Chapter 13-358: That Hollow Feeling

(As of this chapter, The Human Race is officially longer than The Far Future!)

Legion kicked the remnants of a stone T-Rex or something down the steps of the Pyramid to join the other guards there in rubble and ruin. There was enough of an Aura of death magic here to keep normal creatures away, and long custom of not bothering the place with moving stone and bone defenders was probably long in place.

That did mean that the path from the Hollow World to up above was wide open and undefended, but even if they left, there was no doubt it was not going to be that way for long. Doubtless the Illuminati could mobilize some undead guards, or spend some time and effort to make a few more golems.

What was a dinosaur going to do, run the steps and try to get outside the Dome up top at four thousand meters underwater?

If Heavenbound Hall was going to occupy this place in the future, they’d first have to clear off the undead around it, regardless. Just crashing their way through sufficed for Legion for now.

They eyed the strange not-sun in the sky, shaking their head.

There was no way this was a real Hollow World, so there had to be dimensional shenanigans going on. Like Hyperborea, it had to be an isolated dimension located within and anchored to the planet’s mantle, some great personal realm cooked up by older powers for their own entertainment.

The sun was very reddish, but white-hot Runes played over it if you had Devasight, revolving slowly even as there seemed to be no sense of night. The sunlight was not as bright as the opened sky up above, only a little brighter than the Haze, but it was there all the time.

There were clouds and things, but they had no problem seeing through them or the atmospheric haze, and so could see the arc of the world bending up and away on all sides. 50x magnification gave them an extremely good detail of the terrain as they slowly spun around.

And right there was an area with a black cloud hanging over it. Oddly enough, the Haze didn’t seem to have taken place down here, but the inky-black stain of a Shroudcloud with constant hate lightning boiling inside it was impossible to miss.

They couldn’t see another such cloud, which meant it was out of sight, behind the huge revolving ball of the molten sun.

Just based on their observations, there seemed to be more land down here than open expanses of water. It wasn’t a clean reverse of up above, once they overlaid maps of the surface against this hollow world, but there was some correlation. The major bodies of water she could see were indeed largely in the same positions as the continents above.

That said, there were rivers and lakes all over the place, and judging by the greenery around, rainfall was frequent. The trees towered hundreds of feet high, the smaller ones the equals of redwoods in height at least, but festooned with all the color and foliage of a great jungle.

That meant there would be several layers of ecology involved, and obviously this place was magical and had never suffered the same kind of dispersing of magic that the surface had. That meant some terrifically strong creatures might exist down here, possibly even true kaiju... which Queen Rayetiz confirmed were terrifyingly strong, and hadn’t been seen on the surface for at least a thousand years. Or at least, no one had survived seeing them.

The lilitu’s suborned personality spent a lot of time dictating her memoirs to a couple devoted Chroniclers at Heavenbound Hall. She had filled in a lot of details about unknown factors and influences in the mundane and magical worlds for over a thousand years, her recollections concise and accurate despite the passage of time. She had evolved to lilitu status with her corruption of the Catholic Church over a period of hundreds of years, as well as subverting and splitting the rising Islamic faith into competing factions, dividing them even further and slowly making them ever more hostile to other faiths.

Inspiring the Crusades and the lingering hostilities from that series of events, which still endured to this day, had been another of her triumphs. Truly, she had been one of the most formidable influences in spreading Evil in this world, working against the influence of the Heavenbound and other interested bodies to reap souls and carnage for Demonium.

Stalin, Lenin, and Hitler had all taken advice from her, albeit unknowingly, and setting off World War I with quiet suggestions to a fanatic had been one of her crowning achievements.

Still, for all that, she hadn’t known about this Hollow World, and really, it didn’t matter too much to her, except from a curiosity standpoint. She was best at working corruption in a civilized society. The primitive savagery of a place like this was better suited for brutal sorts like the niogriz, maintaining a cruel and savage society designed to reap easy souls. The simple fact that the brute had been trapped by the Illuminati showed how vulnerable it was to more subtle thinkers.

It looked like they were going to have to circumnavigate this place, make a crude Map of it, and locate the second Shroudzone. They eyed the first one and the lands leading up to the curvature in the distance, measuring by eye.

Approximately six thousand miles in diameter. It would take most of a day if they stayed low, but there was no reason to do that. If there was no Haze, they could climb for height, every mile of radius shortened saving half again that around.

If there was an altitude cap, they could find that, too. Always good to do double-duty.

Black and white feathered wings unfolded out of nowhere, gripped at the air, and several flying powers activated together.

They blew skyward more like a rocket than a flier, totally ignoring gravity and wind resistance. It only took a second for them to rise above the canopy that ringed the entire clearing where the Pyramid rested and get a view of the local landscape, and the awesome, rolling sight of the horizon rolling up into the distance in all directions without the trees in the way.

