"Hm? She can sense my presence?"
Mu En focused his mind, maintaining only his link to Nausicaä.
If he were caught peeking, it would hardly befit his dignity as a divine tree.
"A stranger? But I haven't been anywhere today... You don't mean Mr. Tree, do you?"
Nausicaä was about to deny it, but suddenly remembered that she had indeed met an outsider today who didn't belong to the Valley of the Wind.
That was the Erdtree, who claimed to have come on the wind and saved the forest.
"A tree...? No, Nausicaä, just what did you encounter?" The old woman frowned.
She had the same gift as Nausicaä, and trees could not speak.
That fleeting "presence" just now had clearly belonged to an intelligent being. She shouldn't have been mistaken.
Yet when she tried to examine the presence on Nausicaä more closely, nothing remained, as though it had never existed at all.
That only made it more suspicious. An ordinary person couldn't erase the traces they had left behind.
"Ah, you'd never believe what we saw today."
"Shut up, I was closer than you. Let me tell her!"
Before Nausicaä could speak, Mito and Gol eagerly began talking over each other.
"Quiet, both of you! One at a time."
Only after Great-Grandma scolded them did the two settle down and take turns recounting the day's events.
They included how the forest had been saved and the miracle Nausicaä had displayed after receiving her blessing.
Gol even held out his short, thick hand, showing how his five fingers, once paralyzed by the Sea of Corruption's encroachment, could now bend freely again, prompting a round of mockery from Mito.
After patiently listening to the absurd and bizarre account, Great-Grandma finally couldn't help turning to the girl beside her.
Even without a word, Nausicaä understood what the old woman meant-
The three of you aren't in this together, making fun of an old woman, are you?
Nausicaä smiled without speaking and simply raised her left hand, showing the golden mark glowing faintly in her palm.
Seeing the uncanny, ethereal mark, the old woman instinctively probed it with her mental power.
As a result, a mental presence so vast that she could not perceive its full extent flashed past, and she felt as though her mental power had been struck by a sledgehammer!
"Ugh!"
"Great-Grandma, what's wrong?"
Seeing Great-Grandma recoil as though struck on the head by a heavy object, Nausicaä hurriedly put away the Erdtree Mark.
"I... I'm fine. Incredible, truly incredible."
Fortunately, the old woman's mental power was strong enough, and she recovered after a moment.
Though she didn't show it, the shock in her heart was no less than what Nausicaä had felt when she first saw the Erdtree.
A tree that resisted the Sea of Corruption's encroachment, a "prayer" that could purify toxins, fruit that strengthened the body, and mental power so immense that even she could not probe it...
Any one of them could be called a "miracle."
But then the wonder faded from the old woman's face, and her expression grew grave.
"Nausicaä, though it may be disrespectful to that 'Erdtree'... I advise you not to get too close to it, and not to use that power again."
The old woman's words stunned everyone, including Mu En, who was still listening in.
"Why?"
Nausicaä asked the question for everyone.
To tell the truth, she was indeed wary of the Erdtree.
An intelligent being of unknown origins and great power had suddenly appeared in the Valley of the Wind. No matter how one looked at it, that was highly suspicious.
What was more, because of her own special ability, she had been taught since childhood not to listen to those "nonhuman" voices.
But the issue also lay in her own ability.
The more she was forbidden, the less she could resist listening to all things, and she had long grown accustomed to acting on the voices of their hearts.
The voices of the heart could not lie.
And in the Erdtree's mental world, she had sensed not the slightest malice.
Its actions had indeed proven as much. Whatever its purpose, it had helped her save the last forest.
That was why she had accepted Mu En's invitation.
It was a hope of saving the Valley of the Wind and keeping her people safe from the Sea of Corruption's toxins.
Seeing the determination in Nausicaä's eyes, Great-Grandma pondered for a moment before speaking slowly.
"Have you heard of the Sea of Corruption's history?"
The hearth crackled, and the room grew so quiet that they could hear one another breathing.
The Sea of Corruption.
That name was like a sword of Damocles hanging over all humanity. Everyone knew it.
It was a boundless fungal forest, made up of countless giant fungi that could grow a hundred meters tall, occupying nearly eighty percent of the continent.
It was called the "Sea of Corruption" because it endlessly spewed poisonous miasma mixed with spores.
A creature that inhaled the miasma would die within a quarter of an hour, its heart and lungs rotting away. A building covered in fungal filaments would corrode and crumble in just a few months.
To this day, that land of death continued to encroach upon humanity's remaining living space.
Perhaps out of fear, almost no one was willing to delve into its origins, as though danger would stay away if they left it alone.
Only the truly wise took care to record and explore the secrets of the Sea of Corruption.
After a brief silence, Great-Grandma's raspy voice broke the stillness, drawing everyone's thoughts toward the distant past.
"The Sea of Corruption has undergone three explosive expansions."
"No one knows when the first two occurred, but the most recent one was connected to the ancestors of our Valley of the Wind."
"The story took place about three hundred years ago, before the Sea of Corruption had driven humanity to eke out an existence at the edge of the continent."
"An ancient kingdom called 'Eftal' rose swiftly in the center of the continent. It was a nation that had inherited advanced technology from ancient times."
"Bridges spanning oceans, buildings towering into the clouds, aircraft that filled the sky... The flying wing Nausicaä uses and the gunship Jihl pilots are among the most insignificant legacies of that era."
"But the good times did not last. To expand their territory, the mighty people of Eftal even reached for the Sea of Corruption-!"
The old woman's voice grew impassioned and captivating, but just as the story reached its climax, it suddenly dropped low.
"And so, everything ended. In a mere twenty days from the outbreak of war, Eftal vanished completely into history."
"Most of the people in the small nations along the Sea of Corruption's edge today are descendants of those who fled Eftal back then."
The three, who had never heard this history before, were left open-mouthed by the sudden turn.
"What?!"
"Grandma, that's just..."
Mito and Gol, who had seen firsthand what the chieftain's gunship could do, knew very well how powerful this "relic" was.
With just two skilled pilots and enough ammunition, it could easily rout an entire regular Tolmekian army. That was also a major reason Tolmekia had never dared to break openly with the border nations.
They could not imagine that even a civilization capable of mass-producing such terrifying creations of war could perish at the hands of the Sea of Corruption.
The old woman seemed to have talked herself thirsty. She scooped up a spoonful of barley porridge, savored it, and then sprinkled in some precious fine salt.
Only then did she continue.
"That's right. Hundreds of millions of insects, their numbers almost impossible to estimate, swallowed up positions, armies, and cities."
"Their corpses became seedbeds for fungi, bringing all of Eftal's territory within the forest."
"That immensely powerful ancient kingdom people speak of, simply because it sought to oppose the Sea of Corruption... was ultimately reduced to ashes."
"The name of Eftal was never heard in history again."