Chapter 271 – Burning the Giant Eagle

Mo Lan hid inside the protective shell created by her Earth Wall spell, quietly listening to the commotion outside.

Although the earthen walls produced by the Earth Wall spell weren’t permanent — they would disappear once she stopped channeling — the defensive strength of walls made from earth elemental force was even greater than ordinary rock.

The giant eagle’s impacts couldn’t do any real damage to the earthen walls.

With Mo Lan’s level of mana, sustaining the spell until the giant eagle burned to death was no problem at all.

She maintained the Earth Wall spell just like that, listening as each successive impact grew weaker than the last.

Only when everything outside had gone completely silent did Mo Lan carefully dismiss one section of the wall and peer out.

The giant eagle lay on a patch of grass not far away, its entire body charred black, with barely a breath left in it.

Death hex!

Death hex!

Death hex!

…

Soon it lost all signs of life entirely.

The only thing of any value on a giant eagle was its feathers, and burned to a crisp like this, they were naturally useless.

Mo Lan used incinerate directly, quickly reducing the carcass to nothing to avoid attracting other wild beasts.

After all, Lone Peak Forest wasn’t what she had previously assumed — devoid of large wild beasts.

It was simply that they all had wings and lived atop the stone peaks. The wind generated by her Wind Sensing spell simply hadn’t reached high enough to detect them.

Giant eagles weren’t entirely solitary creatures, either.

If she’d encountered one, there were surely many more she hadn’t encountered.

At this moment, she could only feel grateful that she hadn’t ridden her broomstick straight into Lone Peak Forest. Otherwise, she really would have had to attune grass seeds all over again and cultivate new Broomstick Grass.

Mo Lan didn’t dare recklessly climb toward the peak tops anymore.

But she still needed to reach a summit to survey the lay of this forest of peaks.

After thinking it over, she circled back to the north face of the stone peak and set up her vine ladder again.

At the very least, the few stone peaks she’d already passed through showed no signs of nesting giant eagles.

Climbing from the north side meant the giant eagles deeper in the forest wouldn’t be able to spot her before she reached the top.

The moment she reached the summit, she quickly cast a dark-element invisibility spell on herself.

This way, as long as she stayed still, the giant eagles wouldn’t be able to see her.

“Good heavens! It’s this vast?”

Standing atop the stone peak and gazing southward, Mo Lan couldn’t see the end of the forest of peaks.

Dark shapes circled in the distant sky — clearly, quite a number of giant eagles lived here.

With a forest this enormous, how long would it take her to explore it all on foot?

“I can’t keep wandering aimlessly deeper like this!” Mo Lan carefully climbed down from the stone peak and made her way back toward the Hedge Wall.

This time, instead of pushing blindly deeper into Lone Peak Forest, she changed course and walked along the boundary between the Hedge Wall and the forest.

The Inner Region was far larger than she had imagined.

Aimless exploration was simply too inefficient.

From that single sweeping glance at the summit, Mo Lan understood that there was no way she could explore the entire Inner Region on foot within a single year.

She couldn’t even fully explore Lone Peak Forest alone.

So she had to make choices.

The deeper into Lone Peak Forest one went, the more giant eagles there were.

Giant eagles had the advantage of the sky and wide-open sightlines. If she disturbed too many of them, it would be very disadvantageous for her.

There was no need to go head-to-head with these giant eagles right now.

Lone Peak Forest had thin soil, circling giant eagles, danger, and was unsuitable for habitation. Only the mineral ores within its rock layers held any real value. But searching for ores wasn’t her top priority at the moment.

Her current goal was to explore as wide an area of the Inner Region as possible. Even if she couldn’t find Wild Boar Valley, she needed to identify one or even several locations suitable for habitation.

Once the wilderness survival course was over, she would need to begin establishing her fourth-year residence.

If she needed ores in the future, she could always come back to Lone Peak Forest to prospect. There was no need to rush deeper now.

The transitions between different terrain types were clearly distinct.

Mo Lan planned to start from where Lone Peak Forest met the Hedge Wall and walk through the transitional zones of every terrain type.

On a map, this would mean tracing the outer perimeter of each terrain type in a loop, figuring out exactly what kinds of terrain existed and roughly how they were distributed.

Then she would pick the most habitable terrain and explore it in depth to find a place to establish her residence.

This way, even though she couldn’t map out the Inner Region in perfect detail, she would at least gain a general understanding of the terrain and landscape.

Where various magical plants, mineral ores, or wild beasts were concentrated could be roughly inferred from the terrain.

This was the most efficient and most prudent way to explore the Inner Region.

After a full day of exploration, this approach proved itself.

Mo Lan encountered essentially no thorny problems and managed to survey the major terrain types bordering the Hedge Wall within the Inner Region.

Entering through the Hedge Wall anywhere from the Breadfruit Grove to the Dormitory area led into Lone Peak Forest.

Entering through the Hedge Wall from the Planting District to the Magic Training Grounds area led into a grassland.

It was called the Greengrass Plains on the map.

The Greengrass Plains offered relatively open sightlines with no flying beasts spotted nearby, so Mo Lan seized the good weather and risked taking to the air on her broomstick for a look deeper into the grassland.

The terrain rose higher the further in she went, and Mo Lan thought she could even make out a cedar forest in the distance.

Entering through the Hedge Wall near the magic laboratory at the northwest corner of the Academy Core Area and north of Crescent Moon Lake led into a wetland swamp called the Green Marsh.

Entering through the Hedge Wall east of Crescent Moon Lake was even worse — it was a desert called the Yellow Sands.

The southern edge of the desert bordered directly on Lone Peak Forest.

In other words, the area near the Academy Core Area was nothing but stone forests, deserts, swamps, and grasslands.

Not only did the different regions vary in terrain — even their climates differed.

After circling the entire Academy Core Area along the Hedge Wall, Mo Lan’s conclusion was clear: there wasn’t a single truly habitable place in the part of the Inner Region closest to the core area.

At minimum, a place needed mountains, water, and forests to be considered truly habitable!

“Seriously, Headmistress? I distinctly remember that when I looked from Academy Mountain, most of the Inner Region was covered in mountain forests! How did it end up like this?”

This was completely different from what Mo Lan had expected.

“The Hedge Wall doesn’t just serve as a barrier — it also distorts one’s line of sight,” came Lady Amisha’s voice.

Mo Lan had to accept it. Everything she’d seen from Academy Mountain before had been an illusion.

During the wilderness survival course, they had clearly entered mountain forests, which meant the Inner Region definitely had them.

Now it seemed they were all on the far side, well away from the core area.

No wonder the senior students seemed to vanish once they entered their fourth year, rarely ever seen again in the Academy Core Area.

No wonder so many seniors spent an entire year preparing and still couldn’t establish a proper residence in the outer regions.

It turned out that simply reaching the resource-rich, temperate, habitable mountain forests was no easy feat in itself.

The forests were all in more distant places.

Lone Peak Forest, Greengrass Plains, Green Marsh, and the Yellow Sands — these were all obstacles standing between them and the habitable mountain forests they sought.

This was truly unwelcome news.