Every head in Rydorburg swiveled in the direction of the stronghold of Arcusstone when they heard the thunderous voice that swept across the entire city with incomprehensible bewilderment.
“What in Heaven’s name had possessed Li Zhiyuan into committing such insanity?! Has he gone mad?!
“It’s not even a day after he had butchered everyone from the Priory! Is he really going for Arcusstone this time?! What is he after?! To take on the whole world himself?!
“That’s really insane!”
In the meantime, Li Mu was standing just outside Arcusstone’s main entrance. What the gates revealed when they were flung open was the surprising sight of squalor — a barely-tended horse trail left to be infested by weed leading straight into a shabby and decrepit courtyard devoid of any human soul.
There was no one at all. Li Mu was half-expecting to see an army of seething Arcusstone acolytes rushing out to surround him.
Whatever stood behind the gates of Arcusstone’s main entrance screamed of nothing but desolation and despair.
If Li Mu wasn’t aware that he was inside the grounds of the biggest and most powerful militant order the Northern Steppes had ever seen, he would have thought that he had stumbled into an abandoned monastery left to rot and decay.
“Is this what the all-mighty Arcusstone is behind all the facade?!” Li Mu wondered.
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In fact, the whole place looked like there hasn’t been anyone living here in decades or even centuries.
“Is this really Arcusstone?”
Even Shen Jia was so surprised himself that his jaws here hanging with disbelief.
“Are we sure we got the right place?”
Impossible.
Every single person in the Northern Steppes knew that Arcusstone only has one stronghold here in Rydorburg and nowhere else.
Shen Jia peered at Li Mu.
The latter marched through the gates and stepped inside.
Li Mu could feel no rippling sensation coming from any enchantment magic around him nor were there any signs of Taoist magic. Everything around him was true, not an illusion.
The messy and rampant pestilence of grass weeds in the compound could reach as high as Li Mu’s midriffs. One could almost make out the animal tracks that portended the presence of wild beasts lurking around. Layers and layers of bird droppings swathed the top of the compound’s walls and decorative rock mounds. Some of the former had even collapsed and the broken part of the wall only lent credence to how bleak and dreary the sight was. But there were no signs of a battle. This was merely squalor; the destitution of care and maintenance after long years of being worn out and battered by weather.
Li Mu was sure that no one has been here for centuries.
Li Mu and Shen Jia walked down the horse trail that was overrun with more weeds.
Flanking the path was weatherworn or even tumbled white alabaster statues and hitching posts. They had walked for almost a hundred meters when they heard a loud groaning din. The heavyset gates that Li Mu had just kicked open were closing on their own all of a sudden.
The creepiness was making Shen Jia’s hands go damp with sweat.
He looked at Li Mu again, searching for comfort.
But he found none. Without a word, Li Mu pressed on.
For the next quarter of an hour, the mentor and student passed through more instances of disrepair and neglect. They walked up a half-broken bridge after passing the horse trail, walked over a fully dried-up pond, walked by a collapsed building, and came upon a deserted parade square. Finally, they arrived at the great audience hall of Arcusstone, the symbol and seat of its power and majesty.
Strangely, the main audience hall looked well cared for. There was no weed infestation that scourged the surroundings of the structure and there were at least signs that someone had been there. Recently.
A tiny trail obscured from view because of the weeds, led straight to the main audience hall. At the end of it was a ninety-nine-step staircase that reached all the way to the hall’s entrance at the top.
Li Mu and Shen Jia climbed the steps and found themselves looking up at the main doors of the audience hall.
A circular arcade, built in the style of Northern Steppes architecture stood just outside the great doors. Intricately-hewn sculptures of Northern Steppes heroes and champions — most of whom hailed from Arcusstone itself — towering at a hundred meters tall held up the roofs of the arcade. Each and every one of them was once a minor legend in their own right, having each forged tales of their exploits through famous and great battles that all men worshipped and held their names in reverence.
At more than twenty meters tall and half its height in width, the giant doors of the main audience hall swung open to admit them, like a gigantic beast of monstrous proportions yawning its mouth open. Pitch-black darkness beckoned from inside and the strange, unnatural winds that breezed from inside threatened to chill anyone who stood at its entrance down to his very bones.
Li Mu could barely admit that he knew what on earth was going on here.
“Does this mean that the real Arcusstone had long faded in time?
“In that case, who the hell was that messenger and that assassin who tried to kill me on the streets?
“Curiouser and curiouser.”
Pace by pace, Li Mu stepped into the hall, plunging himself into its gaping darkness.
Shen Jia peeled after him closely behind.
The vastness of the cavernous chamber was like the empty stomach of the behemothic monstrosity of brick and mortar that they had just walked into — empty and bare. It looked as if they had just stepped into a crypt that had been plundered dry. Cold winds howled shrilly around them, screaming to and from between the granite columns of the many-pillared hall. Was it because of the wind, Li Mu did not know, for the floor was awfully clean for a place so seemingly empty. Shen Jia’s footsteps were bouncing off the wall in sonorous pitter-patters in the dark-filled enclosed space.
The look on the boy’s face was one of bewildered perplexity.
Li Mu halted all of a sudden.
With reflexes that even a lightning bolt could barely keep up, his hand shot up and groped at something behind Shen Jia’s neck.
Li Mu’s fingers grasped around something small and solid — a tiny dagger the size of a viper’s fang. Li Mu crushed it and the tiny knife snapped. Then, without a warning, he drove the broken dagger into the darkness. A yelp pierced the silence and a black figure fell out of thin air and crashed to the ground.
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It was a man clad in the same scale mail armor as the assassin who tried to kill Li Mu on the streets.
