Translator: Kris_Liu Editor: Vermillion
The cave was very dark. The only dim light Lucien could see was from the noctilucent moss. However, with his Moonlight blood power, which the Church called Blessing, Lucien could see very well in the darkness.
In Lucien’s dark pupil, there was the vague figure of Angwoods, flickering and shivering like a candle which had come to its end. Finally, it went out.
“The Lord… shall be back?” Lucien repeated in low voice. This was what he found in Angwoods’s deepest memory except for its boundless anger and hatred.
When Lucien found this piece of information in Angwoods’s memory, he could feel Angwoods’s great respect and excitement.
Lucien wondered if something horrible was really going on in the World of Souls, if the real immortal would wake up and come back.
Of course, the Lord that Angwoods referred to was by no means the God of Truth followed by the Church. Zie should be the God believed in by the senior-rank specters in the World of Souls. However, Lucien had no idea whether this was a true god or just some kind of abstract representative, or if it was like the ancestor of the vampires—Alterna.
Lucien’s power at reading one’s memory was nowhere close to that of Thanatos, and therefore, this ambiguous piece of information was all that he could get. The only thing that he got to know from it was that he had to take some immediate actions, or something very horrible would definitely happen to the main world.
Meanwhile, because of the information that Lucien got from Angwoods, he was more reassured with Rhine’s words. Yet, Lucien was not going to force himself to complete all the tasks to save the world. After all, he was just a senior-rank mage, and this was something that should at least require the power of a group of legendaries. When it was necessary, Lucien definitely would report this to the Highest Council.
Lucien also got to know that it was Felipe who summoned this senior-rank specter, and right now Felipe had not noticed the existence of the World of Souls and where the summoned specters came from. In Angwoods’s deepest memory, there was its contempt for Felipe’s arrogance and its wish that another senior-rank named Adol would end up being tortured and killed by a legendary archmage.
According to the general information he got, Lucien guessed that the Hand of Paleness was indeed aware of the existence of the World of Souls, but they chose to keep the information to themselves in order to explore it on their own, however, it was used by the senior-rank archmages only.
A bright cluster of flame grew out of Lucien’s palm and completely burnt out the remains of Angwoods. Then, very carefully, Lucien erased all the traces of fighting in this cave, in case some other senior-rank specters would discover what happened there.
Finishing the work, with the assistance of Spy Eye, Lucien proceeded further toward the underground.
In the darkness sprinkled with the dim light spots, Lucien walked in this underground maze for more than ten minutes. Gradually, Lucien felt that the air had become a bit warmer, and then he heard the sound of a river flowing.
Lucien knew that he was already very close to the underground ancient city of the dwarves. He became even more cautious.
Turning around a corner very carefully, what Lucien saw surprised him.
What was in front of him was a huge passage, seven or eight meters high, and twenty or thirty meters wide, and the ground and the walls on either side were built by large gray stone blocks, with black pillars in the middle, supporting the ceiling. From the pillars, the passage was divided into three paths. At a glance, the great sense of grandeur seized Lucien’s mind. As the underground passage was already this magnificent, he wondered what would the dwarves’ city look like?
According to the historical records, the dwarves of ancient times did not have magic, nor great blood powers!
The noctilucent patches of mosses growing wantonly on both sides of the walls cast a dim light on the passage. Under the dim light, everything looked very blurry and dream-like. In this kind of environment where silence and gloom resided, Lucien felt that, at any moment, a corpse would crawl out, or maybe a ghost would float out.
After checking around using the eyes, Lucien stepped on the passage. Although he tried to be very gentle, his footsteps still echoed and lingered in the empty space while he was walking on the stone passage.
Lucien activated his blood power and accelerated his movement speed. Now his footsteps could not be heard, and Lucien was moving very fast but, at the same time, he made sure that he was still in the detection range of the nine eyes.
Both sides of the passage were lined with a pair of black metal tracks, which appeared to be the track for some special vehicles to transport goods. Lucien sped along them, and soon he saw the exit of the passage.
