NOVEL NEXT Chapter 124 – Stamina
Aura and Ari wanted to check on the pine forest they burned down but got confused over the fact that the portals leading there didn't let them go through. With the help of Sophia, they found out that the forest was still burning, and the portals deactivated themselves to keep the girls away from harm. While she was at it, the blonde also turned the portals see-through, so that they were less confusing, before spending the rest of the day with Anna to play with magic together with her.
“Let’s go!” Roughly an hour before Sophia helped Ari and Aura, Chloe dragged Fen to the portal hub to go to their ongoing project. “I want to see if we were able to create our mountain range!”
“Calm down. It's not going to run away.” Fen wasn’t one to hurry.
“But we’ll need like half an hour to find the right portal and get there, so there’s no time to waste!”
“Alright, that’s a fair point.” The wolf looked at the many dozens of portals all around them while nodding a few times. “Let’s make sure to properly complain to Sophia about that soon.”
"Absolutely!" The fox agreed with him, and the two then went through the first portal they thought would lead to their project.
“…” The two returned to the portal hub rather swiftly but managed to find the right one after only four more tries and finally made it to the area where they were planning to make the cozy snowy mountain hut relaxation place.
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“WOW!” Arriving there, Chloe’s eyes immediately grew wide.
“I’m in awe.” Fen also was pleasantly surprised when he looked at the scenery around them. The plateau they planned to place the hut on was still slightly empty; only a couple of needle-leaf trees had grown so far as they only managed to pour out the little remaining magic power they had when they finished up the other day.
That wasn’t the cause of their reaction, though. A little further away, in a circle roughly ten kilometers all around them, was a new mountain range that covered the whole horizon. The height varied a little in some areas, but it seemed about one to two kilometers high. Some plants were growing on the sides of the range. Especially the ground layer was covered in them, but most of it in the higher areas was just grey rocks without any sign of snow around the summit area, either.
“This is way better than I had hoped it to be!” Chloe’s eyes were sparkling. “The mountains are perfect!”
“I can’t believe our, well, mostly yours, magic was enough to create all this!” The wolf was surprised by just how much the area had changed. “Creating so much material to form this massive mountain range should be much more costly!”
“Well, we’re inside Sophia’s domain.” The fox smiled at him. “How surprising would it really be if magic were to behave all funky in here?”
“It would be surprising if it weren’t true." He nodded. “It’s still puzzling, though, but I can accept a Sophia place behaving like Sophia, so it’s perfectly understandable.”
“Hehe.” She let out a small chuckle before focusing on the mountains again. “It would’ve been even better if they came with snow already.”
“Debatable.” Fen didn’t share her opinion.
“For visual purposes!” She lightly glared at him. "There's no need for you to go there just to have it look nice!"
“That’s somewhat acceptable.”
“Are the mountains not high enough for natural snow?” Chloe tilted her head.
“In the regular world, they might not be high enough, though that heavily depends on the climate.” He paused for a moment. “Well, something like an actual climate doesn’t really exist in this place yet, so…”
“That’s a good point.” The fox looked up at the sky, or rather the all-white lack of it. There’s nothing that could naturally create snow, huh?”
“Not that the mountains have been created naturally.” The wolf rolled his eyes.
“Ahaha~.” Chloe let out another chuckle. “Anyway, don’t worry, I’ll take care of putting snow on the mountains. However, I'll need Sophia's help. I'll ask her to place multiple dozens of portals all over the place for me to use. I’ll die if I have to walk everywhere!”
“It would be good for you to gain some more stamina, though.” Fen stared right at her.
“…” She just turned her head away. “T-This is too much of a challenge!”
“So weak.”
“I know!” She nodded. “Almost as weak as you when it comes to snow or other cold things.”
“I should’ve seen that one coming.” Fen sounded ever so slightly awkward as he had nothing to defend himself with.
“Anyway, should we do the forest and the river around here first?" Chloe dropped the topic and pointed all around her. “The hut should be right in the middle, where we are right now, so the river should be nearby, too!”
“Sounds like a plan to me.” The wolf agreed with her. “To make it more natural, I suggest the river should start somewhere in the mountain range and then have it go through the entire plain.”
“That would look amazing!” Chloe smiled at him. “Let’s do it like that!”