With the dagger’s blade laced with the Deity’s Bane poison, the assassin died fast. His body melted into a puddle of black slime and with his final vestiges of sentience and defiance, he threw himself at Li Mu and Shen Jia, but the latter fired a jet of Mana at the black mass, blasting him into bits and pieces.
“Stand here. Don’t move.”
Li Mu’s voice came softly in the tenebrosity.
His senses had picked up more than one assassin and they were all skulking around them using Apparition’s Flight to keep themselves unseen. The absence of light inside the bowels of this audience hall made this place a more ideal place for assassinations than the streets outside, with or without that fog-like enchantment. Even an unskilled assassin, armed with the scale mail armor and Apparition’s Flight, could easily use the darkness to complete any deed and still remain concealed.
But they were up against Li Mu.
Li Mu, like an ebbing mirage, gradually melted into the darkness.
He knew how to use Apparition’s Flight as well, perhaps even more proficiently than the assassins here.
Like a great white shark on the hunt, he began his retaliation in the darkness, chasing down each and every prey unfortunate enough to pass his sights.
Shen Jia was so shocked to see how his mentor discorporating from sight that he let his jaws drop.
In mere seconds, peals of agonizing shrieks and screams echoed in the darkness around him.
Thud! Thud!
One after another, men in scale mail armor appeared like fish drawn out of water with a fishing rod.
By the time Li Mu finally reappeared, a total of sixteen men — all of them similarly clad in the same scale mail armor and coif — had been incapacitated.
But they refused to give Li Mu whatever information they knew. Before Li Mu could even interrogate them, the Class VIII and IX champions all sacrificed themselves by turning into the same acrid puddle of corrosive slime.
“These assassins don’t seem to be part of Arcusstone…”
Li Mu uttered aloud his suspicion. The pieces were beginning to fit.
“Could it be that the real Arcusstone had been decimated many years ago and some unknown force had been at play, using Arcusstone as a cover to manipulate and control the world of warriors from the shadow?
“But what are these assassins doing here? From the looks of how they’re lurking inside this audience hall, they seem to be protecting something.
“Or are they guarding something?”
Li Mu began to look around the hall to see what he could find.
Lo and behold, inside one of the inner vestibules of the hall, Li Mu discovered a hidden mechanism embedded inside the walls. He yanked a lion head sculpture hanging on the wall and the ground started to rumble. The part of the wall rose up and revealed a secret portal.
What followed behind the secret portal was a dark passage that wound into depths unknown.
The unnatural winds that had been blowing inside the main audience hall had come from here, Li Mu realized. But standing just outside the passage, he could pick up dampness amid the stench of rot.
Unfazed, Li Mu stepped through the portal, taking Shen Jia with him.
They were almost fifty meters down the slopes inside the dark tunnel when Li Mu was sure that they were entering an ancient dungeon.
Then they found their way barred by a heavy iron-grated gate made of bars as thick as a man’s arm.
A specially-built lock hung on the latch of the heavily-rusted gate. From the looks of it, brute force won’t do much good to free the way. Meanwhile, the gate was now the only thing that stood between Li Mu and a spacious subterranean chamber housing several hundred prison cells that honeycombed the ground underneath the main audience hall, all of which were sealed with iron-plated doors.
The heavily-studded iron-plated doors looked impossibly strong and sturdy. Nothing suggested there was any way possible for prisoners to get out once incarcerated inside and there was only a tiny hole barely as large as a man’s thumb for jailors to peek inside.
Only, no one was around at all. So Li Mu couldn’t tell if the prison cells were filled.
But first things first, he needed to get past the iron-wrought gates and they looked unusually strong.
Li Mu paused to think, then he went back outside. From the heaps of slimy muck that were the remains of the sixteen assassins, he found several jet-black medallions shaped like keys. He took the key-medallion and used one of them to unlock the gate. It worked.
CREAK!
The rusted gate protested mightily with a shrill creak the moment it swiveled on its hinges.
Just then, Li Mu’s ears fluttered.
His sharp senses picked up movements inside some of the jail cells. But whether they were movements of vermin roused or movements of people who were still alive, he could not tell.
Meanwhile, Shen Jia felt nothing at all.
If anything, he felt as if he had just stepped into an underground necropolis inhabited only by the dead and nothing else.
He walked to one of the iron doors at the bottommost levels of this dungeon.
The odiferous smell of decomposing flesh slammed facefirst into him.
There was no one inside, save for the sunken hollows of the six skulls staring back at him. The skeletons to whom they belonged were laid on the ground in a neat array. From what remained of the tattered clothing still clinging to the bones, these were formerly men and women somewhere between twenty to thirty of age. The bones looked more than a century old and the moment the door opened and fresh air came rushing in, some of the fabric particles disintegrated into dust.
“What the…” Shen Jia gasped, feeling goosebumps all over him.
But Li Mu immediately recognized the clothing. They matched what the whole world knew as the iconic attire of Arcusstone acolytes. All six corpses must belong to Arcusstone members.
They proceeded to roam around the same level, unlocking more jail cells around them.
Like the first jail cell they went into, what waited inside were the skeletons of the dead long passed. Not even traces of their flesh and blood remained except for the shredded and dilapidated clothing they formerly wore up to the moments of their deaths, including authority medallions, jade pendants, hair pins, and many other jade-fashioned valuables that Li Mu could recognize were made by the skilled hands of master craftsmen. He did not know exactly how valuable were the items, but the authority medallions bore several names: Third Assistant Zheng Lun, Captain of the Guard Wang Youxing, Guard-on-duty Yue Qun, and many more. Those probably were the names and positions of these deceased when they were still alive.