Lucien slowed down his pace, and from the pictures sent back by the eyes, he could see that in front of him lay a vast, abandoned architectural complex.
The cave was naturally divided into more than a dozen blocks by the rock walls and pillars supporting the roof. The half-collapsed tall stone houses, overgrown with weeds, looked down on streets that had not been occupied for thousands of years.
What made Lucien a bit nervous was that the stone houses were joined by a series of metal pipes, which protruded from any parts of the houses and then connected to the huge metal pipes at the top of the cave. Growing into the cave roof, no one knew where they were going.
Walking through the cold dreadful streets, Lucien could see at times the familiar metal parts such as bearings, springs, pistons, and gears on the ground, as if he had returned to earth and entered a factory.
The corner of his eye saw something glittering in the grass. Lucien bent forward and picked it up. It was a huge steam rifle as thick as a bazooka. The gears were all rusty and corroded, but Lucien could still tell their sophistication. Also, the steam rifle was attached to a high-pressure steam backpack made of steel, with half the size of a human one.
Gently stroking the rusty rifle, Lucien released a sigh, since it represented the loss of an ancient civilization.
Before the development of human beings, the dwarves who were good at all kinds of crafts, had invented many steam engines and built a splendid Steam Civilization.
Although the dwarves were rather short, the huge airships which could cover the sky, the steamboat which could voyage in the Storm Strait and Boundless Ocean, the cannons that could hold several people inside, the powerful steam rifles, and the steel factories and engineering works that released black smoke day and night were just gigantic as if they were designed for dragons.
Dwarves did not have much theoretical guidance. Relying on their talent and experience, they magically developed the steam, and summarized the mechanical design knowledge in many fields. Even the legendary alchemist, Klaus, had to learn from the dwarves to improve the steam train based on the airships. Klaus’ inventions were more like the improvements based on the original creations of the dwarves, but he managed to use magic or divine power to fuel the vehicles and lower the cost by shrinking their size.
Unfortunately, that civilization had been lost. Lucien got to know about it from the senior-rank Arcana and Magic Library. Even a profound sorcerer like Lazar who grew up in the Congress would have no idea that it was the dwarves who first invented the steam train and used them to transport goods. For him, Klaus was the one who invented the magic steam train.
In the later stage of the dwarves’ Steam Civilization, the pace they had when making that progress started to slow down. The periodic invasion of the dark creatures from the Dark Mountain Range made the dwarves pay hard. The power of the horrible senior-rank creatures was completely out of the dwarves’ expectation, and the steam rifles and cannons failed to work when facing the evil creatures. Within short twenty years, the splendid civilization had retreated to the underground.
However, down there under the ground, Steam Civilization had no space to grow. The civilization finally died out under the attack of many evil creatures and hunters after witnessing the development of the Dragon era, the Nature Elf era, the heyday of Werewolves. At that time, the ancient magic empire first started to gain its power. Only the small proportion of dwarves who chose to stay on the ground, in the end, managed to gain the blood power and spiritual power because of the experiments conducted by the crazy sorcerers. Slowly, those dwarves living on the ground built up their own countries again.
Although today’s dwarves were still good at the alchemy techniques, their civilization was a different one now.
Without the power to safeguard a civilization, one could only see the civilization dying out as time went on. Those ones who were remembered were the profound sorcerers, long-living vampires, and dragons. The rest would eventually be forgotten.
Lucien had some mixed feelings in his mind. He wondered how many splendid civilizations and great figures had been forgotten by history.
He put down the huge steam rifle and moved on. From time to time, he would bent down to pick up some other random stuff, including a silver coin forged with the pattern of a strange hammer and a set of gear, books such as Elementary Mechanical Forging, Steam Rifle Producing, the Illustration of the Steam Engines, the Illustration of Airboats and so on, and the many mechanical articles of various unique styles.
Fortunately, the dwarf language was relatively well preserved and was not very different from the language that the dwarves were using today. Lucien leafed through a few books and copied them in his spirit library.
