Evening.
The outskirts of Thin Mist Forest.
The campfire burned with a soothing "crackle," its warm glow lighting the dim air around it.
Fine cloth sleeping bags, cashmere blankets, scalding iron cups, and boiling water bubbling away...
An ordinary small camp.
At a glance, it seemed no different from the hundreds of Adventurer camps now scattered sparsely throughout the vast forest, set up by those who had ventured deep into danger to strike it rich on "Hunting Day."
But if someone could truly stay a while longer in this seemingly ordinary camp, they would discover in surprise:
The temperature in the camp was clearly a little warmer.
It was already the "Falling Leaf Moon," and the temperature had dropped noticeably. Coupled with the special environment within Thin Mist Forest, nights here were especially hard to endure.
An Adventurer of average Constitution, without hot water and fire to drive away the cold, could easily catch a chill and fall ill over the course of a single night.
But in this camp, the space shrouded by firelight seemed like another world, the temperature adjusted to the range most comfortable for the human body.
Even the mosquitoes and other insects that had always been drawn by flames—the most numerous and most annoying creatures in the forest—seemed to have been driven away by this firelight, nowhere to be seen.
If one observed even more carefully, and also possessed some attainment in magic, perhaps one would be able to discover the fundamental reason why the inside of the camp differed from the outside world.
—The mist was flowing.
Filling every corner of Thin Mist Forest, the gray-white mist that had drifted quietly in the air was now, at this moment, like thin streams, flowing in circles around the campfire at the center.
Like a whirlpool