He spent the evening preparing.
The barrier came first. He'd been designing it in his head for weeks — a passive defence spell anchored to the homestead's perimeter wall, running on stored mana instead of active concentration. Something that would keep working while he was gone.
He walked the full circumference, pressing his palm against the stone every hundred metres and seeding a node of compressed mana into the granite. Each node linked to the next, forming a chain that circled the entire wall. When the last node connected to the first and the circuit closed, the barrier activated — an invisible dome of repulsive force that extended from the wall's top edge inward, covering the entire homestead like a lid.
Anything that tried to cross the wall — climbing over, burrowing under, flying above — would hit the barrier and be shoved back. Hard. The spell was passive, self-sustaining, and carried enough stored mana to run for a solid month before it needed recharging.
He tested it by throwing a boulder at the wall from inside. The boulder hit the barrier at the wall's edge and launched backward so fast it buried itself in the ground twenty metres away.
Good enough.
Next, he packed. Dimensional storage made this trivially easy — he already had most of what he needed in there. Weapons, food, water, spare clothing, crafting materials, medical supplies he'd assembled from monster parts and herbs. He added extra dragon steak, a stack of dried fruit from the orchard, and a few litres of fresh water from the canal. Overkill, probably. But he'd rather have too much than too little.
He cooked dinner by the pond. Dragon steak, roasted over a mana flame, eaten on the cobblestone beside the water. The fish had multiplied — there were dozens now, flashing silver in the shallows. The almost-cherry-blossom was in full bloom, petals drifting onto the surface. The bamboo rustled.
He sat there longer than he needed to. Watching the water. Listening to the garden.
I'll be back. That's the whole point of teleportation. This isn't goodbye.
It felt like goodbye anyway.
He went to bed early and slept poorly.
Morning.
He stood at his front door, fully kitted — mana-woven clothes, blue-metal sword in dimensional storage, supplies packed, barrier active. The homestead stretched out around him, green and alive and his.
"I'll be back," he said out loud. To the house. To the trees. To the fish.
Nobody answered. But saying it helped.
He pushed off.
The plan was simple and, he thought, remarkably sensible for something no isekai protagonist he'd ever read about had bothered to do.
Fly all day. Cover as much distance as possible. Memorise the endpoint's spatial coordinates for teleportation. Then, when night fell and the forest below turned dark and hostile — don't camp. Don't build a fire in monster territory. Don't sit in the open like an idiot waiting to be ambushed.
Just go home.
Tear a hole in space, step through, and be standing in his kitchen. Take a bath. Cook dinner. Sleep in his own bed. Wake up, teleport back to exactly where he left off, and keep flying.
He'd read hundreds of stories where the protagonist suffered through miserable nights in dangerous wilderness — sleeping in trees, taking watch shifts, rationing food, getting ambushed at dawn. And he'd always thought the same thing: If you have spatial magic, why are you doing this to yourself?
Maybe there were narrative reasons. Tension. Character development. Bonding with party members over shared hardship.
Yuki didn't have a party. He didn't need narrative tension. And he had a bath and a bed and a pond full of fish waiting for him at home.
No reason to suffer when you don't have to.
He ascended to altitude — not the full ten kilometres, but high enough that the forest below was a texture rather than individual trees. Maybe four or five kilometres. High enough to clear any flying creatures, low enough to breathe comfortably without the pressurised bubble, though he maintained a light wind shield against the cold.
Then he turned east and opened the throttle.
Speed at altitude was a different animal than speed at ground level.
Down in the forest, he was limited by obstacles — trees, terrain, visibility. Up here, there was nothing but air. No friction, no drag, no reason to hold back. He poured mana into the spatial displacement and moved.
The forest blurred. The wind shield around him compressed. He was crossing distances that would take days on foot in minutes — kilometres vanishing beneath him in smooth, silent streaks.
He knew enough physics to understand why altitude helped. Less air resistance at higher elevation. No terrain to navigate. Straight-line distance instead of winding forest paths. And his flight magic didn't rely on aerodynamics — spatial displacement didn't care about air density or drag coefficients. He was limited only by how fast he could process the spatial coordinates and how quickly his telekinesis could stabilise him at speed.
He pushed faster. The horizon scrolled toward him. The forest below was a green ocean, featureless and endless.