Chapter 722 – Dreamweaver World 60

Chapter 722 – Dreamweaver World 60

Mo Lan nodded, her eyes filled with both anticipation for the Exploration Zone and reluctance to part with Teacher Matina.

Once she left, she most likely would never return.

Mo Lan gazed at Teacher Matina’s hunched figure, her throat tightening slightly.

To her, Teacher Matina was different from those Transfiguration instructors back in Greenwood Village. After a year together, she had grown attached to her.

“Teacher, I…”

Mo Lan had barely opened her mouth when Matina waved her hand and cut her off. “If you’re leaving, then hurry up and pack your bags! It just so happens I haven’t gone out to visit friends in a while either. When you leave, I won’t have time to see you off!”

Her tone was as fierce as ever, only the slight tremor at the end of her words betrayed her.

Mo Lan was momentarily stunned, then smiled softly.

That lingering sorrow of parting coiled around her heart was scattered just like that by her teacher’s gruff concern.

On the day she left the village, the faint light of dawn had just begun seeping through the narrow crevices of Shadow Village’s stone caverns.

Mo Lan stood before the tunnel leading to the surface and looked back. Sure enough, that familiar figure was nowhere to be seen.

Only Leah came chasing after her, clutching a bundle of still-steaming blackberry cookies, insisting on escorting her to the surface.

“Lady Matina left before dawn.” Leah pressed the cookies into Mo Lan’s hands. “But she told me to tell you…” The girl suddenly lowered her voice, imitating Matina’s raspy tone: “If you dare die out there, I’ll drag your shadow back and boil it into soup!”

Mo Lan burst out laughing. “Tell Teacher for me — I’ll live well no matter where I am!”

She took one last look at Shadow Village behind her, then stepped into the tunnel.

At an inconspicuous attic window, a dark silhouette seemed to flash past — looking exactly like a certain someone’s favorite black cloak.

Mo Lan nibbled on the blackberry cookies Leah had given her while nimbly weaving through the jagged stone forest of Moonshadow Isle.

The cookies dissolved on her tongue with a bittersweet fragrance, reminding her of the blackberry honey Teacher Matina always loved adding to her tea.

After the last cookie was gone, Mo Lan dusted off her hands and channeled her Mana, converting it into the Power of Shadow. She let the shadows envelop her and slipped into the shadow world.

During the day, the stone forest was full of shadows she could inhabit. In the shadow world, she leapt lightly between connected shadows — sometimes springing from a boulder’s shadow into the darkness of a rock crevice, sometimes hitching a ride on the shadow of a passing bird to move swiftly forward.

For the Shadow Tribe, the shadow world was like water to a fish. As long as one’s Power of Shadow was abundant, it was far safer here than the peril-filled outside world.

In just a few hours, Mo Lan had already reached the edge of Moonshadow Isle.

A boundless, pink-hued abyss stretched out before her. Its color looked exactly like a sea of clouds dyed red by the morning glow, yet carried a certain unreal, illusory quality.

The surface of the pink abyss occasionally rippled like waves, as though it were breathing.

This was the omnipresent “Pink Abyss” of the dream realm.

All land in the dream realm consisted of scattered floating islands, drifting above the Pink Abyss.

The floating islands here in the Beginner Zone were relatively stable, but the deeper one ventured into the Exploration Zone, the more unpredictable they became — here today, gone tomorrow.

According to the forums, anything that fell into the Pink Abyss would vanish forever.

Even within the shadow world, Mo Lan could feel the chaotic and dangerous energy inside the Pink Abyss. She cautiously stepped back half a pace, then followed the shadow of the rocky mountain behind her up to the summit before leaving the shadow world.

At the edge of every floating island, light bridges appeared that could span the Pink Abyss. Standing atop the rocky summit with a commanding view, Mo Lan could not only make out the faint outlines of small floating islands in the distance but also locate where the light bridge was.

To cross the Pink Abyss, the light bridge was the only passage.

The light bridge itself cast no shadow, so using Shadow Walk to cross quickly was out of the question.

Mo Lan did the same as when she had first come to Moonshadow Isle — she used Transfiguration to become a clear-sky hawk and flew across.

After crossing four or five floating islands in this manner, she finally arrived before the light bridge leading to the Exploration Zone.

According to the information she had looked up on the forums earlier that day, across this light bridge should be a place called Suspended Inverse Isle.

This floating island had remained near the edge of the Exploration Zone for seven or eight years. Although its boundaries periodically expanded and contracted as if breathing, its overall position was remarkably stable.

Veteran adventurers on the forums even joked that in a few more years, it might end up being reclassified as part of the Beginner Zone.

While Suspended Inverse Isle was fairly stable, it was highly dangerous and offered poor exploration rewards, so most adventurers heading to the Exploration Zone would rather take a longer detour than pass through it.

Mo Lan chose to enter the Exploration Zone through here primarily because the island contained an uncapped solo dream dungeon called “Golden Mine Tunnel.”

This was the only uncapped solo dream dungeon whose location she could currently pinpoint with certainty.

Other similar dungeons were all deep within the Exploration Zone. Although dungeon information existed on the forums, finding their locations in the ever-shifting depths of the Exploration Zone was no easy feat.

However, while the Golden Mine Tunnel had no level cap, it did have a minimum entry level of 60.

Fortunately, the experience points she had accumulated were more than enough to raise her Shadow Hunter class level to the dungeon’s minimum entry requirement, with plenty to spare.

Mo Lan spread her wings and flew along the light bridge toward the floating island on the other side.

She didn’t fly fast at first — she needed to first observe what kind of gravity field currently affected the far side of Suspended Inverse Isle.

What made Suspended Inverse Isle dangerous was precisely its chaotic gravity fields.

When she saw that the rocks on the opposite island’s shore were suspended in midair at impossible angles, as though kneaded by invisible hands, and that waterfalls flowed upward with droplets crystallizing into glistening pearl-chains in the sunlight, Mo Lan let out a small sigh of relief.

“Looks like a zero-gravity zone.”

Compared to the hyper-gravity fields that made every step a struggle and the anti-gravity fields that sent everything plummeting toward the sky, a zero-gravity field that simply left all objects floating weightlessly was far easier to deal with.

But gravity fields didn’t stay constant — there was no telling when they might change.

Worried about the possibility of an anti-gravity field appearing at any moment, Mo Lan didn’t dare cancel her Transfiguration.

The ability to fly was her insurance against being flung into the endless sky if anti-gravity struck.

But she also couldn’t fly too fast or too high. If a hyper-gravity field suddenly appeared, she could crash to the ground and injure herself. Only low-altitude, slow flight was relatively safe.

Mo Lan flew while searching for an entrance to the underground tunnels.

When Suspended Inverse Isle had first drifted near the Beginner Zone, it had once been a popular destination for adventurers.

But over time, adventurers discovered that the island’s surface was almost completely barren, and the underground mineral veins were so unusual — found only in this single location with no local dream citizens researching or developing them — that while they were certainly rare, they lacked practical use. Even after mining the ore, there was no way to sell it and no one knew what to do with it. So the island gradually fell out of favor.