I Found a Door to the Elven Realm

Chapter 187: Forest Exploration and Trade with Birds

Eren was kind of having fun with this free exploration.

His Observe skill found a creature and it was a Jade Canopy Viper at Level 32. Venomous with a two-minute paralysis effect. If it had bitten his face he’d be lying on the forest floor unable to move while whatever else lived in the undergrowth found him.

I have to pass the fu*king 50 level.

Twenty minutes after the snake a cluster of mushrooms he walked past released a cloud of purple spores that his Primal Senses screamed at him to avoid.

He held his breath and sprinted clear but some of the particles hit his skin and started burning until his Poison Resistance kicked in.

And then there were the sounds. The deep forest was loud with things he couldn’t identify. Crashes in the canopy above where heavy creatures moved between branches. Low rumbling from underground that might be the ground crawlers the birds had mentioned.

The constant chatter of the Worker network transmitting information across the entire territory.

The Clone lived in this for thirty-seven days with no portal home and no backup. He fought gorillas that threw boulders and outran centaurs that materialized fire spears and climbed a mountain full of wyverns to find food.

The Feline bloodline made all of it possible. Without the cat reflexes and the instinctive threat detection the Clone would’ve died in his first week.

Every evolution the Clone had chosen, every skill path that favored speed over power and evasion over confrontation, was shaped by the fact that he’d eaten an electric cat early on and the system built his entire development around that.

But maybe it wasn’t purely the meat. The Clone had also lived like a cat for over a month. Sleeping in high places, hunting at dawn, grooming obsessively, avoiding fights he couldn’t win.

The system adapted to behavior. Skills evolved based on how you used them and stats grew based on what you did with your body.

He kept thinking about this as he pushed deeper into the forest. The feline-adapted combat style was perfect for this environment but it wasn’t the only option. A different Clone with different early choices might develop a completely different bloodline.

Next Clone gets a different strategy. No cat meat.

He wanted to see what kind of bloodline forms at Level 25 when the base behavior was completely different.

That was a test for later though. Right now he was approaching a section of forest that the Clone’s memories flagged as the former ant colony battleground.

..

The ant war zone was quiet and empty. Clone tried to come here and see if there were some left over bodies or magical things left behind but it was for naught.

But he was the original Eren and this was the first time he was seeing this. It smelled like blood and was eerily quiet.

There was a new and weak ant colony hangin around in the territory but he didn’t see the appeal to kill them.

When the Clone had last passed through here thousands of dog-sized armored ants had been locked in combat across a stretch of forest floor before. Two rival colonies tearing each other apart over territory left behind when the anteater nest was wiped out.

Hundreds of different kind of monsters, horrors and animals also joined the carnace.

But this was too normal and empty.

Maybe this is normal and happens all the time in this forest. And all the places I believed as safe spaces wasn’t safe.

The southern area of the village for example was the safest place Eren have been in this world. Just a few slimes and that it. But maybe that was a misperception in his thinking.

He stopped thinking about strange things and moved around the area.

Now the ground was scarred with collapsed tunnels and trampled undergrowth. Dead ant shells littered the area, old and dried. Whatever won the war had moved underground.

Eren’s Primal Senses swept for movement below the soil but found nothing close.

He was heading for a specific tree about half a kilometer past the ant zone. Not a Worker nest. Not a colony outpost.

The rainbow one’s tree.

The Clone had seen it exactly three times in five weeks. Once when it dropped a dead electric cat at his feet without being asked. Once when he’d watched it swallow a two-meter predator in a single gulp.

And once, the last time, when it had just been sitting on its branch with an intensity that made the Clone’s Primal Senses register it as the most dangerous thing in range.

Barely bigger than a parrot. Feathers in every color. And an Observe reading that neither the Clone nor Eren could penetrate.

The tree was right where the memories placed it. Massive trunk with wide branches spreading out in a dome shape.

About fifteen meters up in a bend where two thick branches met there was a nest. "Nest" was generous though. A loose pile of twigs pushed into a depression in the bark, open on all sides with no walls.

Whatever lived there didn’t need protection.

Eren climbed slowly. His Extreme Climbing skill made it smooth and quiet and his Feline Enhanced grip found holds in the bark without searching. About twelve meters up he settled on a wide branch and from there he could see the nest clearly.

The bird was there. Maybe twenty centimeters beak to tail, about the size of a budgerigar, with feathers that caught the dappled light through the canopy and threw it back in colors that shouldn’t exist on anything organic.

Its beak was tucked under one wing. Breathing slow. Peaceful.

The Clone watched this thing eat a two-meter electric cat in one bite. Size means nothing.

He waited. Three minutes. Five. The Fragment in his pocket was warming from ambient mana absorption and he could feel it charging slowly.

Then the bird opened one eye.

Dark iris with gold flecks and it looked directly at Eren with an intelligence that made his throat tighten. No animal’s eye had any right to look that aware.

The wolves had smart eyes. The centaurs had calculating eyes. This bird’s eye belonged in a person’s face.

Its beak didn’t move. But Eren heard words.

Not Beastin. Not the Worker screech-language.

Elvish.

