I Found a Door to the Elven Realm

Chapter 185: The Dead Human Came Back

From this distance, maybe three hundred meters away, the creature looked enormous.

It was bigger than the dragon he’d seen from far away during the first attack on the village. This was the same red dragon he saw eyeing and flying over the village a couple of times.

It had the same scales with a deep crimson that was visible even through the ash and soot covering its body. Its wings were folded against its sides and one of them looked wrong somehow, bent at an angle that wings probably shouldn’t bend at.

Is it hurt?

Its chest was moving. Slow, deep breaths that made the ash around its body drift in small clouds with every exhale. So definitely not dead. Just lying there next to his village’s most sacred tree and sleeping or resting or.. doing whatever hurt dragons do when they destroy an entire forest and then lie down in the middle of it.

"What the fu*k are you doing here..?" Eren whispered to nobody.

The dragon’s eye opened and made him flinch!

One second both eyes were closed and the next second one massive eye was open and looking directly at where Eren was hiding three hundred meters away behind a broken stone wall.

Eren’s body went cold from head to toes.

His Apex Predator Awareness skill and Predatory Reflex both fired at the same time and every single muscle in his body screamed at him to run. It was the same raw animal fear he’d felt when his Clone encountered the lake creature in its final moments but amplified ten times because this thing was looking at him and it was very much alive and awake.

The dragon opened its mouth and roared.

And he was pretty sure this massive dragon didn’t use sound for that action.

Sounds had limits and traveled through air and eventually faded while this was something else. The roar hit the area he was hiding and also hit Eren’s chest as a physical force. Then the ground vibrated and the broken walls around him cracked further and small stones rolled off their perches. His vision blurred for a second and his ears rang and somewhere deep in his bones he felt the vibration settle into a frequency that made his stomach twist.

It could kill him even from three hundred meters away but even with his new Level 2 Observe Skill telling him nothing and even with his brain screaming at him to run.. some part of Eren could tell that the sound wasn’t threatening.

But it wasn’t angry or even targeting Eren. Dragon probably sensed him but didn’t even care.

It was in pain and the aura or something else was releasing by the creature’s screams. The dragon was in pain and the roar was the sound of something massive and ancient and powerful hurting badly enough to cry out.

That wing is broken or cut apart, I don’t know. But the real question is what the hell is strong enough to break a dragon’s wing?

He stayed behind the wall for another full minute without moving. The dragon closed its eye and its breathing went back to the slow deep rhythm. Whatever made it look at him, it had decided he wasn’t worth the effort of getting up.

That should’ve been insulting but honestly it was the best thing that happened to Eren today.

He backed away slowly using every stone wall and rubble pile as cover. His heart was beating so hard that he could hear it in his ears and his hands were shaking but his legs moved steady because Kinetic Flux Runner didn’t care about fear. The skill just moved his body efficiently regardless of what his brain was doing.

When he was about five hundred meters from the village center he turned and started jogging south, then curved east toward the area he actually came here to see.

No way am I going near that Totem until I have full mana, a plan and probably getting to level 100 or 10000 at least..

..

The Clone’s territory was northeast of the village, about forty minutes on foot from where Eren was now. He’d never actually been there himself but the Clone’s memories had every tree, every rock and every path mapped from five weeks of daily survival runs.

It was strange following memories that belonged to a dead copy of himself. He knew where to turn before he saw the landmarks. He knew that the stream crossing ahead would be slippery on the left bank but firm on the right. He knew that the big flat rock near the water had a family of non-magical lizards living under it because the Clone had watched them every morning while doing his stretches.

The fire damage got less severe as he moved northeast. The forest wasn’t untouched but the trees here were only partially burned with their canopies gone and their trunks charred but still vertical. Some of the undergrowth was already regrowing in the spaces where light could now reach the forest floor through the missing canopy.

Evon forests grow back fast. Mana in the soil probably.

About thirty-five minutes into the walk the burned trees started mixing with living ones and then suddenly the fire line ended and he was back in real forest. Thick old-growth trees with green canopies and mossy bark and the sounds of animals and insects moving through the undergrowth.

The Clone’s tree was easy to find because nothing else in this forest looked like it.

It was a massive old-growth hardwood with a trunk about four meters wide at the base and branches thick enough to build houses on. But what made it different from every other giant tree in Evon was the leaves. They were every color. Not just green but reds and purples and golds and blues all mixed together on the same branches. From the ground the canopy looked like someone had dumped a paint factory onto a tree and his brain immediately filed it under "video game scenery" because nothing in real life on Earth looked like that.

