IWUAaDNW: Exploit 4.8, Interlude 5.7kn, Party 5.3, 5.8

Fiolla made her way to the edge of the dead woods that separated the fort from the academy. As she approached the woods, both she and Whys were caught in a breeze which carried an incredibly appetizing smell, but which for some reason caused both of them to recoil in disgust.

—IWUAaDNW: Exploit 4.8



Kamella gratefully accepted Tyr’s helping hand, and he pulled her up the final few steps of the brand new spiraling staircase to the other side of Central that her village was now home to.

—IWUAaDNW: Interlude 5.7kn



I continued drawing my revision of the plan. I made Jaya the thaumaturge come to the fort next, and made her hit a block of stone with a wrench, which then popped into a sphere in which the pure mana flowed.

“Ah, we’ve discussed this before,” Kamella noted. “You mean using a thaumaturgic device to absorb your mana and prevent it from being released in the wilds, correct?”

—IWUAaDNW: Party 5.3



I’d been curious about the forest that separated the Academy, the Library and the Fort ever since I’d noticed how I thought it smelled great, and everyone else seemed to think it smelled like garbage. It felt to me like it was one of those dungeon things, meant to guide me toward doing certain things. I knew dungeons were meant to absorb these things called “impurities”, and brown gunk that stunk to high heaven and ruined the clothes that touched it looked pretty impure to me. I had a feeling that absorbing those trees would net me a fair amount of impurities, and I was quite interested in that; with my mana situation resolved, impurities were my biggest stumbling block. For that reason, I’d asked Mariynn for crates full of dead wood in exchange for tamed pets and my cooperation rooting spies out of her command structure, but if we were going to open a random portal to somewhere, wouldn’t it make sense to kill two birds with one stone?

[...]

“…Right. Then… Fiolla, get some rest. This could take a while, and I want you Walking to the Academy the moment the other scroll is in this room. We still need to rescue the thaumaturge before we can even think of taking the target. This whole thing will be more than useless if all this mana causes the most closely observed forest in Central to spontaneously come back to life.”

—IWUAaDNW: Party 5.8