The Pyramid was actually located on a low mount of some kind, partially elevated, and the stone beneath was undoubtedly why the trees around it were so... small.

Yes, the trees they could see were soaring to an impossible kilometer in height. You couldn’t make an organic material strong enough to bear that weight, so that meant there were gravity-defying magical effects built into the wood and the branches reaching out in every direction, each tree covering an area the size of a city block or more. Some interwove with one another, so the area of green for uncounted leagues around was all like one single interlaced organism.

The, ah, polar opposite of what the North Pole should be. They smirked despite themselves, spinning slowly as they gained altitude to paint the whole view into The Map and give the Action Cartographers something to salivate over.

They rose to five thousand meters above the canopy, and there was a ripple in the air. They blinked as there was another shift to their view, and slowly stopped their ascent.

Cloud islands.

Layers and layers of cloud islands!

Whatever magical effect had wiped them from view from below was not effective up here, and suddenly the different cloud layers that spilled off into the rising horizon were no longer unseen, guarded by some mass illusion, but as plain as layers upon layers of onions, rising up at least a hundred miles in nearly as many layers towards the baleful, sullen eye of the molten sun overhead.

Clouds the size of small countries rolled by in the distance, leaving no shadows upon the ground below as they did so. They weren’t all that large, of course, but they did grow smaller on average as they rose in altitude.

Not only were there wild habitats upon them, there were also civilizations. They could see ships sailing between the various clouds, some of those far off in the distance even larger than aircraft carriers, literal palaces atop great wooden hulls floating through the sky, while fleeter, nimbler craft tacked through the manifold winds about their larger compatriots.

It was a wondrous and fantastic sight to behold, and even Queen Rayetiz had to admit she was impressed by it, instantly starting to assess and categorize the various civilizations and sky-nations that were within visible range, her interest in this place sparking visibly.

It was perhaps notable that none of the orbital paths of the clouds seemed to come within fifty miles of the Pyramid, and there was a great empty path punching right through all the clouds towards the sullen sun above.

The force of the magnetic pole?, they wondered, feeling about for some sort of Stillflight Field, and finding nothing that would account for such a thing. Still, that seemed the most logical explanation, and the trees were indeed shorter the closer they got to the Pyramid... which, although it stood in a clearing and was clearly visible there, when they looked down, it had somehow vanished into the greenery as well.

Indeed, many of the details of the land below that they should have still been able to discern clearly had now blended into one another. For instance, they could not see any birds flying about below the five-thousand-meter level anymore.

It was like being in a completely separate world.

Had the niogriz even known about this place? It was too high up for True Seeing to see past, a grand and bold illusory barrier that effectively multiplied the living space of the interior of the world here... and made for a potential visible hierarchy of sorts, which no doubt some uninspired wankers had thought to impose on those literally ‘below’ them.

All the potential explorers up top were now going out of their minds. Hyperborea had been awesome, but this was just a realm swimming in magic of some sort or another.

Dragons...

They had resumed their ascent, and naturally a great serpentine form, with long and slender wings totally unable to support a body that had to be at least a hundred meters in length, drew the eye even from this far away.

It was also flying at least twenty levels above them, and far, far above the sailing ships below.

They began their ascent again, not quite as fast as before, wondering about complications and what might actually be going on here.

They passed the first and second levels of cloud islands, which seemed to hold the biggest islands and the vast majority of aerial shipping. At this range, they couldn’t see who or what was crewing those ships, even.

A tingle on their finger drew their attention.

Their nascent Ring of Air Elemental Command was gleaming slightly, and with only a touch of will, they could feel a powerful interaction of Air and Earth power going on here. It wasn’t a Stillflight Field, but there was a powerful flow of Air Elemental power being canceled out by an equally powerful Earth Elemental flow, which effectively brought the bias back to neutrality.

If these creatures and ships were flying around with some power based on Elemental Air, entering this place might just drop them right out of the sky as it was neutralized. It wasn’t having any effect on them, since they weren’t relying on background power or passive ability, but active use of magic and Wrath.

Something for the eggheads to discern, but they were 90% sure of the fact as they felt the interacting magic around them. The interplay also seemed to be preventing any form of Place Spirit from developing here, because they couldn’t sense the presence of one above or below them...

They continued ascending, but after a moment of thought, did so at an angle, veering directly away from the Shroudzone they could still see around the molten edge of the sun, aiming to get a better look at things.

Their speed wasn’t hindered at all, and the fifty miles of distance was covered quickly. This would give them a fairly decent view of the island they chose to fly over, making sure to turn invisible as they did, and ascertain the creatures and people there.