The Clone had lived on a platform of thick branches about twenty meters up. The vine ropes he’d tied were still there, weathered but holding. A crude water collection system made from bark strips and leather pouches hung from a lower branch.

"So this is where you lived.." Eren muttered while touching the trunk with his palm. The bark was rough and warm from internal heat that had nothing to do with the sun. This tree was more alive than normal trees, pulsing with something subtle that his Mana stat of 71 could just barely detect.

The fire birds were screaming.

There were dozens of them in the outer branches, the same ugly black birds with red-tipped feathers that the Clone had lived with for over a month. They were about the size of large crows but thicker in the body with beaks that glowed faintly orange when they got agitated. Which based on the volume of their screaming was always.

The Clone had treated them as nature’s alarm clock. Annoying but useful since they screamed louder when predators got close. He’d yelled "good morning you ugly beautiful bastards" at them every single morning and they’d ignored him every single time.

But the Clone hadn’t spoken Beastin. He’d had the language in his system and used it with the wolves but these birds had seemed too simple and too stupid for real communication. They screamed and threw small fireballs at bugs and that was about it.

Eren heard them differently.

He actually stopped walking and tilted his head because for a second he thought he was imagining things. But no. His Advanced Language Learning at Evolution League 3 with Beastin integrated was catching fragments of actual structure in the screaming. Not every screech was a word but enough of them were that his brain started assembling meaning from the chaos.

[Back. The human is back. Not dead. How is it not dead.]

Eren blinked.

[Tell the eastern ones. Tell them now. It returned. Same shape same smell but different inside. Stronger. Much stronger.]

[I count his warmth. Warmth level is high. Very high. Higher than the wolves. Higher than the horned ones. Maybe one-two-zero warmth.]

Wait.

Wait wait wait.

They’re talking about me?

[Impossible. The water thing ate it. We all saw the blood stop. Dead is dead. This one looks same but is not same. Different walk. Different shoulders. Carries something bright in pocket.]

Eren’s hand instinctively went to the Dungeon Heart Fragment in his pocket. These things could sense the mana crystal from up there?

[One-two-zero warmth is not a tree-human warmth. That is hunter territory warmth. That is dangerous to approach. Do not approach. Watch only.]

He looked up at the branches full of screaming birds and for the first time in his life he understood why the Clone had thought they were just making noise. Because from outside, without the language, it sounded exactly like noise. Random angry bird sounds with no pattern.

But every single one of these ugly little bastards was talking.

[The rainbow mother bird will want to know. Send word to the rainbow one. The dead human is back and its warmth is one-two-zero.]

Warmth. They’re saying warmth but they mean level. Or power. Some kind of energy measurement their species uses.

And they think I’m at one hundred and twenty?

I’m Level 49 but maybe my insane boost to all of my stats confused them.

So either these birds were terrible at math or something about him read way higher than his actual level.

He thought about his stats. Every stat at 60 base. Charisma at 293 with passives. Thirty-three skills including eight at Evolution League 2. The Forgotten Monarch bloodline pumping adaptive energy through his cells. And 146 mana as his only way to travel with Door Master.

But.. he tried to act like he was inspecting the area and not look suspicious.

Eren averted his eyes from the birds and suddenly a light bulb showed up on the top of his head!

Wait!

Actually if they were measuring raw energy output instead of level, 120 might not even be that far off. And if he was as strong as a level 120 monster, then maybe he could travel far lands and look for that human kingdom Emily’s mother found before.

[It hears us. Look at its face. It is watching us back. Since when do tree-humans understand the voice? The old one never responded. This one is different.]

A single bird on the lowest branch went quiet and turned its entire body to face Eren. Its dark eyes were sharper than he’d expected. It wasn’t stupid at all.

And no matter how much Eren tried to act like he wasn’t understanding them, these crafty and weird creatures were a hundred percent sure he could hear their talk.

Even I can’t believe how I understand you assholes. How are you so sure..?

I agree with the clone’s feelings, you have ugly voices!

Eren smiled and spoke with the closest black bird in the distance.

"Hey, how are you..?" His Beastin made his mouth twirl and use half throttle and half whistle noises.

Great. Now I’m making these ugly noises.