The dried leaves covering the ground crunched underfoot as I walked. Orange trees were evergreens, so the fallen foliage must’ve blown in from outside the grove.
The sun had risen, and Wald was still sleeping in the hut, so I left him there so I could scout around the immediate area. Although neither the orange orchard nor its surrounding land had any signs that anyone lived there, there were traces of a passing road nearby that seemed just wide enough to accommodate horse-drawn wagons.
The people who visited this area probably arrived in the spring to collect honey from bees pollinating the blossoms, and once fall arrived and the blossoms bore fruit, they would harvest the oranges. Evidence of this was readily found in a disposal pit I’d discovered. It seemed that they also processed the fruit here. My guess was that they made jam—there weren’t any places near enough to transport fresh fruit to before it’d spoil.
That also meant that there were no large towns anywhere nearby. Given what I knew, our current location must’ve been a remote hinterland pretty far north, close to the Northern Ridges.
Stone stelae were erected around the perimeter of the grove, each one weathered by time. They had probably been placed there to form a protective barrier.
I also found the decaying ruins of an old manor that had probably once been the residence of whatever lord ruled these lands.
Past the orange grove and some ways into the forest, I found the building with “203” engraved over its entrance. It was one of the many small teleportation portals in Golden Dawn that connected to a single destination.
As a hunter who’d honed his tracking skills in Gaelius, I easily found traces of foot traffic in the immediate area around the building. There were several sets of footprints going to and from it. I traced them—they had come from the portal and led to the ruins I had found earlier. It seemed like after they had investigated the inside of the decrepit manor, they had returned to the portal and left.
I was thankful that the prince had made the decision not to hide within the ruins and had instead proceeded farther through the forest. If he’d chosen to hide in the manor, we would have been caught.
“They must be guarding the relay stations rather than these minor portals. Guess they wouldn’t bother posting soldiers at every endpoint,” I quietly observed.
I hadn’t sensed anyone around the portal, but I wasn’t about to approach the building to find out. There was always the possibility that they’d set up a trap or something. As much as I wanted to inspect the portal’s control panel, I decided to steer clear.
Although we had narrowed the area down to 02:03, the panel itself wasn’t likely to give us much more information anyway. Its designation wasn’t unique to this portal, and there were likely to be many more in this area.
Come to think of it, the Central Nations were honestly littered with portals. There were so many scattered among all of the areas that most didn’t have names—only the most famous ones were named. Because of that, I could only take a rough guess of our location, but with all the hints I’d managed to pick up, I was sure I’d figure things out.
“All right... I’ll head back now,” I muttered to myself.
It only took me a second to get back. There had been an empty plaza of sorts directly in front of the little hut in the orange grove, so I cast Jump to return there in an instant.
“Kariya!”
The prince was standing in the doorway to the shack, bundled up in the snow wolf pelts. He seemed to have awoken not too long ago. I had left a note on the table that I’d gone out, so he must’ve been waiting for my return.
Wald breathed a sigh of relief, and his expression softened into a smile. It made me regret leaving him alone, especially after last night. He had been tossing and turning.
Since I had been sleeping for days, I hadn’t felt the least bit tired, so I urged him to turn in first. But although Wald had been nestled comfortably under the warm feather duvet to sleep, he would occasionally jolt awake during the night. He would jump to his feet and look around the room—once he saw me under the lamplight, he would let out a long, deep sigh.
Whenever he had managed to fall back asleep, he would still cry out for his family. Sometimes, he even called for me.
The side effects of the elixir had caused me to fall into a deep sleep, but I felt remorseful that I’d essentially left him alone. His nerves were clearly still strung taut as a bow.
I tried to assuage his anxiety by cheerfully calling out to him.
“Good morning, Prince Wald. Have you already brushed your teeth?” I asked. “I left everything I thought you might need to wash up in the hut. Also, I thought we could eat breakfast outside today since the weather’s quite nice. Spring should be arriving soon, so it’s gotten a lot warmer.”
There weren’t any people in the vicinity of the orange grove, so I doubted using an open fire here would cause any problems.
“While we’re traveling, if it’s just the two of us around, I can fetch food from my Pocket Dimension for us. But if we happen to, say, take a break at a rest stop along the highway, we need to be aware of other people who might be around. In cases like those, we’ll need to cook our meals from scratch. I’d like you to handle collecting small twigs and branches to use as kindling for a fire; I’ll handle the cooking. Here, this is how we’ll do it.”
I knelt next to a patch of earth that had been discolored by flame. Pulling cinder blocks from my storage, I began to stack them on the ground to fashion a simple stove. Stoves were already available at pit stops, but since we didn’t have one here, my demonstration had to start from square one.
I tossed kindling (from my interdimensional storage) into the stove and ignited it. Then, I placed a frying pan (also from storage) over the fire. After that, I poured a generous amount of cooking oil into the pan, peeled some fresh-from-storage potatoes with a knife, cut them into thin slices, and then added them to the oil.
If you asked me, sausages were better grilled with oil than boiled in water—after the casings popped open and the grease leaked out, you could use it to fry potatoes that would pick up the flavor. Anyway, I tossed some small, green tomatoes into the mix as well and lightly seared them.
After I made sure everything was fully cooked, I plated our meal with a spatula and sprinkled some salt on top.