Molting the Mortal Coil

Chapter 1020: Shapely

They let the Artifact Spirit choose his own name, but with their input so that they wouldnt be embarrassed again. After some deliberation he chose the name Xiang Fei Long, the Fragrant Fat Dragon, for himself. As for the Flying Ship itself, it was now to be called the Shifting Jade Mountain. It was a simple name, but the dragon insisted that he have his own mountain. The Flying Ship could also take the form of buildings, or a small mountain, so it wasnt actually that far off. At this time the Mountain was in the shape of a narrow bullet. Wings would give it more lift which could lead to more speed, but due to the strange nature of the world they could end up being more unpredictable.

Since they didnt really trust the Artifact Spirit to handle such delicate control over the Flying Ship. In its many decades of existence it had become extremely adept at controlling the ship like its own body to move and reflect its every action. The problem was that theyd forced it to separate from that thought process so now it had to learn everything all over again from scratch. The journey to the Xuanyuan Empire was as long as Guan Zhenyan was lazy. Neither of these two could be trusted to carefully monitor and react quickly to adjust the Ship to account for the variations in the air. Instead, they just put the ship into the most aerodynamic bullet shape inspired by Sages memories and then adjusted for the current situation. The shape of a bullet was optimized for its gyro-stabilized spinning flight, so after some tests it started to look more like the fuselage of a jet aircraft. It didnt have much in the way of wings, for the aforementioned reasons, but it didnt have to be perfectly symmetrical from every angle. Xiang Fei Long then took it upon himself to shape the Flying Ship more like a large crystalline spike. The research teams oversaw the changes and they allowed him to add as many cosmetic changes as he liked as long as it didnt reduce the straight line performance.

The Shifting Jade Mountain needed to travel in a straight line for a long time at a high speed, and without much attention. The simple shape solved these problems. The high speed and built in defenses were already enough to make it past nearly anything they could run into on the way. Even if they ran into a tier 7 Demonic Beast along the way they should hopefully be able to outrun it unless they flew right into a prepared trap, which would be quite difficult to do as nobody knew the route they were going to take.

Thankfully, things went to plan and the new helmsman, Xiang Fei Long, was at least capable enough to bring them to the Xuanyuan Empire while varying the route along the way. They traveled in the same general direction without just moving along a perfectly straight line that would let others prepare an ambush for them. After safely passing through one of the Tianxia Empires Kingdoms, they had avoided most of the danger for the trip. Each of the Empires seemed to be arranged around an extremely valuable resource. Sage had no idea what that was, but he was sure there was a good reason for each of them to be where they were. Each of the Empires were composed of a number of Kingdoms, and those Kingdoms had Provinces, Counties, Cities, and Villages. Sage had confirmed the increasingly important resources that each size of settlement produced up to the Provincial size, so he assumed the Kingdoms and Empires followed the same pattern.

Each of the Kingdoms were quite huge, spanning approximately 100,000 miles from one border to another. Yet, the ten or so Provinces in those kingdoms only spread to 10,000 miles. That meant the Provinces only covered about ten percent of the total area of a Kingdom with plenty of empty wilderness in between. The same was true both for the smaller sizes of settlements as well as the larger. An Empire was around a million miles from one side to the other, and upon learning this size for a fact, Sage had been astounded. Hed theorized their size, but the only other empire hed been to was the Shou Empire and hed been captured near their borders. The couple hundred thousand miles that he traveled had seemed extreme, but after moving around the Tianxia Empire since then hed realized that he was just lucky, or unlucky, in that the Shou Empire and Tianxia Empire were actually near the borders of their territory and just so happened to be close to each other. The two Empires didnt sit at the center of their territories, which also lent more credence to his theory that they were centered on valuable resources.

Whatever the case, it meant that traveling to the Xuanyuan Empire meant crossing more than 600,000 miles across the untamed wilderness that was technically the territory of the Tianxia Empire. This untamed wilderness was basically devoid of human life, and instead crawling with Demonic Beasts, Demonic Plants, and a multitude of Natural Treasures. These massive wildernesses were necessary to provide a place to form those treasures that took thousands of years to mature. The only humans that could be found out here were those hunting for treasures. Expeditions of powerful people traveled out into these immense wild lands to hunt for fortune. Just like the Kingdoms and Provinces had their own wildlands, these lands belonging to just the Empire were many times larger, but that also meant they were many times more dangerous. They were composed of Nascent Souls almost entirely, with only the most daring willing to test their luck, or the most overconfident bringing along their disciples or descendants.

The sheer size of this world continued to astound Sage as soon as the true size of each Empire was confirmed. Not only was the idea of a million mile Empire astounding, there were many Empires, in fact he didnt even know how many there were in this world. The Tianxia Empire only knew the neighbors of its neighbors at most. Just as hed learned in the Depths, none of them shared larger maps as they aimed to keep the different Empires from gathering too much information about others who might end up being their nearby rivals. It was likely that the leaders of the Empires knew much more, but even the Empires citizens were kept in the dark.

Along the way, they were scared more than a few times as they felt a warning aura from what could only be Saint level Demonic Beasts off in the distance. These tier seven monsters didnt bother to do anything to them, merely giving a warning to keep them off their territory. The territory that each of these beasts claimed was only a few thousand miles wide, which wasnt even a full Province, so it wasnt much trouble for them to go around. They were mainly just surprised they encountered more than one of these powerful Demonic Beasts. Or at least, Sage, Xiang Fei Long, and those watching from the Inner World were. Guan Zhenyan was actually surprised they ran into so few of them, praising Xiang Fei Longs choice of a lucky route. He wasnt worried about being attacked, but happy they had avoided taking too many detours along the way.

They entered the territory of the Xuanyuan Empire, but they were still quite far from the actual settlements. From there they were still a few weeks away from their destination. Guan Zhenyan led them to a certain city in a certain Kingdom, one where he assured them he still had an ally that could shelter them. Upon arrival they saw a battle going on just outside the city wall, and Sage was shocked by the sight of two huge worms smashing against each other.

Worms? What sort of place is this?