The end of the Sky Mountains.

As Turan raised his head above the highest place in the world, his eyes widened at the sight before him.

'What... is that?'

On the way up, Turan had resolved not to be surprised by anything. Whatever lay in a place no one had crossed into for thousands of years, it could hardly be unexpected.

But he had never imagined that not just the land beyond, but even the sky itself would be different. Something pure white lay beyond the ridge over which he peeked.

This place should have been too high even for snow to fall, yet that unknown white substance filled not only the far side of the mountains but the sky as well. So completely that he could not understand how it had been invisible from a distance.

Staring blankly at it, Turan realized that its whiteness was an illusion.

There was red, blue, and green; the yellow, cyan, and purple born from them; and every sort of color their combinations could produce. There was even light in a wider range of colors visible only through the sight of the Illusion bloodline. It merely looked white because that was the result of all those lights mingling together.

Sight was not the only sense it stimulated. All manner of smells wafted from within it, smells his keen nose—which could detect blood kilometers away—had failed to notice until moments ago. Burning wood, animal dung, simmered strawberry jam, sour sweat. There were hundreds, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of scents within.

When he listened, sounds reached him too. Human muttering, animal cries, rolling stones, something buzzing, and even songs played on instruments he did not recognize.

On closer inspection, it was difficult even to define that thing as a substance. It drifted like gas, sloshed and flowed like liquid, and hardened like a solid before colliding and shattering...

Suddenly, understanding entered his mind. In itself, that thing was nothing—and yet it was also everything in the world.

"Ah."

Forcing his mouth open to let out a groan, he realized that the sound he had just made was also part of that substance. No, when he looked down, his body too consisted mostly of the same thing. Only the tiniest portion of his actual body was mixed into it.

Had it always been this way? Or was it because he had reached this place and observed that thing? The instant the thought occurred, his entire body began to sag and melt, being drawn beyond the cliff.

'Wait...'

The substance flowing out of him held all the information that defined him. Turan, child of Karim and Bijella, a Hunter who pursued the wind and hid within lightning. Savior of Kalamap, one of the Three Chief Gods of the Southern Frontier, Night...

"Stop—!"

The instant he shouted with all his strength, his breath caught. Only then did Turan remember that he was at the summit of the Sky Mountains, where even a handful of breathable air was scarce.

No, soon even that breathlessness vanished. The muscles and blood vessels that needed oxygen—even his lungs—had already flowed away.

All that remained here was a tiny portion of what should have been his essence, something little better than dregs. Or perhaps that little something left behind was precisely—

"Turan, Turan! Wake up, hurry!"

Opening his eyes at the shrill voice, Turan felt something hard against his back. Through his blurred vision, he saw Maysa with tears in her blue eyes and Solif wearing a deep frown.

'I'm alive...'

He could vividly feel everything, from the hand braced against the ground to the gullet and lungs through which he breathed. As though it were a lie that all of it had melted away moments ago. For some reason, though, he was wearing no clothes.

"Where are we?"

"Right below the Sky Mountains. You climbed up alone and fell. Don't you remember?"

"Not at all..."

Clutching his throbbing head, Turan recalled what he had just seen. That unidentified thing covering the land beyond the mountains, and even the sky. Perhaps because he had stared at it so long, a headache surged through him as though every fold of his brain were being crushed to pieces.

"But what do you mean, alone? Didn't we get there together?"

"The rope suddenly snapped partway up. We called as loudly as we could, but you ignored us and kept climbing."

Turan had only taken the lead because the Earthkeeper bloodline made him best suited to carving holds into the cliff. When it came to climbing those holds, Solif, with his guardian bloodline, should naturally have been far faster.

Yet no matter how hard they climbed at full speed, the distance between them and Turan had only grown. As they struggled on, gasping for breath, he had suddenly fallen naked from above. Seeing him fall, Maysa had immediately plunged after him, caught him with flight magic, and brought him down here.

"I saw it. Up there—"

As he started to speak, Turan realized he had no idea how to describe it. A thing that was nothing in itself, yet everything in the world at once. Without seeing and feeling it firsthand, no one could possibly grasp its true nature.

No, had any of it even been real? Perhaps it had been a kind of hallucination brought on by his inability to breathe. But judging by his missing clothes, his body must indeed have melted once—

"Wait, where's Vije?"

"She was with you."

"I didn't see her fly off anywhere."

Only then did Turan realize that Vije had gone up with him, hanging at his side, yet was no longer there. Thinking back, he remembered that when his body melted, Vije too had melted and flowed out with him.

'Did she fail to come back? Has she gone beyond?'

-I'm right here!

Just as a dizzying despair gripped him, Turan heard something like a little girl's thin voice inside his head. Startled, he turned, but Solif and Maysa seemed not to understand why.

"What's wrong?"

"I just heard a voice."

