The Chair at the Dragon’s Sigh

Once the party recovered enough to move, Ai used her vines to search for the entrance. We tried to recover the rain covers, but they shattered as soon as we picked them up from the acid damp ground. While the extreme temperature changes wore them out, the acid was the final nail in the coffin.

The cave itself was surrounded by grass. The closest trees were some distance away, acting as a barrier between it and the rest of the forest. The area was pristine, eerily so. If our entrance hadn’t been so destructive, it would’ve been impossible to tell which direction we came from.

“Strange,” Aster muttered. She looked a bit sick.

“What?”

“I can’t sense anything.”

“That’s normal. You should probably avoid using mana sense while we’re here,” Ai jumped in.

“Explain.”

“I’m guessing you have a headache?” Aster nodded. “Well, it works similarly to the rainstorm. The density of mana here is much higher, making it harder to penetrate through. Mana sense works by spreading out your mana while keeping it connected to your body, thereby relaying information whenever your mana bumps into something. If the density of mana is much higher than what you can push through, it requires more mana to achieve the same result. It is sorta similar to mana exhaustion.

“As for why there’s so much mana around Dragon’s Sigh, it’s because of the dragon who used to live here thousands of years ago. The surrounding mana will eventually disperse, but that would take a long time depending on how long the dragon lived here. Of course, if there was a dragon still here, the mana density would make it impossible for us to get closer.”

“And how do you know all this?” Rufus asked condescendingly.

“There’s no researcher in the world who doesn’t know this. Mana density is highly studied due to its many practical applications. The warning about breaking crystals has to do with mana dense areas. The mana from the crystal would combine with the outside mana, making the output stronger. Wolf here was lucky that he got away with only his hand partially vaporized.

“Ugh! It pisses me off so much! There’s so much mana here, but I can’t even use it! Sure, it takes a while to convert external mana into something I could use, but this mana is basically unusable! What’s the point of having dense mana if nobody can use it?!? It’s just a waste!!!” Ai huffed heavily. She eventually calmed down enough to finish her thoughts.

“So, yeah. It’s common enough that you don’t need to worry about it. Using mana sense is a waste of time and will only make you feel worse. Use your eyes until we leave, though I doubt we’ll be needing them anyway. The mana is keeping the beasts out, so we should only encounter bandits from here on, assuming they’re actually around at the moment.”

“Why is it called the Dragon’s Sigh, anyway? I understand the dragon part, but why the sigh? A cave doesn’t make a random sighing noise whenever it’s bored. Or did it have to do with the dragon’s breath blowing wind through the cave?” Rufus pondered.

“No idea, don’t care,” Ai responded unenthusiastically.

“Huh? Aren’t you supposed to be the expert here?”

“When did I ever say I know anything about this old, backwater cave? It's a waste of time to research something useless to me. I only need to advance my plant magic. A cave with high mana density doesn’t help me at all. I’d be better off sleeping in my room. At least then I would have the energy to do more research.”

“Fair enough.” Rufus lazily said.

However, it made Ai puff her chest in victory, grinning like an evil genius.