BXBX NOVEL Chapter 234 234 All Are Lost
Wolfe gently placed Cook into his bed and covered her with a blanket while Mary rigged a hammock between the bed posts for the Fae to recover in.
Wolfe turned the mana level in the room back to four times the outside mana level, but the mana level in the room was still growing, despite his spell being stable.
Cook had said that the forest would collect Mana of its own to sustain itself, but did that mean that the ambient Mana level in the area was going up without the array in the Den? Someone would definitely notice that when they passed by the Fae Forest from the outside.
Once both of the main participants were in bed, and the rest of the witches spread out to their rooms, with Cassie, Ella and Mary piling on the bed around Cook, Wolfe returned the sensation of their auras to the Servants and headed upstairs to see what the forest looked like.
There were a pair of messengers and one stunned-looking witch standing at the front door to the entry shack, but Wolfe was tall enough to see over them. He could hardly believe his eyes when he looked outside, even after being warned, so he could only imagine what it was like for those who had no idea what they were doing.
The Frozen grasslands around the Den were replaced with massive trees hundreds of meters tall. A warm summer breeze blew in the front door of the shack, and faintly glowing orbs floated through the foliage.
With [Detect Hidden], Wolfe could tell that they were actually mana-infused seeds, carried on the wind like a Dandelion pod, ready to expand the forest even further.
The Fae Forest seemed to fade to nothing in the distance. There was no horizon, only a vagueness like his eyesight was failing, or a fog had fallen in the distance, making it nearly impossible to navigate by landmarks.
Mary was right. They had broken the Frozen Wastes. It was no longer frozen. It was a Fae Rainforest. He could feel the moisture in the air from the thawed ground, giving the area a warm and humid ambiance unlike anything Wolfe had ever felt before.
As he stared out the door, the radio crackled to life with the travelling Witches and locals panicking about the changes.
[The village has been overrun with Forest. The scouts are all lost. What are we going to do?] was followed by [We have finished our healing of this location, but how do we get to the next if it\'s also in this forest? Do we use Wolfe as a beacon?]
Wolfe moved to the map on the tabletop of the entry shack and checked the location of the two villages that had broadcasted.
One was ten kilometres north. The other was nearly twenty kilometres southeast.
"Just how big of a defensive forest did they make? I told them to stop when they reached their limits, but I thought it would be within a few hundred metres of the Den." Wolfe asked nobody in particular.
He grabbed the radio and broadcast a question. [All tour groups, this is Snowman. Please ping your location and situation. This is our work, but I don\'t know the extent of the forest\'s reach yet.]
One after another, they reported in. The forest ran only ten kilometres south and west of them, a third of the way to the old frontlines, but it ran over thirty kilometres north and east, and the spore pods were slowly melting the snow where they landed at the edges of the Forest.
[Hey, I know where I am. I get it. The terrain didn\'t change. It\'s just covered in trees.] One of the village scouts declared happily after a few minutes of reports.
That led to a brief bout of confusion. Those villagers whose homes were within the Forest had no problem navigating it, but those scouts who had come from further away were hopelessly lost within the forest, walking in circles and unable to find any sort of landmarks intentionally.
"Holy crap. That\'s fucking insane. I mean, Fawk. I\'ve been in the wastes for ninety years, and I\'ve never seen any shit like this before." Someone said from beside Wolfe, and he turned to see the furry ears of a foul-mouthed young-looking badger man.
The scout was just as shocked as Wolfe was. There was a Witch right in front of him, and he was speaking. The curse wasn\'t working on him, and he could actually speak in the presence of a witch.
"Shit, I\'m sorry. That usually comes out as yapping noises, so I didn\'t think you would hear me. My apologies for my language." He muttered and began to fidget as he realized that he could talk to the Witch, but now he had no idea what to say.
"No, that pretty much summed it up. What did you even do, Wolfe?" The witch on duty asked.
"I didn\'t do anything. I only had an idea to defend the area. The Second Rank Witches and the Faerie worked together with all the mana that they could use, including what I could channel to them with the assistance of the entire Den\'s population. Katerina, the Fae, wanted to create a defensive [Living Forest] spell around the Den, but there weren\'t enough trees here, to begin with, so they added more. I think things got a bit out of hand, though, because I didn\'t expect this.
It is not even winter out there anymore, and I can feel the mana density in the forest growing steadily. I will have to adjust the spell inside so that it doesn\'t overwhelm the others." Wolfe explained.
"This Mana is different. It\'s not like your array, which is just power, there for the taking. This feels alive in a way that I can\'t really explain. I think it\'s being emitted or filtered by the trees, and it\'s different." The witch tried to explain.
"Holy crap. I think we might have actually overwhelmed the curse on this portion of the Wastes. I suppose we can\'t call this region the Frozen Wastes anymore if it\'s going to be this warm all the time. I will have to ask them when they wake up if this is going to last or if it\'s just a lingering effect of the spell."
They were all rambling now, but what else could they do in the situation? At least the Den was safe now.