While Others Cultivate, I Use My Multiverse System

Chapter 113: First day in the snow

"Good thing I came prepared"

Taking my first steps in this unforgiving world, I could feel that even my thick clothing wasn't going to cut it. Right now, I could feel the temperature of my body falling, even with the highest grade of clothing that I was wearing. Maybe it was caused by the fact that I had to wear all sorts of stuff in advance, hampering the effectiveness of the fully cold-proof suit. But as I was right now, there was absolutely no way for me to change what I was wearing.

Not right at the peak of one of the smaller mountains in the chain.

*Mission: Reach the highest mountaintop and confront the boss there*

*Partial mission: Reach half the distance to the highest mountaintop*

*Time freeze: Two weeks*

As soon as I finally found it in me to make the first step, the three simple notifications arrived in front of my eyes.  Raising my head from the lines of text displayed by some strange force behind my system, I scanned the entire area. But to my surprise, the highest peak that I could see wasn't somewhere far away.

In fact, it seemed as if I could reach it in no more than a single day of forced march! That is, if not for how little I knew about climbing. Even though I had several tools like icepick or spiked boots when I looked at the incredibly steep side of the mountain

I couldn't think about anything else but actually approaching it from the other side rather than just using my current heigh to my advantage!

"Let's go then. I better not waste any time."

Encouraging myself with those words, I took the first step. As soon as I did so, the timer of the time-freeze of this world started ticking. Step by step, I started to descend the current mountain top that I appeared at from the get-go. While my position was elevated, due to how close my destination was, I couldn't really see anything beyond the side of the mountain that was directly facing me. And it was simply too steep for me to even risk climbing it. 

With that sad reality in mind, I scanned the area around me as I continued to carefully walk and slide down the side of the mountain, always making sure that I would reach some kind of flat surface where I could slow down and assess my situation.

At first, travelling through this unforgiving land posed a huge challenge for me. The freezing cold of the air alone was enough to sap my strength, forcing me to keep moving. Only by burning the calories and actually moving could I prevent myself from hypothermia. And only by moving could I hope to find some small cave or ravine where I could hide away from the cold, start some simple and small fire and take my time changing to the heaviest clothing I could find in my bags. 

Those bags also proved to not only be quite useful but also turned out to be a huge drag. What seemed like just slightly heavy equipment back in my basement, now was not the only reason for nearly half of my physical exercise, but also quite a lethal trap.

Slip.

That was all that needed to happen to turn my surprisingly hard yet pleasant stroll into a deadly trip. With my shoes losing the grip on the soft snow that made up the ground, my slow crawl instantly turned into a slide down the side of the mountain. With how I was going to descend to the more reasonable height either way, it didn't seem to be that dangerous at first

"Fuck" 

Left with only a few seconds to react when I first noticed the edge of the angle that I was currently sliding through, I desperately threw my hands into the snow, hoping to lock myself in place or at least slow down my descend. Bit by bit, my body was sliding closer and closer towards the edge of the mountain. Soon, I could see that the fall from it wouldn't be dangerous at all. 

In short words, once I saw how far down the relatively flat ground was, I realised that I wouldn't just be injured if I didn't manage to recover my grip. Falling from such an insane height could only result in my demise.

'Damn, should I fail the mission?!'

Barely a few meters away from the edge, my mind was already spinning at the maximum speed. My hands desperately attempted to dig into the deeper layers of the snow, only to make an entire layer of it split away from the hard ground and start sliding along with me. Left with no other choice, I could only risk it all.

Dropping my attempts at slowing down my fall, I turned on my back. With my legs facing the fall, I grabbed the thick cloth of my glove with my teeth,  before energetically pulling my hand up, forcing this piece of protective clothing out of my hand.

Two meters away from the edge, I felt an insane pain in my hand. Just like when in my childhood years I had wart 'burned' out with liquid nitrogen reaching some insanely low temperatures, it felt as if I suddenly subjected my entire palm to this kind of torture. With my fingers freezing and barely moving, I didn't waste any time. Reaching towards the easy-to-access pocket of my specialistic jacket, I pulled out one of the offensive stones. 

