Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation
This magnificent and lavish building had been sleeping in the forest for a hundred centuries. Its glory days were long gone as weathering had eroded its dazzling golden decoration. In the long period of geological change, the main building had gradually sunk into the ground with only one-tenth of it still remaining on the surface. But the astounding thing was that despite its precarious appearance, it was still intact and stable.
Being buried by millions of tons of mud and rock did not crush it.
It looked like, besides the slick decoration, the builder had strengthened the structure of the building. That showed the competence of the deicidal race in building technology.
With Rheia as the guide, the group entered the ruins through the big hole in the dome. They began to search for the path amid the maze-like floors and corridors, venturing deeper into the ruins.
Once inside, Hao Ren confirmed his suspicion again; the place belonged to the deicidal race. There were gorgeous sculptures and reliefs everywhere that exhibited their accomplishments. Additionally, religious symbols and decorations covered almost every corner. The symbols were not meant for the gods but to glorify the builder.
After a few wrong turns, Rheia finally found the right direction. A vertical shaft leading to the underground appeared in front of everyone. The shaft was deep and dark, and occasionally flashing light was visible on the wall; it was the leakage when energy flew through the broken cable and pipes.
“I cannot believe this is so deep.” Lily stood on the edge of the shaft and carefully looked down. Her tail puffed up because of nervousness. “Holy moly! Why do we always have to come to such places?”
“Did you often go to such underground ruins?” Rheia looked at Lily with a strange expression and then shrugged. “This is normal. The building was originally a towering temple that was a thousand meters tall. What we have seen on the surface is just the dome on top of the tower. I am afraid that we will have to descend a thousand meters before we could reach the bottom where important things are usually buried there.”
While speaking, Rheia looked at the wall of the shaft, baffled. “But I am curious; there are no ladders here. How did those people move between the floors?”
Vivian looked down and said, “This must be an elevator shaft. Rock and gravel must have blocked the stairway.”
“Elevator?” Rheia’s mouth twitched. “Whatever. I come prepared. Rheia, the great scholar, will never go to any adventure without preparation!”
As the mage lady spoke, she opened her treasure chest-like robe pocket and fished out a roll of fabric. There must be some space expansion mechanism in her robes; otherwise, there was no way that she could store so many bits and pieces in there.
Rheia unrolled the fabric and gently placed it on the floor. She chanted something in her mouth, and the cloth began to shake, stretch, thicken, and finally turned into a magic carpet. On all four corners of the magic carpet were four lamps. As Rheia cast her spell, the magic carpet gradually floated up to about less than half a meter in the air. It looked steady.
“Let’s get on board!” Rheia said proudly, “I made it myself!”
Vivian quickly spread her wings. “No, thanks! I can fly.”
“I am not going to take that!” Lily could not help but feel hairy when she saw the magic carpet; there was no door nor railing to preventing the passengers from falling over the edge. She took a step back. “This thing looks too wobbly!”
Hao Ren rolled his eyes at the husky maiden and pushed her up the magic carpet. “Stop the crap. I did not hear you say that when you stowed away on an airplane!”
Hao Ren had flight equipment. But this was his first encounter with a magic carpet. Curiosity took over, and he hopped on board with everyone else.
The mage lady skillfully clicked the ignition, got into gear, and took off. The magic carpet carried the load and flew into the shaft wobbly; it was overloaded.
Looking at the gray wall that still had a hint of golden color rising in his field of vision, Hao Ren could not help but mumble, “Where are all the monsters? I thought there will be more here compared to the outside.”
“The devouring monsters only gather around the ruins because of the magic energy leakage. Here, there are hardly any,” Rheia explained. “Because the energy concentration inside the ruins is higher than with what the devouring monsters feel comfortable. All the more so when there is hardly any food here. There is no reason for the devouring monsters to come in here.”
“Ahh, food. Yeah, it is the key,” Hao Ren said and could not help but laugh. “The adventure novels bluff.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I was just talking to myself.”
The magic carpet continued to descend in the shaft. For safety reasons, its descending speed was not fast, which allowed everyone to observe the surroundings. Hao Ren secretly collected the data of the surroundings through his mental connection with the MDT while pretending to study the style of the deicidal reliefs and runes. All of a sudden, he heard a strange rumbling sound came from a direction.
The source of the sound seemed to be far away, but the intricate cavern structure amplified and spread the sound underground.