After a few more minutes of walking in the lost civilization, Lucien saw a huge metal golem half lying on the ground and half leaning against a tall factory building. He stopped to take a closer look at its exposed interior mechanical structure.
Golems—the last piece of straw that the dwarves could grip to safeguard the falling civilization.
The dwarves tried to beat the horrible magical creatures by using this powerful weapon, but the golems that moved very slow failed to fulfill what they hoped. However, it had inspired the sorcerers later and thus they managed to invent the more powerful golems.
Suddenly, a sharp voice was delivered into Lucien’s soul. One part of the crystal ball in his palm suddenly dimmed.
A magic eye was gone!
There came the sound of mournful cries, followed by the sound of busy footsteps that really got on Lucien’s nerves.
Lucien looked up and saw in the distance large pale tentacles popping out of a factory building, and then a huge and disgusting monster got out.
The monster had the upper body of a plump old woman, fat and ugly, and its small eyes were basically just two tiny gaps flickering with fierce and ferocious light. The monster’s huge naked breasts were covered with many black and white eyes, and its lower body was like a white octopus which had many tentacles with suckers.
Hive mother!
A hive mother could produce hundreds of thousands of evil creatures. Without enough food, the evil creatures would eat each other or try to get to the surface.
Following the hive mother, the many evil creatures came to Lucien like the waves of a tide coming from all directions. The number of them was hard to calculate, and among them were even many shooters and warlocks.
Lucien raised his right hand and stroked the badge on his chest. Suddenly, a halo of glittering light spread outwards and quickly covered the range of about five hundred meters.
A powerful storm started to blow, and the many degenerate evil creatures were instantly frozen into pieces and blown away by the strong wind.
As soon as the stone arrows came within the range, they directly fell to the ground since they were frozen with a thick layer ice. The same thing happened to the missiles, spider webs, and magic rays.
Lucien moved forward very quickly, and the halo moved following him. The tall buildings were frozen with the ice and frost. None of the evil creatures could stop him.
The hive mother noticed what was going on. Reaching out its tentacles, it started to climb and jump. The many black and white eyes shot out acid, spider webs, and toxic gas.
However, once they came in the halo of ice and snow, the liquid and gas were frozen solid and then broken into piles of powder.
A few seconds later, Lucien caught up with the hive mother and trapped it in the halo. The movement of the hive mother started to slow down, as its tentacles were frozen solid and thus became very heavy.
At the same time, under the power of the storm, the hive mother’s body started to crack because of the extremely low temperature. As soon as the black fluid came out, it was turned into black ice.
Bang! Thirty seconds later, the hive mother died from cracking into pieces.
By the time Lucien stopped running and the halo disappeared, the entire dwarf city was covered with ice and frost. Some were black and some white. The city became empty and silent again.
The magic spell definitely worked very well, but it was also very likely to hurt Lucien’s own teammates.
…
After more than ten minutes, Lucien finally found a space joint in the underground city. It was a distorted space gap, surrounded by the dwarves’ altars, which were designed in a rather simple way.
It seemed that, at the final stage of the Steam Civilization, the dwarves also started to learn from the magic creatures, but obviously, it did not work very well. As a profound arcanist, Lucien was deeply touched by seeing how the great civilization finally fell.
Lucien took a glance at the poor magic altar, took out the materials and started to worry about his own safety. He wondered if he would get lost when entering another dimension using an altar like that.
After all, close to the space joints under the control of the Congress of Magic, the Congress had set up many space gates using the ninth-circle magic, Gate.
After carefully checking the space gap out and making sure that the gap was relatively stable, Lucien took out the materials and rearranged the space joint teleportation circle. He was glad that the poor quality of the teleportation circle was within his expectation.
It took Lucien three days to reset the teleportation circle. He stood up and did some exercise to warm up and then cast many layers of defense spells on himself. He had no idea what was there on the other end. After all, the last time Rhine used this space joint was several hundred years ago.
Then, Lucien stepped into the dimension which the vampires took away from the dwarves, Night Highland!