One meter away from the fall, my fingers finally managed to grasp the structure of the wooden frame that housed the artefact. According to my memories, it was capable of unleashing a formidable and explosive fireball. With my mind spinning at its highest possible rate, I could even recall the entire explanation of Sander about the way he managed to make the fireball something more than just a ball of liquid fire, turning it into an explosive instead. The time that my mind required to reproduce that entire scene was just a fraction of what my body needed to conquer this last meter of my slide to the doom. 

My legs reached the edge. With no ground to support them, my centre of mass started to rapidly change, suddenly reversing the trend of my deaccelerating slide. My hips reached the edge. And my fingers finally managed to squeeze the wooden frame to the point where the frozen metal of the springs snapped, allowing the artefact's circuit to connect to its fueling stone.

ROAR!

Aiming the stone directly at the nearly vertical side of the mountain below the edge, I felt as if my mind was going blank for a second. Not because of the fear of death. If this desperate measure of mine would fall to work, I could still give up and just return back to the basement by simply failing the mission. But I wasn't going to give up on letting Ayda move to my world so easily! What this lightheaded moment of mine was caused by, was a huge fluctuation of magical energy induced by the artefact in my fingers.

Thankfully, as soon as it started, it was already over. The mana fluctuation that is. With the energy so dense to nearly cause me to lose consciousness just by moving around now released and shaped into a ball of dense fires, I could gaze at it only for the shortest of the moments. 

Because as soon as it appeared, it already dug itself into the rock of the fall as if it was no different for the snow, before breaking apart and blinding me with a dark-red cacophony of light.

"Wha"

With my lungs suddenly squeezing to the point where I could even take a breath, a slight question escaped from my mouth along with all the air that I still had in my body. With my legs suddenly turning from extremely cold to burning hot, I could hardly feel anything outside of the extreme heat of the explosion.

But just like expected, it didn't last as long as someone unaquitanced with destruction could assume it would. What we saw in the movies and how explosions looked in reality, were two completely different matters. 

With the raging fires quickly sizzling away into just a bout of smoke, I could finally see what was around me. 

And there was absolutely nothing. For a moment, I was just stuck in a tranquil state, with perfect temperature coating my body.

"ARRGH!" 

The next moment, an insane pain shook my entire body. It felt as if someone used a hydraulic press to slap my back with a force that only some ancient warriors with battle hammers could produce. Once again, all the air that I desperately managed to recover in my lungs was now gone, leaving me suffocating on the ground.

Wait, the ground?

Forcing my agonising body to move, I turned my head to the side Only to notice that I was in the middle of a small depression in the snow, staring directly at the very same peak where I started my journey!

But there was something wrong with the perspective of this sight of mine. Rather than observing it from an equal level, I actually had to look up to spot it!

A few moments later, where the pain that nearly paralyzed my body finally started to slowly wane away, I forced myself to stand up. In such a cold temperature, it was the utmost level of stupidity to remain motionless. Looking down, I could see the black marks on the cloth of my pants, explaining why my legs were feeling even colder than before. 

It seemed that this explosion that I used to throw myself away from the edge of the mountain somehow worked, either throwing me to a completely different place or just hampering the fall of mine to the point where I could actually survive it. And from the looks of things, I paid for this explosion with the nearly complete destruction of all the anti-cold qualities of my pants, and all the pain that continued to torture my mind.

After several attempts at standing up, I finally managed to regain the mobile position. Raising my head, I had to shield my eyes from the bring the light of the sun reflected by the snow all around me. Looking up to the familiar mountain top, I finally managed just understand what was the source of this uncanny feeling I had when I first spotted it.

I was actually on the other side of the ravine that separated my starting location from the part of the mountains where my destined mountain peak was located!

As risky as it was, if I could progress so much in such a short amount of time, then I could actually stop worrying about completing the mission at all!