It was strangely familiar despite being a voice he had never heard before. Its identity soon became clear: a familiar-looking black eagle suddenly emerged from the middle of his chest.

"Wh-what the hell!?"

"Vije!"

Having abruptly popped out of Turan's body, Vije chirped as usual and perched on his head. Looking closely, she seemed a little smaller than before. Previously the size of an ordinary black eagle, she now looked almost as small as a kestrel. Anyone who did not know her would have taken her for a young black eagle.

"What happened?"

-I melted and merged with you, Turan! Now I can go into the place that fits me perfectly!

It was as cryptic an answer as the ones she had given when they first met. This time, however, he could roughly understand what she meant. His soul and Vije's—their very essences—had melted and fused together, allowing not just their souls but even their bodies to merge.

Their soul bond had even strengthened in the process, so that they could now convey their thoughts to each other as voices.

'Come to think of it, magic that manipulates souls already existed.'

A Tamer's soul-bond magic linked a human soul to a monster's, enabling a faint exchange of emotions. Primitive though it might be, it was undeniably magic that interfered with souls. He wondered why he had never thought of this before.

Then Solif waved a hand and said, "Well, I'm glad you seem to be all right, but let's collect what you dropped first. We don't want someone picking it up. And put some clothes on."

* * *

Tracking magic revealed that the important items—the Mimic Holy Relic, guardian magic tool, high-capacity backpack, and so on—had all fallen nearby. Apparently, their weight had sent them straight down.

His clothes, however, had all been carried far away by the wind. He had worn them long enough to find them with tracking magic, but they had flown tens or hundreds of kilometers away. Even riding Vije, gathering them would take quite some time.

"I'll make you new clothes while we're at it."

"Some of them were gifts. I need to find them."

"I doubt Asiz would want you running around looking for his clothes instead of resting in your condition."

Though there was nothing specifically wrong with his body, Turan was suffering from an overwhelming weakness. For an ordinary person, it would have been like a severe cold with aching limbs. A noble, immune to ordinary illnesses, falling into such a state was hardly a good sign. What he needed now was rest.

After Maysa continued to persuade him, Turan took some disguise clothes from his High-Capacity Pouch, put them on, and returned to the hideout. The Baraha couple, busy planting a few edible plants in the garden, asked in surprise at their sudden return.

"Oh, you're back already?"

"Don't tell me you succeeded..."

"No, we came back to rest for now. I'll explain the details."

"Will you be eating dinner here? I'll get it ready."

"We'll see!"

Only half listening to Solif's conversation with his parents, Turan leaned on Maysa as she helped him into a spare room to lie down.

"Want something to drink?"

"I'm fine. Let me tell you what I saw first."

The two said he needn't bother, yet quietly settled beside the bed. Then again, could anyone in this world fail to be curious about what lay beyond the Sky Mountains?

Turan tried to describe the view from atop the Sky Mountains as vividly as possible, exactly as he had experienced it: the unidentified substance filling the world beyond, earth and sky alike, and the phenomenon of being drawn into it merely by perceiving it.

"Haah..."

"So a hideout like the one we imagined is out of the question, at least."

"Right. Not a chance."

Having seen it himself, he knew it was no place a human could hope to live. Presumably, that held true even for the Heads of great houses. The fallen gods, too, must have some inkling of its secret, which was why they had never bothered trying to cross.

"And I'm not certain about this, but it seemed as though that substance surrounded the world in a huge sphere. I think we'd run into it even if we tried crossing somewhere else, or went up into the sky or underground."

"It's that vast? More importantly, I can't even begin to imagine what sort of substance it is just from hearing about it."

After several minutes of debating the nature of the thing enclosing the world, Solif pointed at Vije as though something had just occurred to him.

"So what was that just now? Vije going into your body and coming back out. Is it a new spell you learned?"

"This? I'm not sure how to explain it."

When Turan held out his hand, Vije pecked his finger with her beak, then slipped into it and disappeared. Smaller though she was now, a bird bigger than a fist vanishing in an instant was surreal even by wizards' standards. A few seconds later, she emerged from his other hand and chirped.

"When our bodies broke apart and came back together... I think our souls and mana took on the same properties, allowing us to merge. Like how the Light of Judgment mixes fire and light. That's just a guess, though."

As an added benefit, perhaps because Vije's body had become half a mass of mana, she could now change her size to some extent. To demonstrate, Turan enlarged the kestrel-sized Vije to her original size, then to the size of a dog or wolf, then to that of a large beast of prey—and even beyond.

"Whoa!"

"Wow..."

Only after she had filled the previously spacious room did Vije shrink back down and wiggle her rump on Turan's hand. As she did, he heard a voice in his head asking, "Aren't I amazing?"

"Is that as big as she gets?"

"Probably. Of course, bigger isn't always better. The mana making up her body becomes less dense."

