After the blood sacrifice ritual ended, even Isara, who had the strongest constitution, felt exhausted. The ritual had consumed far too much magical energy, so Danyla sent them back to their rooms to rest.
Sitting cross-legged beneath the weirwood in the Sky Garden, Danyla swept her gaze across the kingdoms once more through her weirwood network.
The magical energy between heaven and earth was now rapidly dwindling and beginning to converge on certain specific regions.
These included the sites of ancient ruins around the world, such as Oldtown.
Over the decade or so since the extreme weather began, an immense amount of magical energy had gathered in Oldtown's underground spaces. Cold springs of magical energy had even formed in the lowest chambers where the carcasses of magical creatures were stored, and the weirwood in the dragonpit had grown almost as tall as the Hightower.
Even the forging workshops in Oldtown had become much more efficient. Ten thousand sets of valyrian steel equipment and fifty thousand sets of Imitation Valyria Equipment were now stockpiled underground. But no one knew about them except Danyla, Ohn, and a few other master smiths.
Even the hundreds of apprentice smiths thought they were merely forging ordinary fine steel equipment, because the final blood sacrifices and the carving of enchantment runes were all carried out personally by the master smiths.
With its uniquely favorable geography and its numerous weirwoods, Holy Flame Island had also drawn in boundless magical energy. The magic gem veins in its northern mountains had grown considerably as a result.
Through the weirwoods, Danyla knew that an enormous, fractured Rainbow Energy Crystal more than ten meters across lay hidden beneath Holy Flame Island's volcano.
It was probably a fragment of the heart of an immensely powerful energy-body lifeform from ancient times, yet not