Clear, fluid, structured Elvish with an accent that sounded older than anything he’d heard from the village elves. Emily spoke Elvish with a musical quality but this was different, deeper and more formal with word endings that the village dialect had dropped generations ago.

[You came back but you are not the same one who died.]

The words hit his brain through Advanced Language Learning and he understood them perfectly but the shock of hearing Elvish come from a motionless beak made him grip the branch hard enough to crack bark.

"You speak Elvish?"

The bird opened both eyes and adjusted slightly on its nest. Still no beak movement. The voice came from somewhere around it, maybe the feathers or maybe the air itself.

[I speak many things. I spoke with the pointed-ears before they came to this forest. I spoke with the soft-walkers before they disappeared. I spoke with the scaled ones before they buried themselves in the mountain.]

Before the elves came to this forest..?

"I need help." Eren kept his voice steady and spoke in Elvish since the bird had started the conversation in it. "I have over two hundred elves on the other side of a portal with no safe place in this world."

He gripped the branch tighter. "The village is destroyed, there’s a dragon sleeping on the Totem and I need to find a way through this forest. North. Toward wherever the human kingdoms are."

The bird tilted its head three degrees to the left. Its gold-flecked eye studied him and the expression behind it was far too human for a twenty-centimeter animal.

[Safe is a word that small creatures use. What does it mean to you?]

"A place where things don’t try to kill you every hour of every day."

[No such place exists. Everything that lives eats something else that lives. The pointed-ears built their wall of light and called it safe but the wall is broken now and the big red one sleeps on the tree.]

[What you call safe is just a place where the things that kill you are smaller than you.]

Eren rubbed his face with his free hand. "The elves I’m protecting are much weaker than me. Level 10 to 30 at most. A pack of wolves would finish most of them. I need a path that avoids the worst threats."

The bird closed one eye and kept the other fixed on him. When it spoke again the Elvish carried something new in its tone, a calculation that reminded him of Kalina when she had her color-coded folders out.

[I can tell you which creatures live in each territory from here to the northern edge of the forest. The ground crawlers, the fire apes, the horned ones who throw light, the swimming thing in the deep lake, the dark one on the mountain.]

[I know their territories and their movements and their weaknesses. I know this forest better than anything that has ever lived in it.]

The bird paused.

[But information has value. Others understood this. They brought me things. Insects and small kills. They were always polite even when starving.]

The bird was too strong but also extremely lazy.

So you are saying, this is like an information trading hall and you sell information to everyone who bribes you.

[You carry the face of that dead one. His face and his smell but you are louder and ruder and you tried to charm my Workers which was the most stupid thing I have seen a tree-human do in three hundred years.]

Three hundred years old minimum and no human ever came to this forest! Also they work for you but are you a queen or just an alfa. O wonder how their hive mind works..

"What do you want?"

[The golden fruit. The one the horned four legs guard. Ten of them.]

Eren almost laughed. "The centaurs nearly killed the Clone for taking two. You want me to steal ten?"

[The dead one stole two and gained fifty points of Fortune. You didn’t inherit those points when it died. You are the luckiest tree-human in this forest and you are telling me you cannot steal ten fruit?]

She had a point. With all his skills and overpovered stats equal to level 120 according to hive birds and thirty-three skills... the odds weren’t completely insane. But the centaurs weren’t stupid or weak either. They’d be alert for another raid after the Clone’s theft.

"And what do I get for ten fruits?"

The bird opened both eyes fully and the gold flecks seemed to glow.

[Everything I know about the forest, the mountain and the lands beyond the northern ridge. Every creature’s territory and weakness.]

[The location of the passage that the soft-walker female used to leave this forest years ago. And one more thing that you need but have not thought to ask for yet.]

The mention of Ember’s route north made his heart beat faster. Emily’s mother had found a way through the death zone and out the other side to a human kingdom. The village elders didn’t know how she did it. Emily didn’t know the full story.

But this bird did.

He looked at the tiny rainbow creature resting in its garbage nest and thought about how completely insane his life had become.

Six months ago he was selling security systems to big companies with Kalina just barely over minimum wage. Now a parrot-sized apex predator was offering him a trade deal for stolen magical fruit.

I love my life..

"Deal." He said it before the smart part of his brain could talk him out of it. "I need time though. I’ll be back."

The bird settled deeper into its nest and closed both eyes.

[The dead one also thought he would be back. Ah.. He was not wrong. Hihihihihi...]

That sentence could mean a lot of things and Eren decided not to get angry for rude comments about his Clone. He had his memories and things between them were too personal. But this bird was an old strong creature and didn’t have the sentimental.

Eren tried to climb down from the tree then stopped.

Why the hell I act like jumping down isn’t an option?

His cat bloodline left over skill were too op. He didn’t have the bloodline but it didn’t matter. His body was a couple of times stronger than the Clone’s.

So he jumped down and felt the difference between mindsets.

Clone was used to use his abilities and it was a part of him.

Eren had to constantly think about it and find opportunities to use them.

I need to train..

He started walking east toward the centaur territory. His Kinetic Flux Runner was already adjusting his pace and his brain was already mapping the route from the Clone’s stolen memories.

He had to steal ten luck fruits from an army of centaurs who could materialize fire spears and had Luck stats in the thousands.

What could possibly go wrong?