Lily was the first one to react to the sound. She clenched her giant alloy X666 sword, and her ears flicked back and forth. “Did you hear that? It sounds like something has collapsed!”
“I heard it too.” Rheia was a little nervous. She drew a few magical runes and watched them gradually dissipated in the air before she breathed a sigh of relief. “The sound did not come from here. It should be from somewhere farther and deeper—the Great Pit.”
“Is this situation common?” Hao Ren asked with a frown.
“There are often strange noises coming out of the Great Pit. Sometimes it is airflow, sometimes monsters,” Rheia said indifferently. “Some people say that an old boring machine is digging through our world. Don’t worry, it is far away from us.”
Hao Ren had wanted to say that it would not be far, especially when you could hear it. Just then, the magic carpet reached the bottom of the shaft.
A series of flapping sound was heard as Vivian landed next to them. She tucked her wings and looked around. “This place looks pretty intact.”
Rheia directed the magic carpet to roll itself up while taking out a magic crystal to read the magic energy concentration in the air. The eyes of the mage lady seemed to light up instantly. “Not only the structure is intact, but the magic reaction is also strong. Some ancient facility is still running here. I have struck gold this time!”
Noticing at Rheia’s excitement, Nangong Sanba could not help but ask, “Do you know how the things that you are looking for look like?”
“Things? No, no. I am a scholar, not a tomb thief,” Rheia said seriously. “The ruin itself is what I am looking for. The knowledge buried here, anything useful or with research value, even the structural drawing and the runes and sculptures we saw along the way are the greatest wealth! Come on, hurry up. We still a long way to go!”
Rheia stowed her magic carpet and then rubbed her iron wand with her hands. The crystal on the tip of the iron wand brightened up. She then walked ahead toward the gate, which was apparently an exit at the bottom of the shaft.
The gate was locked, and the access system that controlled the locking mechanism had not been working for years. But it was not a problem for Rheia, who pried open it with her wand without much effort and motioned the others to follow her.
Hao Ren and Vivian exchanged a look and then followed Rheia closely.
This building indeed looked like a temple. And no matter what was in the mind of the deicide when they first built it, the internal structure has the distinctive features of a temple. Not long after coming out of the elevator shaft, Hao Ren and his teammates saw the spacious halls and the solemn corridors, and also more epic reliefs and paintings. Had Hao Ren not known that the deicidal race had long abandoned their faith in gods and proclaimed themselves as sovereign, he would have thought that the place was dedicated to the gods.
Since the building had long been abandoned, there were not many clues left behind. But judging from the neat condition of the place and the fact that there were no apparent signs of damage, Hao Ren thought that those people did not abandon the place in a hurry.
It was apparent that the owners had ample time to leave the building. They took everything with them and only left behind those things that they could not carry. Even so, the things that they left behind were all in the right places, each door was closed correctly, and there were no signs of a rushed evacuation.
Hao Ren also did not find the scene of living items strewn around with the house owner suddenly disappeared. So, he ruled out the possibility that the deicide vanished instantly due to the sudden act of God. All clues pointed to the scenario that the place was abandoned before the advent of the hour of deicide.
Two teams and two different agendas. While Rheia enthusiastically looked for knowledge and heritage of ancient civilizations, Hao Ren and his teammates collected information on the deicide to complete their intelligence report of L’Haronne.
After a brief look around in the central axis of the building, Rheia suggested going to the side hall. She estimated that the energy core in the side hall was still running and that findings would be something invaluable to her.
Hao Ren had no objection to the suggestion.
The group walked through the main hall of the underground temple and the central cloister. It was a feeling of suffocation traveling through the empty temple, but this little difficulty was not a big deal to Hao Ren’s team, which had gone through the baptism of fire.
But halfway to the side hall, the group had to stop as there was a rift lying ahead in their way.
The building was broken in half here with the side hall and main building separated by a rift, which was almost a hundred-meter wide and seemingly bottomless.
Lily stood at the edge of the crevasse and looked up. The dome of the building was also torn apart with rock formation and stalactites hanging from above. The place could have been an underground cave in the first place, that could be the reason why the rock formation above did not fall when the dome broke apart.
There was light on the rock. It flew like a stream on and around the stalactites. The light seemed to be coming from the ruins of the buildings on the other side of the rift, where the side hall was located, and the light stream ended on the top of the building. Apparently, the light flow was the magic energy that Rheia sensed earlier.
The so-called magic energy vein indeed existed, but the path to its source was blocked.
