Chapter 935 — The Signal Appears Again

Gawain had even suspected that the Goddess of Magic was the source of the mysterious signals received twice by Sorin Fort and Winter Fort, and even suspected that those eerie signals were phenomena produced when the Goddess of Magic probed the Magic Web before carrying out her escape plan — though there was insufficient evidence, the conjecture was highly plausible, and so many people thought the same.

Yet now... the Goddess of Magic had been confirmed to have escaped completely and departed far from the human world, and the traces she left in the Magic Web had been thoroughly erased by Naritel and Duvalt — and yet that eerie mysterious signal had appeared again!!

"Has only the Sorin Prime Hub detected it?" Gawain frowned. "Have the other hubs filed similar reports?"

"Not yet. That signal is unstable, sometimes strong, sometimes weak; it seems only under rather chance circumstances that it appears and is captured by our Magic Web crystals," Hetty shook her head. "But the other prime hubs are currently checking all monitoring records from midnight to dawn yesterday, to see whether any clues were missed — if the signal they received was too faint and too brief, it could very well have been overlooked by the duty staff at the time, though traces might remain in the buffer crystal arrays."

"Hmm..." Gawain nodded slowly. "Have them look into it carefully. This signal... concerns me greatly. It is far from ordinary. The Goddess of Magic has already made trouble in our Magic Web once, and now this signal has appeared again. I fear it means that the Goddess of Magic is not the only one who wants to make trouble."

Hetty lowered her head and bowed in acknowledgment. "Yes, Ancestor."

Hetty left. Behind the desk, Gawain sank into thought, then raised his head and looked to his side, watching as an Amber slowly separated out of the air beside him.

The half-elf lady blinked, her face wearing an expression of surprise and confusion. "I thought that once the Goddess of Magic ran off, the business with that signal would be over..."

"I thought so too — all of us thought the signals received by Sorin Fort and Winter Fort were produced by the Goddess of Magic," Gawain said, his brows tightly locked. "But now it seems these are very likely two unrelated events..."

"If only Naritel had succeeded in keeping the Goddess of Magic there," Amber said instinctively. "Then we could have confirmed it with her directly. Even if that signal wasn't her doing, she might still know something about it — she is a god, after all, and ought to understand more than mortals."

Listening to Amber's muttering, Gawain merely shook his head and said nothing.

...

Two days later.

The cold wind of late autumn blew across the vast Holy Spirit Plain. Looking up at the sky from the Sorin region, one saw only a high sky and sparse clouds, the view clear and open.

The season of frequent rain and even snow was coming; such clear days would likely grow fewer and fewer over the next few months.

Stirred by the autumn wind, a great rustling came from the enormous canopy of the Sorin Great Tree. Countless branches made noise deep within the crown, as though certain structures within were shifting and recombining, and further sounds of continuous friction and rolling came, as if something were moving through the depths of the canopy, leaving sound in its wake.

At the very top of the Sorin Great Tree, the uppermost layer of the canopy, extremely dense wooden structures and heterogeneous leaves overlapped to form a surface as solid as steel. On this "green ground," comparable in scale to a city square, a series of man-made installations had been fixed — railings to prevent people from falling, street lamps for illumination, and small weather observation and collection devices. The largest of them all was the enormous crystal array at the center of all these installations, held and supported jointly by a great many metal frames and tangled vines: the Sorin Prime Hub Array.

This was the highest point of the entire Holy Spirit Plain, and one of the most important installations in the Sorin region. Around the vast crystal array, a dozen fully armed large treants could be seen. All of them were "guardians" grown and differentiated from the Sorin Great Tree, charged with protecting this great tree and the many precious devices mounted upon it. These treants wore heavy alloy armor, with large Magic Web energy packs — of a size humans could never carry, the kind used on war chariots — fixed to their backs and waists, and in their hands they carried fearsome Gorgon cannons. Every one of them looked majestic and awe-inspiring.

And the defensive strength of the Thoren Prime Hub did not end with them—

Some distance from the crystal array, along the outer rim of the canopy, many structures of extraordinary thickness and sturdiness grew out from among the branches; at the ends of these wooden limbs, which resembled the arms of giants, were "clenched" fortress-grade railguns and heavy bomb launchers—formidable defensive firepower that formed another guarantee of the Thoren Prime Hub's safety.

The Weave Prime Hub was an imperial strategic installation of the utmost importance; this held true not only here at the Thoren Great Tree, but at the other Prime Hubs as well, each of which possessed defenses of a comparable order.

With a rustling clatter, a fissure suddenly opened in the "ground" near the crystal array; the leaves that had covered that "ground" parted to either side, forming a structure like a cluster of petals, and a "cage" grown naturally from vines rose up out of the opening.

The cage came to a steady halt, the vines along its side opened layer by layer, and Margarita and several technicians stepped out from within.

The shield that enveloped the entire canopy platform shut out the bitter gale of the upper air; what greeted the visitors was only the magnificent, sweeping vista at the crown of the tree. Margarita drew a soft breath and could not help exclaiming, "No matter how many times I come up here, the view is always so breathtaking..."

A rustling sound came from the side; the portion of vines that had earlier separated from the lift cage writhed and gathered together, and amid a process of merging and reshaping took on the form of Beiyila. This former Hierarch of the Ten Thousand Abyssal Silence Cult nodded to Margarita: "Gazing out in all directions from such a height does give one a most uncommon feeling—if you have need of it, I could build yet another, higher observation platform atop the canopy."

"No, that won't be necessary. Thank you for the kind offer, Lady Beiyila," Margarita said hurriedly, then looked toward the crystal array not far off. "His Majesty is greatly concerned about the signal's reappearance. Have you made any new discoveries here?"

"The tracking attempt has failed; the signal source vanished completely, and within the range of my perception I can find no trace of it," Beiyila shook her head. "But while trying to analyze the signals we had already recorded, I seem to have stumbled onto something."