At first, I wasnât actually allowed to go with this team.
After all, I was the one that was receiving the reports from the wind spirits with the power of Sylph. If I wasnât there, then there would be no one to receive these reports.
However, it wasnât as if I could let them go without me.
If something did happen, I naturally had to be there to take care of it.
As such, I forced my way onto the team.
Since I was going, there were others that also insisted that they would be going as well.
The popes that came from the Holy Empire were part of that group that wanted to force their way in, but there was someone that stopped them.
Since the saintess was going, it wasnât as if there was a reason for them to come.
Other than this, there were the sages from the Sorcery Empire that wanted to come along. The excuse that they gave was that they needed to be there to analyze anything that we found.
This worked because they were the best that the Sorcery Empire had to offer.
They had become sages for a reason, so there really wasnât anyone that could beat them when it came to their magic knowledge.
Then there were the representatives from the other countries.
It wasnât as if they had a special reason for coming along in the first place.
But they just wanted to come because they thought that this would be important.
With their status in the racial alliance, it wasnât as if I could ignore them.
So in the end, I had to take them along with us to let them see what it was that was happening.
With this team, we made our way to where the report came from.
It didnât seem like there was anything special about this place, but the moment that we arrived...
"Thereâs something off about this place."
Everyone nodded in agreement when I said this.
After all, they all knew the reason why I had said this.
Silence.
There was only silence in this place.
A forest like this would normally be filled with sounds, these would be the sounds of the creatures that lived in this place. It would never be as quiet as it currently was, it was as if there wasnât a single sign of life in this place.
But why would that be?
It had to be the corruption energy that was driving all of the things away from this place.
"Why wasnât this included in the report?" I couldnât help asking the member of the Feather Race who was with us. This member of the Feather Race was the one that had made the report and had been waiting to guide us to where he found the strange swirl of energy.
When he heard this, there was an awkward look that appeared on his face before he said, "I didnât actually go into this forest to scout it out, all I did was fly above this place to find that swirl of energy."
I couldnât help narrowing my eyes to look at him when he said this, but I stopped in the end.
There was nothing to gain from blaming him for this after all.
Though that didnât seem to stop the Fenrir from doing so.
The member of the Feather Race looked like he was afraid that the Fenrir would swallow him whole with the expression on his face, but I calmed them down in the end.
"Alright, letâs just see what that swirl is like. Thereâs no point in us fighting amongst ourselves like this."
The Fenrir gave one more glare at the member of the Feather Race before dropping this matter.
Since it was silent, there was no telling if there was even anything around us and there was no telling if there was any danger here.
The sages were the ones that solved that problem as they suddenly used a spell.
This was a spell that would detect life in the surrounding area, so they would be able to find anything that was hiding around us. But as we expected, there wasnât a single thing that was here.
"If thereâs nothing here, how are these trees even growing like this? It doesnât seem to make any sense that they would be growing this neatly if there wasnât anything that was distributing the seeds."
"Look carefully, youâll see that there are some younger ones that are growing near the base of the older ones."
"Then youâre saying that there were animals that lived here before, but theyâve since disappeared?"
"This strange swirl must have just appeared recently. Letâs go and take a closer look."
With this explanation, I started to understand the situation of this forest.
It wasnât as if I knew everything that there was to know about forests and ecosystems, so this was indeed a useful explanation. The only thing that I knew was that if there werenât any animals and such that distributed tree seeds, then it would become a giant mess.
But the elves really did know a lot about nature.
After walking forward for a bit, we finally stopped since we could see what we came here for in the distance.
Just like the member of the Feather Race described, it was a strange swirl.
The strange thing was that it seemed to be gathering something in the center and it didnât seem to be spreading. It was almost as if it was a piece of art with the way that the corruption energy was gathered.
But we could all tell that the pattern of this strange swirl wasnât ordinary.
"Can you decipher it and tell us what it would be used for?" I had to ask the sages of the Sorcery Empire this.
But in the end, they shook their heads and said, "Weâve never seen anything like this before. This is the first time that weâve ever seen an array with this kind of pattern."