Nihona

What good is a rival if they don't make you better? For years, this was the core of Nihona's competition with Kai, the fastidious cartographer. Kai would pore over ancient charts in The Crystal Highlands of Armaria, predicting the path of a shifting monolith, only to find Nihona already there, waiting with their poker face, having simply followed the hum of the earth. In return, Nihona would find their carefully scouted shortcuts marked by Kai's infuriatingly precise survey flags. The race was to find the Echoing Geode first. But when they both got trapped by a sudden crystal-slide, they realized the game was flawed. They sought Horoguramu's pools not to see who would win, but how. The vision was blurry, showing one reaching the geode only with the other’s help. The rivalry didn’t end that day; it just gained a new, unspoken objective.