If her body grew while her mana remained the same, its density naturally had to suffer. Still, more muscle would allow her to exert greater strength. The ability to adjust those traits to suit the situation was an enormous advantage in itself.

"And this really is the last thing."

Before either could ask what he meant, Vije flew from Turan's hand and vanished from sight. They stared blankly for a moment before Solif yelped and clutched his forehead.

"What do you think?"

"... Is it what I think it is?"

"That's right. Vije can borrow my stealth and tracking abilities now, too."

Listening to Turan and Maysa's exchange, Solif muttered, "That's absolutely insane. The end of the world itself. Even people only get three bloodline abilities, and she's just a bird."

Vije reappeared and pecked at Solif's forehead, muttering that he shouldn't say mean things. Naturally, the pecks were too weak to crack the skull of someone with the guardian bloodline.

"Vije's soul probably had a form compatible with Arabion to begin with. When we mixed together this time, the Zahar form got imprinted on it, I suppose... Something like that."

Stealth went without saying, but Vije's newfound ability to use tracking magic was also an enormous advantage. At its core, tracking involved amplifying a sense toward a specific object to locate it. Turan and other Zahar nobles used their keen noses for that, but Vije would be able to identify targets with a black eagle's exceptional eyesight—soaring high into the sky and looking more than a hundred kilometers in every direction.

Listening to this, Solif grumbled, "Why can't I find a monster on my wavelength?"

"You might, if the opportunity comes."

"What if I took just any monster up there..."

"I don't know if you could even get up there, but even if you could, you'd be better off not trying."

Turan still remembered that dizzying sensation at the summit of the Sky Mountains: his entire body melting and flowing out beyond, leaving only remnants he could barely recognize as his own. Until he knew how he had returned from that state, climbing up again in the hope of a second stroke of luck would be madness.

* * *

Several days passed after their attempt to scale the mountains. While Turan quietly recuperated, the others each found their own ways to spend the time.

First, Maysa selected several sets of Turan's spare clothes and began turning them into magic tools. She drew on not only her own vast mana reserves, but even borrowed the power of Solif's guardian bloodline.

Considering that a magic tool's strength depended first on the Enchanter's power and second on the power of the person lending the bloodline ability, it was easy to imagine how formidable they would be. Of course, making such items would leave them weakened for a while, so they had to be moderate in the amount of power they invested.

"How are you feeling?"

"So-so."

"Try drinking this, at least. It's tea made from herbs I just picked."

Meanwhile, she also devoted herself to looking after Turan, brewing tea from plants grown in the vegetable patch right outside the house. For this, she enlisted the help of Solif's mother, Romi, who was familiar with Baraha's medicinal-tea traditions.

To that end, Maysa not only grew the plants rapidly with plant-growth magic, but showed the ingenuity to ferment them quickly using the Decay spell Turan had once taught her. Every day, as he forced down teas that tasted bitter, sour, fishy, foul, and everything in between, Turan felt a little regret over teaching her that spell.

Aside from occasionally helping Maysa make magic tools, Solif spent most of his time with his parents. With no servants or maids to handle the chores, he had plenty to do, from teaching them basic home maintenance to fetching things they had not managed to buy earlier.

They could not risk leaving traces by visiting a nearby village, so he shopped in a distant city more than half a day's flight away on Vije. The two must have squabbled fiercely, for he invariably returned with at least one small scratch.

Finally, aside from carrying Solif on those occasional trips, Vije was constantly out and about. She had become thoroughly absorbed in playing with her newly changed body.

Ordinarily, she remained in her smallest, kestrel-sized form, but whenever the mood struck, she became a giant black eagle with a ten-meter wingspan and hunted terrified animals. With her newfound stealth, she could snatch up prey soundlessly even at that size—a veritable predator of death. She even showed the cunning to shrink again when she ate, allowing her to fill her belly more easily.

After roughly two weeks of everyone passing the time in their own fashion, Turan was finally able to leave his bedroom.

'Still a little dizzy... but much better than before.'

Walking into the garden unaided for the first time in ages, Turan basked in the sunshine. His body and mana had long since recovered, yet his health had stubbornly refused to improve until now.

He now knew why.

'I never imagined I'd succeed like this.'

The soul-magic primer he had acquired while looting Baraha's stronghold. Even as he faithfully meditated according to its instructions, Turan had often felt as though a thin shell lay in his way, one he could not break.

But not long ago, while devoting himself to meditation for lack of anything else to do, understanding had suddenly come to him. Those few remnants that had not been absorbed back then—what had seemed little better than dregs—were his unchanging self, and the very medium that had drawn back his true substance from the brink of being absorbed into the beyond.

By forcibly hauling back so vast a substance with its feeble, newly awakened power, that self had become paralyzed, as though suffering from sore muscles. His poor physical condition had been a consequence of that.

With a sensation like a button clicking inside his head, Turan awakened his spiritual awareness.