Chapter 516: A Lesson In Flight No One Asked For

If you ever find yourself in the middle of the Central Safe Zone and start walking exactly 40° northeast, after about fifty days, you’ll leave the protection of the Central Monarch’s Spiritual Pressure and enter Kandara.

On your left would be the Northern Safe-Zone. And on your right would be the Eastern Safe-Zone.

But if you still keep walking 40° northeast in a straight line, after a little more than two days, you’ll reach the end of our supercontinent.

In front of you, for as far as your eyes could see, would be a vast stretch of Northern Ocean (also known as the New Arctic Ocean).

And floating somewhere in the midst of that frigid water, you’ll find a broken archipelago of snowy peaks and frozen glaciers. This chain of islands was known as the Shattered Isles. Our destination.

If you’re wondering why we didn’t land directly in Iron Height, there were two reasons:

One — according to our sources, an Awakened there had the ability to emit strong EMP waves that fried most electronics long before they ever reached the warzone.

So taking a high-tech private jet there would be a hilarious way to commit suicide.

And two — the entire East had declared a total lockdown on its airspace, which meant any unauthorized aircraft flying too close to the borders would be shot down on sight.

That meant we couldn’t simply fly across or around the Eastern Safe-Zone to reach Iron Height.

We had to approach Iron Height from the sea.

Thankfully, we had a lot of ships thanks to Vereshia.

Her fleet had left her family’s docks in the South several days ago. Rather than sailing east around the southern edge of the continent, they had gone west first, stopping at the Western Safe-Zone to pick up my family’s army. You know, since this was our fight.

From there, the fleet had continued sailing north.

It might sound counterintuitive.

Why sail all the way around the supercontinent just to reach the East? Because the said supercontinent was fucking enormous.

And the southern route wasn’t actually the shortest one.

The Eastern Safe-Zone stretched much farther south than the Central and Northern regions, but the southern ocean around its tip was very difficult to navigate.

The waters there were violent and unpredictable and filled with vicious Spirit Beasts.

The northern route, on the other hand, allowed the fleet to follow the coastline of the Western and Northern Safe-Zones before turning south into Eastern waters.

If all this information is too much to process for you, just understand that instead of going:

South → East → Iron Height

The fleet was going all around the world like this:

South → West → North → East → Iron Height

It may look like a ridiculous route on paper but it was a much easier one in practice.

Our destination was the Shattered Isles in the Northern Ocean. We had planned to land there and rendezvous with the fleet before making our way toward Iron Height together.

Great plan, indeed. All credit to Vereshia.

But you know what was not a great plan?

Dropping me out of a hovering jet at ten thousand feet without a parachute!

A ramp had been lowered from the back of the military jet, exposing the freezing night air outside. Vereshia was holding me out by my nape like I was a puppy.

My feet were dangling several thousand feet above the ocean. I was screaming and crying and flailing like my life was on the line... because it was.

"Please! Please, please, Lady Vereshia, please! I’ll be good! I’ll strive to be a model Cadet! I’ll open a shrine in your name! I’ll attend my classes and even read the rule handbook! Just please don’t drop me!"

"You’re lying."

"I swear on my mother!"

Vereshia paused as if considering my offer, then clicked her tongue in rejection. "I think I’ll enjoy throwing you out more. Besides, you should’ve behaved in your victory speech. This will be your punishment now."

I lost it. "You crazy woman! I’ll die! I’ll die!"

I was yelling as loud as I could, yet my voice was immediately getting swallowed by the howling wind.

"Don’t worry! Gravity will handle the down part!" Vereshia yelled back, amused as if this was some kind of joke.

Aarav joined in. "Sam, think of this as your training. You need to learn how to properly use your Spiritual Pressure. Right now, you’re using it only as armor on instinct. When you learn to control it, you can achieve a variety of things like flight and telekinesis and fear inducement."

"JUST TEACH ME IN A CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENT FIRST!" My voice disappeared into the wind.

Vereshia leaned farther out of the ramp. "I’m sorry, what was that?"

"YOU HEARD ME!"

"No, I didn’t."

"YOU ABSOLUTELY DID, YOU BITCH!"

Aarav was laughing again. Fucking traitor, that guy.

"Listen, I’ll give you a rundown on how it works," he said, his voice distinctively clear. "There are two ways to achieve flight. One is hard, and the other is harder. Which one do you want to learn?"

Was this guy serious? "The easy one!"

"I’ll teach you both," he nodded sagely. I wanted to punch him. "You already know what Spiritual Pressure is, right? It’s a physical force exerted on reality by your soul. The bigger your soul gets, the more it grows in weight, and so the more force it applies to the world around it."

Why the fuck was he giving me a lecture here?!

"As your skills improve, you can extend this pressure away from your body, wrap it around objects, and pull or push them. That’s telekinesis. Theoretically, you can use this same application on yourself. You can treat your own body as an object and pull or push it. This is very hard, because we naturally think of our body as the center of our Spiritual Pressure. Instead, we’d have to imagine that our pressure is a second body surrounding us. Getting into that mindset is hard when you’re starting out. You’ll also need to consciously adjust the directional vectors and maintain an extremely stable pressure field around yourself. It’s a lot of math. But over time, you learn to do it subconsciously. As I said, this method is very hard, but it lets you fly at speeds unimaginable!"

I had stopped listening to the fucker. The moment he mentioned math, I tuned him out and started calling upon my Origin Card.

Call me delusional, but I was pretty confident I could take on both Vereshia and Aarav alone.

Maybe the cold was getting to my brain.

Maybe the fear of imminent death had pushed me past the point of rational thought.

Or maybe I was just fucking stupid.

Either way, I called upon my Origin Card.

It didn’t come.

I somehow managed to stretch my neck and peer over my shoulder. And what did I see there if not two Cards with glowing red and black runes floating above Vereshia.

Bitch was using some kind of Debuff Cards to suppress my innate ability! What the fuck? Was this not against any protocol now?!

And just to add to my frustration, Aarav continued his lecture like he was a professor and this was his class. "The second method is much easier conceptually, but much more demanding physically. You use your Spiritual Pressure to push against gravity itself. Just create a concentrated field of Spiritual Pressure beneath yourself and push downward with enough force to counteract your own weight. Once you can maintain that pressure, you can gradually adjust the direction of the force and move through the air. This one is so simple."

Of course! Everything is simple when you’re not the one being thrown out of a plane!

Before I could curse his ancestral line, however, Vereshia lowered me a bit.

"Class is over. See you down there."

"Wait, wait, wait! Let me tell you something! Let me tell you—"

She let go.

My stomach dropped. And then I did too.