New Eden: Live to Play, Play to Live

The group’s travels resumed as soon as David and Kujaku re-entered their vehicle, but didn’t last much longer.

Less than ten minutes later, they had arrived at a clearing in the forest with enough room for all of their vehicles, as well as any hut or shelter they would hastily build before sundown.

The eerie part about it was that the sunlight only barely made it through the canopy above them, the trees bending and twisting to cover the sky in an almost perfect dome above the clearing.

And it was no small feat, given that the clearing itself spanned about a hundred metres across, and even had a rivulet snaking down one side of it. It was an unnatural sight, to say the least.

But they quickly figured out why.

"Can you feel it too?" Alex asked, looking at Kary’s worried expression.

She nodded in response, her shoulders tense.

And she wasn’t the only one. The entirety of their group was looking around with varying degrees of worry and angst.

"There’s too much mana in the air for it to be just a passing wave. There has to be a source here," David claimed, looking around in hopes of finding it first.

But Alex was already tracking the source as he spoke, walking toward the center of the clearing.

"It’s like the trees are trying to get close to this, and are kept away simultaneously. Whatever it is, it’s also not fully active," he said, setting his hand down almost dead in the center of the circle of trees.

He could feel something pulsing beneath the ground, maybe fifty feet or so, but the pulse was slow; almost like a slumbering heartbeat.

He tried reaching for it with his own mana, but it was pushed back immediately. It felt to him like whatever this was; it had a barrier in place to keep itself from being found.

Something was weird, though.

Turning to Kary, he verified with her.

"Did you feel it before we crossed into the clearing? You have the furthest mana detection range, you should have, right?"

Kary grimaced a bit, shaking her head no.

"No sign of it until the car was stopped, actually."

Alex frowned.

"Don’t dig it up just yet; I want to see something," he said.

Walking toward the edge of the clearing, Alex turned to face the center of the circle and stepped outside the line the trees formed.

Immediately, his mana senses lost track of the pulsing mana; the forest became dead calm once more. He stepped forward again, and the pulse resumed in his senses.

He stepped back out and looked at the trees that formed an almost perfect circle around the clearing. Something intrigued him.

The trees were all reasonably large, sure, as if they had been here for decades. But something was odd about them.

The bark on them looked almost too soft to the naked eye.

Getting a closer look, he understood why.

The bark was ridged so finely, it left no gap between the ridges to make for a rough surface. But that made no sense.

Putting his hand on the tree, he felt a small pulse of mana emanating from it.

"What the hell?"

He gave a brief knock on the bark, and it sounded as if he had knocked on a stone statue of a tree, instead of a living tree. But the branches swaying in the wind above him, and the leaves rustling debunked that thought.

"Why is it so dense?" he wondered.

Alex focused his gaze toward the roots of the tree before him, and he pushed his mana sense below the dirt. The answer became clear.

He looked to his left and right, seeing the same thing under each tree that formed the circle around the clearing. An acorn.

But not a regular one, no. These acorns were oozing with mana now that he had spotted them, but the moment he looked elsewhere, they faded away from his senses.

"The trees are a barrier. This is not a natural occurrence. It was set up by someone long ago. These trees have to be at least a millennium old, and yet, they remained so small. They only grew denser."

David looked at him with a curious expression.

Deciding he wanted to test this theory, he unsheathed a knife from his belt and threw it at the closest tree with enough force that it whistled through the air.

However, it didn’t embed itself into the trunk, as he had expected. Instead, it dinged off the trunk, as if it had hit a solid rock, and the blade broke off, flying into the woods.

"Huh..." he blurted, looking at the tree with curiosity.

Alex chuckled at the event, but tried showing what he meant when he said the trees were abnormally dense.

He jumped into the tree before him, reaching a branch that stretched above the clearing, and stood on the very tip of it.

The branch barely bent under his weight, moving only a few inches down, even though it was no thicker than his pinky beneath his feet.

Everyone was standing there, a mix of awe and confusion painting their faces. Everyone except Yeoja.

She was looking at the branches as if they were made of solid gold.

A branch that solid would be useless in the hands of anyone in any way other than a club. But for someone who could use mana and wield bows, they were worth their weight in gold.

"Alex, can you cut me a branch about the size of my wrist? Please?" she asked, her eyes wide.

"What? I just showed you the branch I’m standing on is harder than steel, and you want me to try to cut one? Am I missing something?" he asked, jumping down from the tree.

"You don’t understand. A branch that rigid, that can still sway with the wind, would make the best bow for someone with mana. Especially if they are part of a barrier, like you said. That means they are already imbued with mana!" she exclaimed.

Alex took a moment to realize the implications of her statement, before his eyes widened.

She was right. The trees were already filled to the brim with mana; they would make the perfect weapons in any shape.

"Challenge accepted," he grinned.

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