364 Locating the ancestral grounds

Regretfully, I was too pressed for time to just relax and enjoy my adventurous nature. Only now it started to dawn on me that growing in strength and influence brought not only the benefits but also responsibility!

Taking a look at the remaining distance from the island I was aiming for, I released a deep sigh and picked the oars. Despite covering barely half of the distance I had to travel by sea, if I wanted to change my landing spot, I had to free myself from the current way earlier. For some reason that I was too unknowledgeable to understand, the closer I got to the land, the stronger the force of the current was!

At least, compared to moving the entire fleet of the canopies, changing the direction fo a single boat was far easier. In just a few moments, I felt the force pushing me towards the island slowly weaken, only to fully subsidize with about a quarter of the distance to the island remaining. 

With how fragile the canopies were, I couldn't risk taking any sharp turns. Limited to just angling out of the current, I had to paddle the remaining distance completely by myself.

Considering how easy it was to create new boats, as soon as I reached about two hundred meters from the shore, I simply jumped out of the canopy, covering half of the remaining distance by just riding on top of my shockwaves. 

I couldn't wait for the time when I would master a proper way of flying!

Even if utilizing my abilities in this quirky way allowed me to soar in the skies for as long as I had enough mana to cast yet another shockwave, when it came to precise control of my trajectory, I was powerless. 

While I could easily cope with the rebound of landing on the land, I still decided to hold my explosions and ended up in the water. A considerable splash would disappear in a mere moment, but a crater in the earth would remain as the hint for anyone who would ever want to for some reason track my steps. 

Just a little bit of paranoia never hurt anyone!

And it didn't have anything to do with the fact that the weather was pleasantly warm, with the water being as clear as in those rare places on the earth that remained unpolluted! It wasn't like I just wanted to play in the water for a tiny bit!

After swimming through the remaining one hundred meters, I finally stepped on the land. No matter how nice the weather was, I still had to use a firewall of mine in order to dry my clothes a bit. Even with my maxed resistance stat, moving in wet clothes could lead to uncomfortable blisters!

If I were to be late for the ceremony, I would have no other choice than to go with the flow and improvise. While in the worst-case scenario, I could settle on gathering slaves from other islands, it would pose way more challenges than just poaching them from the closest island to my own.

With no other way than to push forward, I finally resolved myself to just figure out the solutions to any problems that would appear on the spot. WIth how little information I had, trying to predict the outcome before even checking the ancestral grounds would be as stupid as trying to predict the outcome of the lottery without even knowing its rules.

In the end, if the push would come to a shove, I could always rely on my charm in order to get as many people as I could to my side! And if I were to be late to the ritual that would end up with the appearance of the hero, stalling his travel to the Overlord's place while making sure to move all the remaining slaves to my own island was the option as well. 

After all, in those legends that Gabriel told me about, the hero always limited himself to pushing the invaders out of the island! With how everyone I met so far considered sea travel a taboo, I could at least hope to avoid the wrath of this mythical figure by simply running away!

Those thoughts inevitably accompanied me while I made my way through the dense vegetation of the forest. What I considered the easiest part of the entire voyage turned out to be quite challenging. Even if I could just blast all the roots, weeds and trees away with an honest dosage of shockwaves, this kind of commotion would draw way too much attention.

In order to deal with anything that would await me in the ancestral ground, I had to gather some information firsts, forcing me to go with a stealthy approach. I didn't mind revealing myself and acting in the open later, but for now, not only I had to find the location of my target in the first place, I had to do it without getting noticed!

My caution seemed to pay off after about two hours of my blind travel when I noticed several pairs of armed men guarding a small clearing behind them.

But something wasn't right!

Not only was the clearing completely devoid of the people, b

At first, I thought that they were simply watching out for any invaders while deep in the forest in order to buy as much time as they could in the even of some danger approaching, but after scanning the area with my energy vision, I realised that the entire group actually stood in the small circle around the clearing!

But that wasn't the thing that raised my doubts. 

With the alarms going off at full strength with my head, I took a closer look at the small energy disturbance located in the middle of the clearing. Only upon closer inspection, I realised that I saw something similar relatively recently! 

Not only that, I actually owned the source of such rift in the space myself, and interacted with it several times already!

But how the heck those people, who could only use the energy to improve their constitution, would be able to obtain a subdimension?!

It took me entire parasitic core, an insane amount of dead magical beasts and the entire island full of vegetation to reach the point where I could afford the energy cost of creating it! There was simply no way those primitive tribes could make one themselves!