To Farther Seas (4)
In this world, there exist places called demon realms.
To ordinary people, the term simply means a harsh natural environment where no one can live—and in truth, many such places look as if no human could possibly survive there.
Yet people live on the Floating Island. They live in the desert known as the Immortal Golden Land. They live even on the frozen earth at the edge of the world.
And just as people do, living creatures adapt and endure those same environments.
The problem is that demon realms also teem with creatures as exceptional and powerful as the land itself is merciless.
Like the colossal beasts that once roamed the upper level of the Floating Island, or the People of the Summit, the world overflows with terrifying life-forms most people will never encounter in a lifetime.
Take, for example, the time a pack of wolves from a demon realm appeared near a kingdom built on its border.
The wolves raided the pastures and devoured every head of livestock. They ate the people. They ate the mercenaries hired to stop them. They ate the gate guards, the knight orders, and the town watches of every castle and city they reached.
Their tough pelts turned aside arrows. Their lean, agile bodies changed direction at will and tore through knights. Their massive frames, crushing strength, and iron-hard fangs and claws could kill a sturdy ox in a single blow.
With a pack like that on the rampage, the people had no way to fight back.
In the end, the kingdom evacuated as many citizens and soldiers as it could behind the capital walls, gathered craftsmen to mass-produce ballistae and other engines of war, put the refugees to work expanding the fortifications, and only then—with reinforced walls and newly forged weapons—fought the pack to the death and barely managed to wipe them out.
That was what the creatures of a demon realm were. In that kingdom’s case, they had laughed the wolves off as mere wolves at first and responded far too late, which only made the damage worse. But even a swift response would not have saved them. A single rhinoceros from the Floating Island would have been enough to plunge a nation into crisis and leave it reeling from catastrophic losses.
Why had that story suddenly come to mind?
Because Chester, clinging to a log after the storm had smashed their raft to pieces and left him adrift, found the tale rising unbidden in his thoughts.
The old kingdom that had nearly fallen to wolves—and that later truly fell to foreign invasion because it never recovered from the damage. It was the sort of story that drifted around like a fairy tale, but Chester knew it was true. His father had traveled that region himself and heard it from a historian.
This isn’t even a demon realm!
This was just the open sea, nowhere famous as a demon realm, and what they had faced were sharks.
Not that sharks were weak—but set against the monsters of the Floating Island’s upper level, no one would call them strong.
Still, Chester felt it in his bones.
The sea itself, simply by existing, was a demon realm.
The one mercy was that the mad storm, after thrashing their raft half to death, had somehow carried them far enough that a continent was beginning to show on the horizon.
“…….”
“…….”
— …….
“Everyone all right?”
Beside Chester, his family lay sprawled across the log like corpses drowned in the fight against the storm.
Monia, determined to answer somehow, trembled as she lifted the hand draped over the log a fraction of an inch—then let it fall again at once.
“Good enough.”
Chester nodded, then lashed everyone to the log with rope so the waves could not tear them away, gripped the timber, and began to swim.
Their destination was the continent rising before them.
An hour of swimming, carried along by the waves, brought them to shore with more strength left than he had expected.
“Hah!”
After hauling the log and his family out of the water, Chester worked the stiffness from a body long spent swimming and looked around.
A few trees.
A scattering of trees grew near the beach—but Chester noticed the wrongness at once.
Only a few.
It seemed the deduction he had made from that shattered, abandoned ship had been correct.
He climbed the nearest tree at once, gained height, and swept the land with his eyes.
What spread before him was desert without end—an ocean of sand as vast as the sea itself.
“……Hah.”
Just as he had feared, desert stretched away in every direction.
“……Wait. Is that side shining gold?”
Then he noticed it: one stretch of desert did not share the deep yellow of the rest. It glowed with a strange golden light.
And in Chester’s mind rose his father’s old travelogue of a golden desert.
Fuck that. Never again.
That single line had opened the first chapter of his father’s long, grand, tedious, and bitterly resentful desert memoir.
Of all the places Chester’s well-traveled father had nearly died, two stood above the rest.
One was a jungle called a demon realm. The other was a desert—and of the desert in particular…
Damn it, Father.
Chester groaned toward the man who was no longer alive.
You could have told me something useful!
His father had cursed the desert so inventively and at such length that Chester’s mother had constantly scolded him for swearing in front of the children—and that was nearly all Chester remembered. The man had said almost nothing of real substance about the place.
Of the jungle, at least, there had been the story of a minor wound that had been properly treated, only for insects to crawl inside and lay eggs so that the cut had to be reopened and dozens of thread-like worms pulled free.
As for the desert… what was it again?
A desert whose sand shifted from deep yellow to gold only when sunlight struck the grains at a certain angle.
That sand held a peculiar power—really the work of microorganisms, though people who did not know that called it the power of the sand itself. Because of it, corpses buried beneath the dunes did not rot even after a hundred years. And so the place had earned its name: the land of the living dead.
Right. That was it.
One of the names that had risen in Chester’s mind only a little while ago, when he was cursing the cruelty of the sea.
The Immortal Golden Land.
“Insane.”
They had left the Floating Island hoping to reach some ordinary continent—and instead the world had handed them a demon realm, and not just any desert, but the Immortal Golden Land. How was he supposed to take that?
“I’m sure… I’m sure…”
His father’s endless cursing had made him so curious that, back in his butler days, he had hunted down books and studied the desert on his own.
They said the sun’s power is so fierce there that long exposure brings on a strange sickness that kills you, unlike anywhere else. With the Grace of the Summit, that shouldn’t be a problem.
He would simply rub Grace of the Summit into their skin whenever they rested.
Climbing down from the tree, Chester kept turning the desert over in his mind. Of course, nearly everything he had read had been travelers’ accounts.
Scholarly works by people who specialized in studying, surveying, and recording deserts were hard to come by. Knowledge was precious; the valuable findings of alchemists and scholars were not released to the public but kept under national control.
Travelogues of the desert, however, always came with hardship—and how those hardships were overcome was plain on the page. Why? Because anyone who failed to write down what they had suffered was already dead.
Living things rot unusually fast… that doesn’t apply here.
The Immortal Golden Land was a place where living things did not rot. People even claimed you could carry raw meat, bury it in the sand from time to time, and keep it for months.
Ironically, then, for all that it was a desert and a demon realm, the Immortal Golden Land was a place where the need for preserved food was almost nonexistent. Everything kept.
Next—the wildlife.
One traveler’s account described a colossal snake rearing high enough to pierce the sky and snatching birds from the air.
There were stories of giant lizards as well, of scorpions and spiders, of ordinary-sized snakes…
More giant creatures than I expected.
Snakes and lizards, at least.
How do they get water? Something that big has to drink a lot.
Chester did not go so far as to imagine snakes boring deep underground for aquifers, or lizards storing heat by day and deliberately shedding it on cold nights to force condensation and drink the moisture they needed before dawn.
Still—lucky. If creatures that large can live here, finding water might be easier than I thought.
He nodded to himself and began listing what they could eat in the desert.
Cactus is edible, right? There were accounts of people drinking from cactus and filling their stomachs with it. Scorpions are fine once you cut off the stinger. Spiders I already know you can eat. More food than I expected.
Water. Fire. Shelter. Food.
Solve those four, and you could survive anywhere. Chester steeled himself and prepared his heart to cross the Immortal Golden Land.
Then another thought struck him.
Rex has a fur coat. Can he handle the desert?
The People of the Summit were creatures adapted to the Floating Island’s violently shifting climate. He would be fine… right?