They followed the little flying pig all the way to where the roots of the world touched the sky.
The pig seemed to have become resigned to seeing them, but it wouldn't let anyone get close if it could detect them. With ZipZings stealth skill and invisibility spell, she could have attacked it easily, but verbal communication sort of required direct interaction.
Danika had tried leaving written messages, and even carried the others ahead of the pig to leave more. But the pig apparently couldn't read in any of the languages that any of them knew how to write in, and Jade could write in hundreds of languages, including elvish oddly enough, even though he no longer had any other data about elves outside of his memory records. The pig probably couldn't read at all.
No one but Jade and the pig seemed to think there was anything particularly different about the stone ridges that rose from the ground, where the roots of the world were supposed to be. They seemed like the kind of feature that you might see while climbing any mountain to Danika, but the pig stopped trying to fly onward, and ran around on the ground sniffing the exposed stone with all its might.
"What do you think it's looking for? Is there anything significant about the roots, or something that grows on them?" Danika asked Jade.
"This is only one of the roots. Each one is a pathway, but the entrances are difficult to find and well guarded," Jade replied.
Shrubbery had finished her paper and returned to them a second time before they reached the root, and now she asked, "How would the pig know that?"
Kit suggested uncertainly, "Maybe it's like a migration instinct? Maybe another reason that you never see a flying pig is that they all go to another place?"
They all turned to look at Jade, and Danika prompted, "Jade?"
"I don't know, I do not have any records of a hummingbird cross, or of any flying pig that lived for more than a few minutes," Jade replied.
"But you must have calculated what their data would be like if they lived," Shrubbery objected.
"No," Jade replied succinctly.
Danika assured Shrubbery quickly, "Actually, crosses that have not yet been generated really don't have any. That's why part of my usual job is reworking auto generated creatures that cause people difficulties, so that they fit better."
After Danika listed a few examples, Kit said sympathetically, "I feel like the pig could use your help."
"I think it would benefit from my other idea more," Danika replied. "I think it's pretty interesting as is, but it would be cool if it could choose to do some epic quest and become an ordinary pig or bird if it wanted to. Of course, it would have to be super difficult for half dragon characters like me to use it to become full blooded dragons."
Jade asked curiously, "Did you request such a quest from the Emperor?"
"Not yet, because I've been working on the demo team. But I've told my assistant here everything I've thought of so far, so that I can work on it when I return," she explained.
"Maybe," Jade began, just as the little pig made an excited noise.
The flying pig seemed to have discovered something, and began trying to dig into the stone. It frantically tried half a dozen places before suddenly sinking out of sight as though it had stepped into quicksand.
Danika abandoned the conversation and zipped over to that spot. She pushed against the stone with her little clawed hands and felt something cold, and wet, that suddenly sucked her away into darkness.
She didn't panic. Shinichi made fun of how often ZipZing got eaten by things, but he wasn't wrong. She felt that she could be considered somewhat of an expert by now. She activated both her light cantrip and increased her own dazzling, and tried to look around herself.
It was hard to tell, but she thought that she might be moving very quickly through a tunnel full of greenish liquid. The tunnel seemed to be growing larger as the traces of movement surrounding her grew darker.
She tried to swim upward, and banged into something hard. The first impact was followed by several more. Once she was battered into a limp, unresisting state, she seemed to be floating in the middle of a dark space again, with faint traces of quick movement at the edges of what she could see.
It was strange, it felt like liquid, and she floated without moving her wings, like it was a liquid, but she could breathe. She'd been able to breathe inside her egg before she'd hatched, but she hadn't floated within it, or even had any idea that she was within a liquid until she'd hatched.
A moment later, her pet Hikaru popped into existence beside her. It's light seemed a bit dim, and it seemed to move very slowly, but its presence told Danika that she had moved out of range of Jade and her stone space. She tried accessing her menus, and they popped into existence normally. Her firefly's health and energy were full, so whatever the liquid was, it didn't seem to be harmful to it either.
After a moment of thought, she tried tapping her storage ring. Her inventory was also available normally, so this wasn't a place like her egg. She wrote on the guild board: "Sucked into the root I think, and being carried away in some kind of liquid. Waiting to see where I end up."
Shrubbery responded first: "We followed you. But I'm inside of a tree space, like the path my tree lets me travel through to move between places. It is taking a lot longer to get anywhere, but everything else seems normal. Also, there's no liquid here."
Kit responded a few moments later: "I stuck my hand through the stone, and fell through like it was the entrance to a shadow path, but I came out right away and I'm in the Jade Palace. The Emperor says that he can't tell me anything because you must undergo your own trials. Sorry."
Jade was the last to reply with: "It seems that you were correct ZipZing. The entrance existed very close to its original coordinates, only I did not know how to see it through this interface."
Danika replied to Jade first: "None of us could see it, but I think the pig could smell it? It's okay Kit. If you think about it, if the root is the Emperor's pathway then it makes sense that he can bring you straight home from it. Shrubbery, I wonder if you could walk out of your tree from there, or if we are all headed to the same place?"
Shrubbery replied right away: "Oops, I tried calling to my tree. You were right, it could reach me there, so now I'm in my garden, but it says that it can't send me back to that path."
Danika gazed into the liquid darkness that seemed deeper and more vast with every passing minute, and replied: "It's cool that it really linked up though. Jade, what's your path like?"
Jade responded obediently with only: "Empty."