He spent the next three days practicing.
Low-altitude runs through the homestead — weaving between trees, skimming the canals, circling the house. Then higher, above the canopy, where the wind picked up and he had to tune his stabilisation. Then into the forest — threading between massive trunks at speed, ducking under branches, testing his reaction time against the cluttered terrain. Then back above the canopy at full speed, pushing his acceleration until the forest below was a green smear and the wind against his pressurised air bubble roared.
By the end of day three, flight was as natural as walking. Easier, actually. Walking required paying attention to terrain. Flight just required knowing where he wanted to be.
On the morning of day four, he stood on the roof of his house and looked up.
The sky was clear. Not a cloud in sight — just deep, vivid blue stretching to every horizon. Perfect visibility. If he was going to survey the landscape, this was the day.
He knew the numbers from school. Commercial aircraft cruised at roughly ten kilometres. At that altitude, the curvature of the earth was barely visible but the horizon extended hundreds of kilometres in every direction. If there was anything out there — mountains, rivers, coastline, cities — he'd see it from ten kilometres up.
He also knew that at ten kilometres, the air was thin enough to kill an unprotected human in minutes. No oxygen. Temperatures well below freezing. Atmospheric pressure a fraction of sea level.
He formed a pressurised air bubble around himself — a sphere of compressed, warm, oxygen-rich air, maintained by a steady feed of mana. It wrapped around him like an invisible suit, insulating him from the environment outside.
Would I even need this? His body ran on mana more than oxygen at this point. He hadn't tested the limits of that, and ten kilometres up wasn't the place to start.
Better safe than stupid.
He pushed off.
The ascent was smooth. The homestead shrank beneath him — his house becoming a grey square, the pond a dark oval, the canals thin silver lines branching through green.
At five hundred metres, he paused and looked down.
His homestead was a perfect circle. He'd known that intellectually — the chain reaction had radiated outward in a uniform sphere of destruction, so the dead zone's footprint was naturally circular. But seeing it from above made it real. A clean disc of green and grey, bordered by the dark line of the perimeter wall, set into an ocean of forest that stretched to every edge of his vision.
The improvement hit him in the chest. When he'd first woken up, this had been a wasteland. Kilometres of grey ash and skeletal trees. Now — from up here he could see it all at once — it was alive. The canal network spread across the interior like veins, glinting with reflected sky. The four groves were visible as distinct zones of green — darker in the north where the nut trees' heavy canopies clustered, brighter in the east where the citrus groves caught the sun, varied in the west with the spreading stone fruit trees, and dappled in the south where hardwood canopy shaded the berry patches below. The Japanese garden was a jewel of colour near the centre, the pond a dark mirror, the cherry blossom a dot of pink.
The wall circled it all — a continuous band of grey stone, solid and unbroken, holding back the forest's advance.
I built that. All of it.
Something warm settled in his chest that had nothing to do with mana. Pride. Real, earned, uncomplicated pride.
He also realised, for the first time, just how large the homestead was. From ground level, the scale was hard to appreciate — you walked through it, and it felt like a big ranch. From five hundred metres, it looked like a small city's footprint. The chain reaction had cleared an enormous area, and he'd filled it with an enormous amount of work.
He resumed his ascent.
One kilometre. The homestead was a bright circle in a dark sea. The forest spread in every direction — uniform, dense, unbroken. No gaps. No clearings. No roads.
Two kilometres. Same. Forest. Forest. More forest. The canopy was a textured carpet of green stretching to every horizon. He turned slowly, scanning three hundred and sixty degrees.
Nothing. Just trees.
Three kilometres. The air outside his bubble was noticeably cold. The forest continued in every direction without variation. But to the east — faint, hazy, right at the edge of visibility — a line of something darker rose above the canopy's horizon. Mountains. A range of peaks, jagged and grey-blue with distance, running roughly north to south.
Mountains. East. That's the first landmark I've seen that isn't trees.
He kept climbing.
Five kilometres. The mountains to the east were clearer now — a substantial range, snow-capped at the highest points, extending well beyond his northern and southern sightlines. The forest filled everything between his position and the mountains. And in every other direction — west, north, south — the forest continued. Unbroken. Vast. A continent of trees.
Seven kilometres. The sky above was darkening toward indigo. The sun was brighter up here, the light harsh and unfiltered. The curvature of the world was almost imperceptible but technically there — a subtle bowing of the horizon at the extreme edges of his vision.
The forest had not ended. In any direction.
Eight kilometres. Nine.
The warm feeling in his chest was gone. Something colder was replacing it.
Ten kilometres.
Yuki hung in the thin, freezing dark at the edge of the world's atmosphere and looked down.
Forest.
In every direction. To every horizon. A blanket of green so vast it looked less like a landscape and more like a biome — a single, continuous organism covering everything in sight. The mountain range to the east was the only interruption. A long, jagged scar of stone cutting through the green, running north to south for what had to be hundreds of kilometres.
Everything else was trees.
No cities. No roads. No cleared farmland. No smoke. No light. No sign of human habitation in any direction to the limits of his vision — which, from this altitude, extended thousands of kilometres.
He turned slowly. A full circle. Taking in every degree of the panorama.
Forest. Mountains. Forest. Forest. Forest.
His homestead was invisible from up here — a speck within a speck, a tiny circle of green lost in an ocean of identical green. If he hadn't known exactly where it was, he never would have found it.
This forest is the size of a country.
Maybe bigger. The Amazon. The Congo. The Siberian taiga. Forests measured in millions of square kilometres. He was looking at something on that scale — a primordial wilderness so large that his homestead, his walled domain that felt so vast from the ground, was nothing. A grain of sand on a beach.
No one is coming here.
The thought landed like a stone dropping into deep water. Cold. Final. Absolute.
No travellers were going to wander past his walls. No scouts were going to stumble across his dead zone. No merchants, no adventurers, no soldiers, no farmers. This forest was impenetrable — he'd spent months fighting through it, and he had magic that let him level mountains. An ordinary person on foot wouldn't make it a kilometre before the terrain or the monsters killed them.
His homestead was completely, utterly isolated. A walled garden in the middle of nowhere, invisible from above, unreachable from below. If he wanted to find people — if he wanted to find civilization — he was going to have to go to them. Nobody was coming to him.
If I don't go searching, I will never find anyone. And no one will ever find me.
He screamed.
Not a word. Not a name. Just a raw, full-throated scream that ripped out of him and filled the pressurised bubble and went nowhere. Ten kilometres above a world that didn't know he existed, a seventeen-year-old kid screamed at the top of his lungs because he had been alone for months and the forest was endless and he missed his mom and he missed his bed and he missed people and there was no one to hear him so he screamed until his throat burned and his voice cracked and the sound died into a ragged gasp.
He hung there, breathing hard, eyes stinging.
Then he wiped his face with the back of his hand and let out a long, shaky exhale.
Okay. Got that out. Now think.
He hung in the silence for a long time. The wind outside his bubble howled, but inside it was still. His breath fogged slightly in the cold air bleeding through the edges of his barrier.
The mountains were the obvious first target. Mountain ranges meant valleys. Valleys meant water. Water meant settlements. It was how civilisation worked in every world, including his old one — people gathered where the resources were, and mountain rivers were resources.
East, then. Toward the mountains. Through however many hundreds or thousands of kilometres of forest lay between here and there.
He could fly it in hours. Days at most.
Okay. East. The mountains. That's the plan.
He took one last look at the panorama — the beautiful, terrifying, endless expanse of green that had been his entire world for months — and began his descent.
He had a journey to prepare for.