Elemental Cats

Seeing Lucy's obsessed gaze, Nil also got curious and stood next to Lucy to read the paper as well. Nil didn't get as enraptured as Lucy did, but he also seemed to look forward to going to the place described on the paper in front of them.

When they finally snapped out of the daze they were in, they realized that despite having read through all the papers and documents in their room several times, they had never seen this one about the Treblor Forest. Nil realized practically instantly when he saw Toz and Mindle still standing in the doorway looking at them, without the slightest intention of finding out what the paper was about. Added to how Toz was the last one out of the room since he needed to lock the door, it was pretty obvious that he and Mindle had found the paper when going through their stack of documents and then hid it to surprise them after dinner.

Nil found it a little silly but cute that Toz and Mindle wanted to surprise them when they would have gotten just as happy even if they just showed the paper when they found it.

Lucy's brain was still filled with vivid imaginations of forests and lightning, and it took a little bit longer for him to realize it was Toz who had turned all the other papers upside down and left the one with Treblor Forest right side up, on the bed.

It didn't take much deliberation and discussion for the group to settle for Treblor Forest.

Most of the other things they had found that seemed interesting were only interesting in theory. Old ruins, mysterious disappearances and reappearances, ghost hauntings, sightings of previously thought extinct wild beasts. The ruins would have been exciting and possibly dangerous if not for them already having been scoured by uncountable explorers for several years. Going for one of them would be like going for a relaxing walk with an interesting view. There might even be food stalls selling overpriced food there with how safe and boring it would be.

Ghosts were already an established no, at least for everyone except Mindle. She seemed curious about another kind of being without a material form.

Mysteriously vanishing also seemed pretty interesting, but none of the witnesses that returned remembered what had happened to them, and if that was the case, there would be no need for the group to intentionally go there just to get memory loss.

The only thing that came close to Treblor Forest was the Deep Sea. It was a unique place in the Void, and they wanted to visit it at least once, but if they wanted to actually explore it, they would need to get a bit stronger if they didn't want to disappear. Risks and thrills are fun, but dying? Probably not as fun.

Treblor Forest, on the other hand, was filled with potential danger that, if handled correctly, would only force Toz and the others to exert themselves, and keep them on their toes. They would only die if they made a few critical mistakes in a row.

Although that was only true for the first part of the forest, the part they would be entering from.

One of the reasons that Treblor Forest was so special was that it wasn't limited to a single plane. It stretched between two different ones. Two planes of different levels at that. Considering that most planes were so far apart that one needed portals to travel between them, even if one could travel in the Void safely, it was an extremely rare occurrence.

Since the planes were of different levels there wasn't even the alternative that it had been only a single large one that had split apart.

It was a mystery how it had happened, if the forest had spread from one plane to another, or maybe if a special existence in the void had connected the two planes with the forest, since the Treblor Forest was considerably ancient. And with the difficulty most humans had in exploring and navigating through the forest consistently, it was a tough challenge to find out the secrets of the forest, a challenge that many had taken on but where few had succeded.

Since there was no way to tell where the forest began, which of the three parts was its beginning or end, it was just assumed that it originated from the forest and, thanks to the two neighboring planes, grew as it had done. And thus that the third part, the part of the forest that bridged the two planes in the Void, was the original forest, and that the other two parts located on the two planes, were like a non-void extension of the forest.

The third part of the forest was located on an earth attribute plane of the seventh level, and the first part was located at a fifth level plane of lightning. The fifth level plane was where Toz and the cats would be headed to begin the next stage of their journey. It was a medium level plane, so beasts up to the sixth level, while not everywhere, could be found pretty often, just like how there had been a bunch of third level beasts on First Ignition, a first level plane.

But the group's strongest fighting forces were Toz and Lucy, both merely at the third level. Although Toz had more mana and better control of it than he noticed during their encounters with other humans and other third level mages had, and Lucy used a pretty rare element in a way not many were prepared to deal with, the group wasn't ready to tackle the Treblor Forest just yet.

While focusing on their training, they would travel from one part of the plane to another, more specifically, the place where the entrance to the forest was located. And during their travels, they would mostly focus on training to try and reach at least the fourth level.

And then, after reaching, at minimum, the fourth level, they would begin their journey through the Treblor Forest.