“Usually, I would have gone through the main entrance when I’m barging in,” Amity started saying as she walked. I stared at her from behind after the implications of that last part. “But Lily asked me to use this one today, instead.

  “Honestly, I don’t know what the big deal is,” she continued. “It’s just some dragons, you know? They come every year to have children, and they don’t even let me play with them!”

  “That sounds reaso-” I stopped mid-sentence when I suddenly started fearing for my life. “Totally unreasonable.”

  “I know, right?!” She turned towards me, nodding her head with her eyes closed, then she returned. “They aren’t even that strong! The Calamities could go toe to claw with some of the most powerful of them… some of the Calamities. Not Greg, though, Greg is just Greg.”

  I started observing the surroundings as a parallel thought process started listening to Amity’s rambling. What I first thought was a very dense forest revealed to be a carefully maintained garden when I saw a couple of elves and some humans using tools to tend to the trees and flowers.

  Judging by the way magicules moved in the surroundings, they were using skills or magic to do it. I even saw a human planting something, and a blue flower sprouted from the ground and grew taller than they were.

  I wasn’t sure if this garden was like Amity’s, a magical circuit made out of plants, or just a regular one. I was too close to it, and for all I knew, I could be inside just a tiny portion of it. I wouldn’t recognize a magical circuit this close to it.

  I suddenly froze mid-step. Temporal energy in the area spiked, and time itself felt weird, like something that wasn’t supposed to happen was happening. It was a very strange sensation that made my stomach drop, but I couldn’t sense anything amiss around me, just the weirdness of time.

  It wasn’t even flowing strangely; it was normal, just this strange sensation I couldn’t quite describe.

  “Hm? Why did you stop? Found something shiny?” Amity asked after I stood still for a couple of seconds.

  “I- No, nothing.” I decided to keep the strange sensation in the back of my mind, for now.

  It took us a full hour just to approach the walls, and seeing them up close was just mind-boggling. Looking in any direction made me feel like a grain of sand on a beach. It was absurd how gigantic the thing was.

  The door we approached wasn’t anything to scoff at, either. A pair of 20-meter-tall, highly decorated, golden doors stood in front of us. I felt like if it were to be sold, it would bankrupt entire countries back on Earth.

  Amity approached it and just shoved it open like it was an inconvenience having it in her way. Both doors swung open and hit the internal walls with a loud metallic sound. I half expected the doors to crack or break from the force she used, but they stood firm.

  Without missing a beat, Amity walked inside. I followed her through the doors, and after we both crossed, they closed on their own without making a sound.

  The inside of the structure was astonishingly refined. Paintings of various people, all wearing the same uniform as the people tending the garden, adorned the walls. Instead of the blueish color the outer walls had, the inside looked more like cracked green marble.

  The corridor we were in looked endless. As I stared straight ahead, I could barely see the end, just a tiny dot after countless segments, each with a golden chandelier emitting a golden light that illuminated every centimeter of the corridor.

  Amity stopped and stood still for a few moments, then she got impatient and started fidgeting with her fingers, and a couple of seconds later, she started examining the paintings on the walls.

  “Is-is everything alright?” I eventually asked, after she had moved to the fifth painting.

  “Hm?” She looked at me. “Oh, yeah. Usually Lily comes to pick me up after a few moments, but I guess she’s busy…

  “Which means,” I saw her face go from bored to having an evil grin in a matter of seconds. “She won’t be able to stop me from exploring.”

  She began giggling and suddenly was gone, left without a trace. I stared at the spot where she was before. I was left alone, in a place filled with dragons and powerful creatures. How fun.

  I honestly wasn’t sure what I should do. Amity was supposed to lead me to Athorisnamor, and now I’m here. Should I stay here and wait for that Lily person Amity commented on to appear and help me, or should I just start walking randomly until I find something?

  My thoughts were interrupted by the large door behind me opening up and a woman tiger person wearing the same clothes I had seen other people wearing back in the garden and in the paintings. It looked a lot like a green suit with rainbow details.

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  She looked surprised when she saw me and almost stumbled on her own foot as the doors closed behind her.

  “Sorry,” she said after recovering herself. “Can I help you?”

  “Actually, you can,” I said after a second of real time. I had accelerated my mind and debated with myself if I should ask her for directions, ultimately deciding to do it. “I am a little lost. Could you help me?”

  “Of course,” she agreed eagerly. “Where do you need to go?”

  “Could you point me in the direction of Athorisnamor? I need to speak with him.”

