Loa stepped onto Lake-Center Island.
The moment his feet touched ground, he sensed something wrong.
It wasn't danger-it was a fine, pervasive prickling. Like pulling a sweater on or off in dry winter weather, countless invisible sparks burst across his skin. He raised a hand. Every hair on its back stood upright, and tiny blue-white arcs stretched between his fingertips and the air, crackling softly.
The concentration of Thunder Element was absurdly high.
He took a few steps forward. With each step, the friction between his soles and the rock carried a faint tug of attraction. This mountain had been thoroughly magnetized-not just its surface, but from the inside out. Every grain of gravel, every crack, was steeped in years upon years of lightning strikes.
No wonder it floated. This wasn't magic. It was physics.
Loa looked up toward the summit.
The hollow was conspicuous, like a bowl turned upside down right in the middle of the mountaintop. He climbed over the magnetized rocks, feeling a faint stickiness beneath his feet.
There was nothing in the hollow.
The bare rock walls were unusually smooth. Not the rounded smoothness of natural formations, but as though something had carefully scraped, dug, and hollowed them clean.
Loa crouched and ran his fingers around the bottom.
There were no residual energy fluctuations, no traces of restrictions. Someone had been here, and quite some time ago. That person had taken whatever had originally been here-perhaps ore, perhaps some Lightning Element treasure. It seemed unrelated to the Thunder Prison.
He withdrew his hand and stood.
There was nothing to regret. With such a vast, anomalous place, it would have been stranger if no one had discovered it in hundreds of years. The true inheritance couldn't possibly be sitting out in plain sight.
The problem was that