“How do we do it, though?” Fen tilted his head. “In my other forest, Ari and I dug out the riverbed and then filled it with water. I have nothing against manual labor, but…”
“I do, though!”
“I figured, so let me finish.” He rolled his eyes. “There has to be a more, uhh, magical approach to it.”
“I like that a lot more!” Chloe went back to smiling.
“Sophia said that it’s possible for magic to create a continuous source of water. If that’s true, we should probably put it somewhere on the mountain range.”
“It might help if we carve a little trench along the plateau to guide the direction of the future river.”
"A valid point." The wolf liked her addition. "Judging by what we did so far, it might be enough to release our magic alongside the trench to have it grow later on.”
“Just what I was about to suggest, too!” The fox nodded a couple of times.
“Okay, let’s try it out."
“Let’s go!”
Afterward, Chloe waited for Fen to change to his big mode to jump on his back. Once he did so, the duo sped to the edge of the plateau where the mountain range started.
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“How about we mark this the end and walk over to the other side while roughly carving the path for the river and releasing bits of our magic?” Fen was thinking about their next steps.
“Sounds good to me!”
“Both of us are going to walk, though. On our own feet.” The wolf stared at her. "It's just 20 kilometers. Maybe 25 or, at best, 30 if we add some bends to the river.”
“Hrmmnnn…” Chloe’s face scrunched up. “If it’s okay with you that it'll take a couple of hours.”
"I'm in no rush, and you need to get every bit of exercise you can."
“Are you calling me fat?!” The fox instantly got loud.
“How did you come to that conclusion?” He looked confused. “I’m calling you lazy, untrained, and in dire need of more stamina.”
“…” She wasn’t sure if that was any better. As he was right, all she could do was change her expression into a pout, though.
“Alright, let’s go.” Saying so, Fen simply began walking away from her.
“Ah, wait for me!” The fox quickly ran after him, and the duo continued to walk next to each other towards the center of the plateau.
While slowly moving forward, Fen used a bit of his magic to carve a roughly one-meter-wide and 50cm-deep trench into the ground behind them while Chloe released bits of her internal authority alongside it.
“With that, we’re back at the hut location.” A few hours had passed since then when Fen announced their arrival at the portal in the middle of the plateau.
“Does the river really need that many twists and turns…?” Looking and sounding rather exhausted, Chloe looked back at their path so far and how wiggly the trench they made was. “I think it’s like twice as long and bendy as it needed to be.”
“No, I think it’s perfect like that.” The wolf shook his head. “It looks more natural like that.”
“You just wanted me to walk more!” The fox saw through his intent.
“That is an utterly baseless accusation.”
“Is that so?”
“Of course!” He just nodded. “Now, we have to keep it going like that, too. If the second half of the river becomes straight now, it would look really weird.” His plan was flawless.
“I would usually agree that everything straight is weird, but…” Chloe scratched her cheek. “I guess it’s better not to change that behavior, either.” It wasn’t for the reasons the wolf intended, but she agreed to keep going the way they did before.
Another couple of hours passed before they eventually arrived at the other side of the plateau from where they initially started.
“I was just about to run out of magic, so that was perfect.” Fen sounded quite satisfied.
“I was just about to run out of my will to live!” Chloe strongly disagreed with him. “Thanks to the twists, it was W-A-Y more than the distance you told me!”
“It sure was~.” He nodded. “I didn’t keep track of the exact distance, but I’d guess we walked for about 50 to 60 kilometers.”
“Don’t sound so smug about it!” She got loud.
"You're still alive, and it was a good endurance training for you, so keep quiet."
“Grrr!”
“You think that growling at me, a wolf, will do much?”
“I think I could beat you!”
“Really?” Fen stared at her. “Sure, your magic is more potent, but will you be able to catch me?”
“…”
“So, how do we do this perpetual water source idea to feed the river?” The wolf ignored her reaction and looked up the mountain in front of them. "A small lake where we create some water and pump a good bit of magic into while thinking it should keep going and only to disappear once it reaches the end of the river?”
“That’s how I’d do it.” Chloe nodded.
“Okay, let’s give it a try."
Afterward, the two dug out a little pond and used their magic to fill it with water to the point it overflowed into the trench they made the past couple of hours. While doing that for a while and watching the water travel down the plateau, the duo also released more of their internal magic into the pond while hoping it would keep going forever and continuously keeping the river alive and filled.