  “Ah, the ceremony,” she nodded. Before I could ask her about it, she continued. “Please, follow me. I’ll guide you to one of the transport hubs.”

  She started walking, and I followed her. Honestly, the idea of a palace needing a transit system is just incredulous, but after seeing the sheer size of the outer walls, I could understand why a place like this would need such a thing. A person could not be expected to walk the thing from one side to another.

  After several small doors that I wouldn’t fit through, we reached a set of large doors that I could barely fit inside. Entering it, I felt a pocket of thin space on a small platform I was too big to fit on to my left, another pair of doors on the wall opposite to where I entered, and what looked like a control terminal on the right side of the room.

  The woman went to the terminal and started tapping on the crystals on it, picking some up and placing them in other holes in the terminal.

  “As this area was designed for EXCEED access only, we won’t be able to use the teleport matrix. I have called the service capsule, and it should arrive shortly.” She then moved to the two pairs of doors on the opposite wall of the entrance and stood there, waiting.

  After a minute, I was about to start asking her something when the doors opened up to reveal what looked like a storage-like room, filled with places to attach boxes and even some objects that looked remarkably similar to those supermarket carts for large and heavy objects.

  She walked inside, and I followed her. Inside the room, there were glass panes that showed just the wall on the other side. I was starting to connect the dots when she tapped on the terminal inside the room, and the doors closed.

  My thoughts were confirmed when, suddenly, the wall outside the glass pane started moving. This was not just a room, but a full-on on-demand train system. Even more impressive was that I didn’t feel the acceleration at all, even though I could feel I was moving through space by tapping into [Spatial Manipulation].

  I looked through the window just in time for it to change from just the walls into a giant room that was filled with lines made out of colored light with capsule-looking things moving through them at dizzying speed, even stopping on a moment's notice to change into another light track.

  A few seconds later, we were passing through another tunnel that stopped me from viewing the outside, but even that didn’t take long, as the light coming from the window started blinking. I had to accelerate my mind using [Mathematical Cortex] and even slow down time for me to just be able to see what was happening.

  We were moving so fast that entire open spaces filled with fountains, gardens, and pools were just a blur of light.

  Eventually, the doors opened again to reveal an exact copy of the room we entered before, with only the colors being slightly different and the area she called ‘teleport matrix’ being way larger. It was fifty meters in diameter and just as high..

  The woman accompanying me left and went to the terminal, tapping onto the crystals. The circular elevated floor of the teleport matrix lit up. I could feel the sheer amount of magicules powering it up. It was massive.

  She moved to the matrix and called me to climb on top, saying it would take us to the right sector.

  Stepping on it, a flash of blue light filled my vision. When it faded, I was in another room. The only clue that we had actually teleported, and not just flashbanged, was that the room was no longer green marble, but a light blue marble. Honestly, I wasn’t sure it was actually marble, just something that looked like it. [Appraisal] wasn’t working on it; it just didn’t return anything.

  The woman walked towards the door, and I followed her. As we were leaving, another person, a human wearing the same uniform, but in blue colors, carrying the very same supermarket carts that were inside the capsule we rode on a couple of seconds earlier, filled with giant wooden boxes. He nodded to us as he entered the room we had just left.

  Now that I had time to look around, I saw the corridor we were in was just gigantic. It was easily a hundred meters wide and a hundred and fifty meters tall.

  The woman I was following quietly guided me for another thirty minutes until a set of doors that were each double my size. I was both impressed by the sheer size of the place and the number of people I saw in uniform casually walking around with no sign of exhaustion whatsoever.

  “You’ll be able to wait here,” she said to me after we arrived. “If you excuse me, I need to return to my sector. I am running late for my duties.”

  With that, she bowed to me and walked away without even waiting for me to thank her. Of course, I would start thinking maybe dragons don’t thank people when they ask for help around here.

  Shaking my head to get rid of those thoughts, I observed the doors again. There was some sort of inscription on it in a language I didn’t know. I quickly tried to use [Knowledge Library] to translate it.

  [Downloading…]

  And I had triggered the download of the entire language instead. Of course, why not? The same thing had happened the first time I encountered humans.

  I had tried to use the skill to translate what they were saying, as I didn’t understand a thing they were saying, and accidentally downloaded the entire language inside my brain. Language professors hate this one trick.

  Well, I couldn’t sit around waiting for it to finish downloading; who knew how long it would take.

  That person said I could wait here, maybe it was a normal waiting room to talk with Athorisnamor.

  …Or maybe not, because the moment I opened the doors and stepped inside, something silver hit me in the face and I was sent rolling onto the ground with something heavy on top of me.