All the staircases leading upstairs had collapsed, and more than half of the side of the 1st Floor near the lake was flooded. The cracks in the load-bearing walls were as dense as if Little Mia's paws had scratched them, while every kind of snake, insect, rat, and ant had already made a home here.
Although Megan had investigated the ring's location, she had not expected the manor to be in such terrible condition. Standing with Shade at the entrance to the manor house and looking into the interior foyer, she hesitated before saying to him:
"Take my hand. I'll bring you up."
She naturally hooked her hand around Shade's:
"Though my strength is still recovering, I can manage a short flight."
"Let me do it instead."
Shade closed his eyes briefly, used his newly acquired Enhanced Space Perception to determine the terrain around the manor, then took out a vial of Weather Vane Bluegrass extract and dripped it onto his tongue before tightly grasping Megan's hand:
"Stand firm."
He took a step forward, and the two of them vanished from where they stood, appearing in the third floor corridor. The weight of the two of them and Mia pressed down on the warped wooden floorboards, producing a loud "creak~" that startled the nearby rats into fleeing into the shadows cast by the sunlight shining through the window at the end of the corridor onto the rotten, collapsed door panels.
"Space Movement?"
Megan looked around in surprise:
"You're only a six-ring Ring Arcanist, yet you can already perform stable spatial movement while carrying someone?"
"Have you tried it before?"
"I have. A friend who has already passed away was also very skilled with spatial power. But she was much higher-ranked than you, and she generally only used spatial power for