I Found a Door to the Elven Realm

Chapter 184: Burned Down

Selena woke him up before sunrise with a plate of eggs and toast and a glass of water that tasted better than any coffee he’d had this week.

"Eat fast." She put the plate on the floor next to the mattress and her fingers brushed his hair back from his forehead. "You said you wanted an early start for the other side."

Eren ate the eggs in about two minutes while Emily slept next to him with her arm still curled around a pillow where his body had been. She’d gotten good at not waking up when he moved. Pregnancy was making her sleep deeper and Selena had mentioned that elf pregnancies in the middle months usually came with heavy exhaustion periods.

Rosa was asleep on the other side of the mattress with one sock missing for some reason. Mel was on the far mattress with her back turned to everyone like she always was. Lyra’s head was somehow at the wrong end of her mattress and her feet were near the pillow.

How does someone sleep upside down without waking up?

He ate the last piece of toast and went to the bathroom on the ground floor because the upstairs one was broken. The farmhouse bathroom was a sad little room with cracked tiles and a toilet that made a sound when you flushed it that reminded him of his grandma’s washing machine from the 90s.

His grandmother from father’s side and actually almost all the old generation from father’s side was dead by now. But he remembered his grandma had this ancient washing machine that she refused to replace even after his father bought her a new one.

It would shake the entire bathroom floor during the spin cycle and she’d say "it still cleans the clothes so why throw it away?" She used that machine for twenty years until the motor caught fire in the middle of the night and his grandfather had to throw it out the kitchen window because the door was too narrow.

Eren was maybe seven years old and he remembered watching his grandfather wrestle a flaming washing machine through a window frame at three in the morning while cursing in words his mother later said didn’t exist in any language.

That was the funniest and scariest night of my childhood and now I’m flushing a toilet that sounds exactly like that machine.

He checked his mana. His personal mana pool hadn’t regenerated in Earth as his home world didn’t have mana but the Dungeon Heart Fragment in his pocket still had 296 from yesterday.

296 mana. Inter-dimensional portal costs 100 per second. He had act fast when he opened the portal.

If something goes wrong on the other side and I need more than 1.4 seconds of portal to get back.. I’m stuck there.

He weighed the risk while washing his face at the sink. The water pressure was garbage but the water was cold and it woke him up better so Eren didn’t complain.

Going to Evon with barely enough mana for a round trip was stupid. He knew that.

But the Totem situation was eating at him every hour he spent on the farm doing normal things. Every hour the Totem might be dying or already dead was an hour where two hundred elves might be losing something they couldn’t get back.

Also the Fragment recharged in Evon’s mana-rich atmosphere. If he got over there and spent even a few hours near an energy-dense area the battery would fill up on its own. Then he could come back with a full 1000 mana reserve and actually have options for seeing the future options.

"Going now.." He kissed Selena on the cheek in the kitchen doorway. She grabbed his shirt collar and pulled him back for a real kiss that lasted about five seconds longer than he expected.

"Come back before dark." She let go and went back to her morning cooking prep without another word. She knew darkness was dangerous only in Evon and in their magical forest. Earth didn’t have the same rules and dangers abour night time. But old habits were hard to lose and this was only her second day on Earth.

Eren walked into the hallway and pulled the Fragment from his pocket. The small crystal marble was warm in his palm.

He focused on his destination, the south side of the forest to the area he’d appeared in on his very first day in Evon. The slime territory where Emily had found him confused and barefoot and absolutely out of his mind with panic. That area was the furthest point from the dragon’s mountain and should’ve been safe from the fire.

"Door Master."

The portal ripped open and the smell of Evon hit him immediately through the shimmer but something was wrong with it. Instead of the clean mana-rich forest air he expected, the portal’s opening let through a wave of bitter smoke and burned wood.

He jumped through in one stride and the portal snapped shut behind him.

Everything was black and even the trees from this far south side, exactly opposite side of Dragon’s march to the village was burned down!

This was the worst possibility!

F*ck!

And after seeing the condition of things, he realized the whole area wasn’t just burned down like after a normal forest fire where you’d see charred trunks and stumps and scattered debris.

The magical fire was more absurd than normal one and it almost erased everything!

The massive ancient trees that used to tower over this section of the forest, trees so wide that two people couldn’t link arms around them had been reduced to nothing but piles of white ash on scorched earth. It felt like shit seeing the current state of this place.

Eren turned in a full circle and his brain couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing because the scale was just wrong. This area used to be a dense forest floor where the canopy was so thick that sunlight barely reached the ground.

He’d trained here with Mel and Nimbo and Thadric for weeks. He’d set up obstacle courses between the roots of these exact trees and watched Rabbu-i try to use scimitar while her outfit was so thin that nobody could concentrate on the training.

Emily had pinned him against one of these trees on a night when everyone else was asleep and done things to him that still made his ears warm when he thought about it.

All of it was just ash now.

"Forty hours.." he muttered while looking north where the village should be. "How the hell does a fire do this in forty hours?"

The scale of the burned area’s distance was massive and a bit absurd.

Do forest fires spread this quickly?

The answer was obvious when he saw the place and probably dragon fire wasn’t normal fire as a cherry on top. Even if the Totem’s barrier only blocked magical attacks and let natural flames through, the dragon’s breath was the ignition source.

That breath could melt rock and turn sand into glass. Once it lit the forest, the initial temperature was so high that even wet wood and green leaves would’ve caught instantly. The fire wouldn’t spread like a normal wildfire, slow and dependent on wind direction. It would’ve been instant in every direction at once.

The ground was still warm under his boots. Not hot but warm enough that he could feel it through the leather soles. Whatever burned here had burned at temperatures that cooked the soil itself.

He started walking north toward the village or where the village used to be as he cursed more after seeing all the things he liked about this area..

Every step covered ground he recognized only from his memory because nothing on the surface matched anymore. That rock formation where the slimes used to gather, the one he’d used as a landmark during his first weeks in Evon, was blackened and cracked from heat but at least it was still there.

Everything organic was gone.

About fifteen minutes into the walk he reached the ridge where the outer village houses had been or should have been. Some houses were stone while most of them had stone foundations but wooden upper body before. But now everything had burned except for the stone foundations embedded in the ground.

There were just barely visible under layers of ash but the wooden structures had burned completely. Some of the old stone walls were still partially up but the top halves had crumbled and the remains looked sad.

He saw some barricades they built in the last few months for monster attacks for winter which helped them deter so many dangerous situation. But..

I built those barricades. Me and Thadric and Emily. We spent weeks carrying logs and hammering stakes and planning defense lines and the dragon just..

He stopped walking because something ahead in the center area of the village didn’t look right.

Eren crouched behind what was left of a stone wall on the eastern edge of the village and looked toward the center.

The dragon was there!

It was lying on its side in the open area between where Selena’s restaurant and Oldir’s house used to be. Its body covered most of the village square and its tail curled around the base of..

The Totem.

The Totem was still there. Eren’s heart almost stopped when he saw it. The small tree looked worse than before with its leaves gone from yellow to a dark brownish color and some of the lower branches were snapped or hanging. But the trunk was intact and the bark was still on it and the thing was alive.

He was pretty sure it was alive because the dragon was wrapped around it like a cat sleeping next to a heater.

But the dragon itself..

Eren’s Observe skill activated automatically and the blue text that appeared told him absolutely nothing useful.

[Observe Skill failed: Target power differential exceeds current skill threshold. Approximate level cannot be determined]

Same as before. The dragon like drakes or those tortoises that used blood magic was so far above his level that the skill gave him a blank wall.

Now, what do I do?