"I would not suggest doing that again," István said, staring out at the devastation.

"I agree with Elder Scholar," Qīwù said.

Well, I was still blinking away the afterimages of the… detonation?

Not that I was sure that was the correct way to refer to it. It made little noise relative to the sheer level of destruction it wrought. Sounding not all that different from one of István's pistol shots, it'd decimated the grassland, scouring it free of grass, soil, enemies (snakes or otherwise) and water in an irregular manner.

The center was completely empty, in a neat semicircle the size of a house, starting roughly where the attack had landed, where it carved away everything down just as deep. Beyond that, it quickly became shallower and more difficult to discern exactly what had transpired. As near as I could figure, portions of the 'spiral arms' of the Nebula I'd made had broken off and tumbled their way through the landscape, obliterating matter as they went.

The concept gave me pause, as I'd mostly seen my Nebula as a more 'physical' object, that imparted damage or created wounds in the same matter as a rock of equivalent mass and shape given the same circumstances.

The more I thought about it though, the less sense it made. I'd done many things with my power that didn't seem to match that misconception.

It's your will, Celistar said in my head, having understood the situation via our shared link. You're approaching a breakthrough.

She'd mentioned these before - their cultivation style had the concept of a "watershed" where one started gaining some features of a higher realm of cultivation prior to actually reaching it. Of course, given Celistar's frequent Soul Sea meeting rants about how little sense a lot of my cultivation made to her, it was quite possible that this meant nothing as well.

Or it could be a big deal.

Back in reality (and outside my head) the stream that had been flowing through the meadow was now cascading down the rim of the hemicrater I'd created, and I could see that while some was being absorbed into the ground, there was enough accumulating that it would eventually refill the hole and continue on it's way.

We'd have no such luck and would have to traverse our way around it. Luckily, while it was big on the scale of damage, it was relatively small on a geological scale.

There was a lonely tree off in the distance, where we could get some shade from the sun. As someone with the kind of red-headed complexion I had, the sun was kind of my nemesis. Made me kind of worried I was already halfway to being a crispy critter.

Then I realized that we'd spent a fairly extended time out in the sun before, and since coming to this world, and it hadn't been an issue. I looked at my assistant.

"Qīwù, do cultivators get sunburnt?" I asked.

She actually scoffed before catching herself and looking somewhat guiltily at me. "No, of course not, that's something for mundane people, Venerable." I kept looking at her, and eventually something gave. "I mean, how can you not know this? At your level…"

"For the last damn time, Little Qīwù, I'm younger than you. You said so yourself, remember? I've been a cultivator for a lot less time than you think." I gestured toward the scar I'd made in the landscape. "Case in point. I have a lot of power, but not always the best control over it. I'm absolutely sure there are things I could learn from you, if you weren't so busy putting your head up your ass and not listening to what I have to say."

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I wasn't sure how Steeve translated that, but Qīwù was stunned speechless while a mountain of amusement tumbled from a certain Elder.

After a few moments, Qīwù seemed to snap back into it. "As the profound wisdom from Elder Gran states, 'The more one knows, the more one knows they do not know everything.'"

While I'm pretty sure Gran never would have put it in those exact words, who knew how they reached the ears of our compatriots in the Circle after being garbled by a certain crafty fox. For all I knew, she was changing everything Gran said into the language of the gods, or something.

The little fox, as if she'd heard me thinking about her, poofed into existence above my crossed arms, falling down ever so slowly in a zigzag motion like she was a bird feather or a leaf. It definitely lightened my slightly sour mood.

Once we bypassed the hole I had not-so-intentionally carved into the landscape, I realized one tree in the distance was not like the others. It didn't belong with the rest, instead being out on the prairie, and much larger than it first appeared, which helped explain the illusion, as the crown was about level with the ones behind it.

In the shaded area beneath the massive canopy, the grass was all matted down, likely the resting place of some sort of herbivore. Or at least I hoped it was that and not more odd snake-lizard hybrids or something even more unsettling.

We all plopped down, especially Qīwù, who seemed quite done with the whole adventure, flopping on her back and just a bundle of nerves, huffing breaths in like she was angry at air.

"Didn't you want to come along?" I asked, somewhat confused with the attitude she'd been displaying during the trip, growing more and more agitated and short-tempered as time went on.

"Well yes, but this was not what I expected."

"This is more or less exactly what I expected," I retorted, before adding: "Well, there're fewer things for Elder Mountain to punch than I was assuming there would be." Viktor nodded sagely at the statement, as though he considered my words particularly enlightened thinking.

"Why," I said as the silence to my words lengthened, "What did you expect?"

She stared at her entwined fingers, clearly putting thought into it. "You know, I'm not sure."

"That's honest," I replied, "I can respect that."

István grinned at her. "Would it really be an adventure if you knew what to expect ahead of time?"

"I suppose not."

There was the thud of a pack hitting the ground - István had somehow produced it out of nowhere during the brief moment I'd been looking back at my attendant. He hadn't pulled his usual trick totally unobserved though: I had a sizable net of my enhanced senses cast around the tree, not trusting the local biome to stay at arm's length.

Seemed only fair considering that half the species we'd encountered seemed to think that our eyes were beautiful and wanted to taste them without asking permission first.

Because of this, I could detect the brief but intense burst of energy generated when the supplies had burst into being. I hadn't seen it directly, though, so I was still in the dark about how he'd actually accomplished the feat. Something for another day, to be sure.

Somehow, it was only after Elder Scholar started pulling out rations from his 'bag of holding' that I realized I hadn't even considered how we were getting fed. I hadn't even felt hungry. Some adult I was, I'd probably starve to death if left to my own devices.

Everyone else seemed to know that he was carrying supplies, which made me wonder just how I'd missed out on it. Surely someone had discussed this in my presence at some point.

Right?

The dishes didn't differ all that much from the fare I'd grown used to eating, which made me wonder how they ever stayed intact whilst being jostled around inside a big old bag with a simple drawstring on the top. It was - in the truest sense of the word - a 'bag' of food. Probably finite and not magical, but considering the source was István, I wasn't about to place any bets.

The less I thought about it, the better, in my opinion. Food is food, and it tastes just as good regardless of whether I planned to eat it or even if I had any knowledge of its existence.

Ignorance is bliss, as they say.

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