NOVEL NEXT Chapter 441: Everfrost (3)
My father didn't pay any attention to the frozen jungle, or to the massive herd of creatures we were travelling with. I spent a few more moments observing our surroundings, before I realized that the creature we were riding kept perfect pace with the glowing orb in front of us.
I thought about it for a few moments before I decided to ask a few more questions. One of the advantages of being a kid was that I could ask weird questions and nobody would think it was off.
"Does the monster we're riding ever get tired?" I asked. I tried to phrase it in as childish of a way as possible, so that my question wouldn't seem too unusual.
My father laughed.
"Old Momo here is capable of staying in motion for almost a year at a time," said my father, as he fondly patted a patch of nearby fur. "That's in his natural state, too. The chieftain of our clan has taken a taming spark every single time he could, so he can boost the abilities of any tamed beast up to a crazy level. It's part of why our towns are safer than a lot of other towns - our village-beasts can actually fend off weaker threats on their own."
"Do other villages also live like this?" I asked. This was what I really wanted to know - was our strange, mobile series of towns standard for this world?"
My father thought for a moment.
"Well, it depends. Every single settlement of people needs an ember, or the settlement will freeze." My father pointed at the giant, glowing ball of light that we were chasing as he said the word 'ember.' "Whether a village is mobile or whether it's stationary mostly depends on the ember. Some embers are rooted in place, and those villages usually don't move around very much. Other embers, like the one our village chases, are mobile, so we have to move to stay with it. I've heard that far to the north, there are even towns with millions of people, all clustered around several massive embers that don't move at all. I don't know if that's true or not." My father shrugged. "Either way, at least in this area most embers are mobile, and the few stationary embers are quite small."
I nodded to myself. I had a much better idea what this world looked like now. 'Sparks' were probably something like an ability from the Market's system - a way of defining what someone was good at and how their ability would evolve. Embers were apparently the core of most settlements in this world. I had seen my father use fire magic earlier, so I had no clue why settlements were reliant on embers - I would have thought that at least a few smaller settlements would instead appear where powerful fire mages banished the cold. That was probably too advanced of a question for a two year old to ask, though, so I decided to wait until I was older to figure that detail out. At the very least, I had a rough idea how this world worked, though. That was good enough for now.
The two of us started to walk through the town at a leisurely pace - or at least, we tried to. The area right around our house had been cleared of snow, but after just a few streets, we ran into a mound of snow that I had no hope of crossing, given my current size.
"Do you want a ride?" asked my father, as he spread his arms out. It almost looked like he was waiting for me to hop into his arms. I hesitated for a moment, before I decided that I might as well. So far, I had a good first impression of my father in this life, and I didn't mind a nice hug.
I hopped into my father's arms, and he gently lifted me into a princess carry, before he started wading through the snow. As he walked, I distinctly heard him grumble "this area's cleaner really didn't do his job correctly again" as he sank into a particularly deep pile of snow.
My father didn't seem that frustrated, though. He simply plowed through a few streets of snow, until we got to another fairly clear area.
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"So fast!" I said, hoping that I could dig a little more information out of him. This time, I was curious to see if he could give me a bit more context for whether his speed was unusual or normal for this world.
My father grinned at me, and it looked as if he were incredibly proud of himself. "I might not be focused on speed, but I do have four sparks. My first two sparks are focused on fire magic, but my third and fourth were focused on enhancing my physical body. My speed is pretty good, isn't it?" My father winked at me. "If you choose a physically oriented spark for your first two sparks, you'll also be zooming around in no time. You might even surpass me with just one spark, if your base stats are high enough."
I mentally filed away my father's words. I could also assume, based on my father's words, that progression in this world's System was probably based around absorbing sparks and then training them somehow. He sounded pretty proud of himself when he said that he had four sparks - so four was probably at least above average.
As we zoomed through the village, I saw several other people also moving through the snowy streets. Most of them were a little bit slower than my father - but they were all still ridiculously fast. I would have been shocked if the average member of this town had less than Grade 9 or 10 agility. There were also several villagers that were much faster than my father. They whizzed by at speeds I could barely process. To my surprise, most of them seemed to be heading in the same direction as us.
Several of the townsfolk also stopped to wave at my father and I as we speedwalked past them. It seemed that my father had good standing in this community - most people were friendly towards him. I saw a few other people give me sympathetic looks as we passed by them, which made me wonder if they were lamenting my family situation. It seemed like we lived in a reasonably close-knit community - probably due to the size of our community. I didn't think there were more than five thousand people riding on the back of our town's village-beast. I had no clue how many people lived on the other village-beasts travelling with us, but we still probably had a rather low population.
Soon, we arrived at a much larger, more ornate building. It was distinctly different from the other buildings around us - it was far more decorated and larger than the usual buildings I had seen in our surroundings. We had arrived at the temple.
Several other people joined us as my father carried me inside of the building.
The inside of the building was much warmer than the outside - it felt as if I had stepped out of a fridge and into a slightly toasty sauna. The other thing that got my attention was a giant statue located right in the center of the temple. It was a statue made of polished, gleaming silver. It depicted a man holding a giant orb of fire. I squinted at the statue, and realized a moment later that the man wasn't holding an orb of fire. It looked more like he was conjuring one into existence. I could even see surprisingly detailed swirls of 'essence' made out of gold, making it look like the man was summoning all of the nearby essence in the world to conjure an ember.
"Is that a god?" I asked my father, as I glanced at the statue.
My father laughed.
"You could call the first ember-keeper a god, I suppose. Legend has it that long ago, this world was a desolate wasteland of cold, jungle, and monsters. The first ember-keeper created an ember from essence, and brought with him the first wave of refugees. Those people settled in this plane, and they're also the distant ancestors of most people in this world. Though, we do get the occasional rare visitor from one of the other planes," said my father.
I blinked in surprise. Originally, I had thought that the existence of other dimensions would be a closely kept secret among the higher ups of this dimension. After all, it had been that way in every previous world we had landed on - knowledge of other dimensions was either long-lost, or only known to a select few. However, my father had quite casually mentioned visitors from other planes just now. I assumed that 'planes' were just the local word for dimensions… so it seemed like people here were aware of the fact that they were part of a dimensional cluster? That was good to know.
Unfortunately, I didn't get to keep quizzing my father about the common sense of this world, because after a few moments of waiting, an old man with a fluffy white beard and wrinkled hair rushed out of a side room in the temple. He took a look at the crowd, before he nodded at us. The priest of the temple had arrived.