"And it was still inside the lake?" Uchiha Madara asked.
"Very few people across the entire Elzeran Continent know about this now, aside from a handful from the Church. But since I happened to meet the three of you here, I might as well tell you directly," the man said.
"I read records about this forest in a forbidden book. It said that Winterfort originally had no such forest. This was the work of Kantner, the greatest spatial mage on the Elzeran Continent from a very long time ago."
"The road from the royal city to Winterfort was extremely difficult to travel. It should still be that way now, right? Back then, Kantner wanted to make this road more convenient for people, so he used his spatial magic to forcibly move a separate space here, opening a route from the royal city to Winterfort," the man said.
"That was how this forest came to be," the man concluded.
"This place leads to the royal city?" Carter Binda said in surprise. "But this forest isn't nearly as large as what we see now, is it? Even if you drew a straight line from the royal city to Winterfort, it would be much farther than this."
"That's right." The man grinned. "But that's what makes spatial magic so incredible. A journey that originally took a week can now be completed in a day."
"Why has no one ever heard of this? Such a convenient route couldn't possibly have remained unknown from the beginning until now," Belaque asked, looking at the man.
"It was because of the Magic Stone," the man said. "This route was originally meant to benefit the people of the Elzeran Continent, but when the royal city first sent people to test it, they unexpectedly discovered the existence of a