seemed to like his behavior and quietly wanted to give him Poisondale. In the end I called over the creature, resting nearby with his belly to the ground, and let him choose whichever of the two he preferred.

The moment I called, he came running as if he'd never been resting at all, legs and tail pattering, and gave me a look that said he'd do anything I asked, his thick tail swaying side to side. I had him pick between Dok-ak and Poisondale, and he picked Dok-ak. For the record, I didn't tell him how the names were made. I just asked which he liked better, Dok-ak or Poisondale, and he roared that Dok-ak was the one!

……Anyway, after receiving a name from me, he paid even closer attention to managing the high-rank subspecies, and now and then he went down the mountain, hunted winged maggots, and presented them to me. No matter how hungry I was, I had no desire to eat maggots—pink flesh and guts stitched together in layers, writhing hideously—so I praised him for the thought and told him to eat them all himself. He whirled his scale-covered tail in a giddy fit and, cute as anything, refused to share those in particular. He ate every last one alone.

After we arrived at the summit of Mt. Veltical, the Holy Land, Franc kept practicing Miniature Art, and three days after our arrival she succeeded in reducing herself to 3.6 meters. Nothing short of tremendous progress!

"The key was stimulating Phase Power precisely, matched to precise pronunciation and a precise rhythm! And the shorter the time Miniature Art takes to activate, the greater the effect!"

Greatly reduced, Franc looked at herself with a flushed face, delighted, and explained how the art worked. Seeing her so happy put me in a good mood too. She was still about twice my size, but compared to her original height, she'd shrunk to roughly a twentieth. And perhaps because she'd grown smaller, her voice had returned to that pretty lark's song from before. I was immensely glad.

Her voice as a giant had been fine too, but up close it made my whole body tremble, as if I were standing in front of a speaker built for a concert hall. It was a bit…… much. Whether from the scalp care I'd kept up, her hair had grown enough to cover her shoulders, and she'd regained the look of a lovely young woman. And because her body had shrunk, the clothes she'd been wearing had all slipped off. A dazzling nakedness was laid bare, and the desire that had piled up from not being able to hold Franc burst all at once.

The truth was, at eighty meters her form didn't come into view all at once, so it had been hard to feel more than a baseline of lust toward her. Even if she'd danced naked, my desire wouldn't have surged. I'd been getting nothing but a mental satisfaction. Buried between breasts the size of a house, all I felt was the excitement of a child looking at a toy. Sexual arousal didn't happen. ……Except, of course, when she shoved certain parts in my face.

Anyway, I felt like I'd die if I didn't hold her right then. I spread a Blue Space Wall out wide, pulled the shelter straight out of Subspace Storage, took Franc by the wrist, and went inside. She was startled by the shelter appearing suddenly before her eyes, but that was not the important part! I dragged the wide-eyed Franc up into the bedroom, toppled her, and climbed on…… and found a major problem.

Size.

She was twice as big as me, and that place of hers was twice as big to match! Push it a little and I could have stuck my head in and taken a tour of her womb. I racked my brain furiously for some way around it, and the look Franc gave me while I did—slightly pathetic, watching me think—was so damn awkward I didn't think I'd forget it for a long time.

Anyway, after thinking it over and over, I concluded there was no choice but to force Phase Power into my little guy through the Mana Sieve and enlarge him. Past a certain size there was a side effect of slight dizziness, but if it meant I could have sex with Franc, what was a little dizziness! Thanks to that, we got to spend a truly scorching night.

Honestly, the sight of my erect cock grown past my chest all the way to my head was a little absurd, and grotesque besides. But what mattered was holding Franc! The bigger it got, the more stimulation came through it, and I seemed to have relapsed into finishing far too fast. But Franc climaxed as much as I came, so we were even.

Perhaps because she'd gained a perfect body, she was even more plush down there, the apple scent richer, her reactions dramatically changed. Every time I struck the mouth of her womb, her inner walls clenched around me, and truly……. Her moans, sobbing like a cat—how stimulating they were. Crying and whimpering, she sounded so much like a succubus half-blood that I thought I'd lose my mind. Let my guard down for a second and I felt like I'd die in the act.

The sex that started in the early evening went on until the next morning. Ordinarily, an hour or two until Franc passed out was how the adults' game ended. But now that she was Transcendent-grade, she had formidable will and stamina, and when we went until we couldn't go anymore, the night was simply gone.

Morning sunlight through the window found Franc like a goddess carved from marble—a perfect nude, the traces of my release scrawled messily across her—gushing white ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠semen in pulses from her spread asshole and her cunt as she muttered.

"Uuuh…… Seoha…… you pervert……."

Her lower belly had swollen as if she were eight months pregnant. She breathed slowly, eyes half-unfocused, as if even drawing breath were difficult. I looked down at her and scratched my head.

A little too much, maybe?