Lily looked down at the crevasse below and found that it was far darker and deeper than the shaft they had just gone through. Down the abyss was a chaotic cyclone surging occasionally. The thought of the danger was making Lily break out in cold sweat, and her hair stood on end. She quickly stepped back.
Vivian spread her wings once again. She stretched her wings while trying to estimate the wide of the crevasse with her eyes. Her expression said that flying across the rift was a piece of cake. “It is just a hundred meters wide. I can just fly across it.”
That was also the thought of her teammates; a hundred-meter-wide crevasse was not even a challenge. Even Lily could lunge across just like that without needing any help. All the more so when they could opt to fly.
But Rheia immediately stopped Vivian. “Wait a minute! Don’t do that!”
Vivian turned to look at the mage lady. “What’s wrong?”
“This rift is the breach that leads to the Great Pit I have mentioned before.” Rheia’s face did not look good; even nervous—an expression people rarely saw on the chesty mage lady’s face. “You will surely die if you do that!” Rheia said.
Vivian tucked her wings. She was doubtful. “It is just the entrance to the Great Pit. Will there be a problem flying above it?”
“People like you all who know a smattering of the Great Pit are most likely getting into danger.” Rheia sighed and then picked up a stone. She cast her magic into the stone and tossed it across the crevasse.
The enchanted stone flew straight out, and it looked like it would cross the crevasse and reach the side hall on the opposite side easily. But just as it was halfway across, a shadow rose from below the crevasse. Hao Ren had never seen such a weird phenomenon or matter. The thing looked like sheer darkness, and the darkness was so pure that there were no details visible. It just soared to the air, as if it had dug out a piece of space from the air, or a drop of black ink had dropped on a painting. When the darkness rose, it did not come into contact with the stone that flew halfway across above the crevasse, but it suddenly turned illusory and translucent.
A second later, the stone disappeared into thin air—even the magic flash that Rheia gave it had vanished together.
Hao Ren had seen many strange things in his life, but nothing was like this. He could not help but swallow, thinking quietly that things were not looking good.
Once ‘licked’ by the thing, nothing seemed to escape.
“The Great Pit will devour everything—anything that possesses magic energy, sings of life, stone or an adult dragon—that enters its sphere of influence,” Rheia said. “I don’t know how or from whom you learned about the Great Pit. Teachers? Wandering poets? Other mercenaries and adventurers? They are all bullshitting and boasting with the little knowledge of the Great Pit. Most researches claimed to reveal the truth of the Great Pit is downright lies. Those who claim to have entered the Great Pit and come back alive and wrote a book about it are even more nonsense. Their studies only touch the branch structure of the Great Pit or their experience in the mines near the Great Pit. No one has ever come back out alive from the Great Pit. It is ridiculous that many of the self-proclaimed scholars have even divided the Great Pit into two parts: the deadly zone and the so-called mild zone. This is utterly bullshitting! There is no mild zone in the Great Pit. At most, these are the natural caves that contain a slight influence of the Great Pit, and it is not worth the trouble to study them!”
Rheia pointed at the crevasse, where the strange darkness had slowly retreated, and it looked like nothing had happened before. “This is the Great Pit, the real deal. So, never ever cross the rift from the above, and don’t try to challenge its phagocytotic ability.”
Hearing the stern warning of Rheia, Nangong Sanba gasped. “Now I know why you have difficulty recruiting people.”
“What?”
Y’zaks also said in her coarse voice, “Now I finally understand. According to the current world-recognized definition, the underground temple and the shaft that we have just passed through are already part of the Great Pit. Am I right?”
Rheia’s face turned red.
Hao Ren folded his arms and looked at the mage lady. “It is just that in your definition, those places are not counted as one.”
“I do not have any money anyway! You had better kill me now,” Rheia said.
Hao Ren was speechless.
He could not find the words to respond; what a creative answer it was.
“Forget it, we have not said anything yet,” Hao Ren said helplessly and waved at the mage lady. “We had better find a safer place to camp and rest before finding a way to circumvent this rift. What do you think?”
Rheia thought for a moment and said, “Are you planning to kill me while I am sleeping and inherit my wealth?”
“Inherit my foot!” Hao Ren could not hold back his anger. “Do you really think that your shaky house in White Maple City worth anything?”
“The tower may not sell much money, but the land in the mage area is very expensive!” Rheia retorted.
Hao Ren was rendered speechless.
