Ch210-Land Down Under

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Ch210-Land Down Under

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The light that passed through the cracks above illuminated the area. If it weren’t for the giant patches of darkness in the spaces between the cracks, Sylver would have thought he was still outside.

Sylver was grateful for the fact that he didn’t need to breathe because if the intense pressure on his eyeballs was to be believed, there wasn’t any oxygen down here. It wasn’t a perfect vacuum, but if it weren’t for the layer of mana surrounding him, the saliva in his mouth would have started boiling by now.

“We’re underground, how can the air pressure be this low?” Ria asked.

Since she was covered by Sylver’s mana, he heard her loud and clear.

The complete and utter silence didn’t disturb Sylver, but he could feel Mora was bothered by it.

“Normally I’d say magic, but this is one of those rare times where I have to say, Ki. Or something along those lines. The good news is that this isn’t a dungeon,” Sylver said, as he walked over to Mora and very gently moved his hand down her “head.”

Calling her a “horse” right now wouldn’t be proper, the only thing horse-like about her was her head, and even then, Sylver had to squint to see it.

Her torso had squashed itself into an oval sphere, and her limbs shifted until they were almost right next to each other.

More than anything else, she looked like a giant spider. Or a crab, depending on the angle.

But, to Mora’s credit, she was no longer limited by her musculature, and now could move left, right, backward, forwards, and although she wasn’t as “fast” in terms of acceleration, she was still significantly faster than Sylver was on foot, or in [Fog Form].

Currently, they were both standing on the roof of a single-story building, that very easily supported the weight of an extremely dense necromancer and his equally dense companion.

The reason for that was that the roof was made out of metal, as were the walls supporting it, as was everything as far as Sylver could see. Tarnished silvery metal, covered in some spaces by coats of dark orange dust.

Sylver felt Ria slither down his side and leg and felt something akin to a gasp from her as she touched the floor.

“It’s plastic,” Ria said, as she lifted the tiny piece of metal she had sliced out of the ground up to Sylver’s face.

“Great,” Sylver said with a polite smile, as he took the tiny speck of plastic metal out of her tendril and continued moving his hand down Mora’s neck.

“It’s some sort of extremely dense organic polymer, but the chemical structure doesn’t make sense?” Ria asked, as if she excepted any sort of answer other than what Sylver said.

“Ki enhanced plastic,” Sylver said, as Mora nearly pushed him over as she shoved her head against his.

Her eyes had moved around and now gave her just short of 360 degrees of sight, blocked only by her torso behind higher than her head.

“No, it’s… It’s like amber, solid resin, but it shouldn’t be this dense,” Ria explained, as Sylver nodded along, while he waited for Mora to completely calm down, and for the scouting shades to return.

“I see,” Sylver said dismissively, as Spring returned with not a whole lot of news.

The city was empty, and it was also one piece of a greater whole. Streets continued into solid rock, buildings were cut in half by the rock walls, and for all intents and purposes, it appeared as if someone had found a giant hole in the ground and teleported a part of a city inside.

Sylver didn’t recognize the architectural style, but going by the height of the doorways, and windows, humans, elves, or a race of a similar height, had once lived here.

Both Sylver and Mora turned at the same time and saw a flat snake-like creature slithering towards them. It was dead silent, mostly due to the lack of air to carry the sound, but also because the monster was somehow moving along the dusty rooftops without disturbing the dust.

“That’s very disturbing,” Spring said, as he disappeared into Sylver’s shadow, and confirmed that the monster was completely invisible to him, while he wasn’t materialized.

Sylver watched as the monster opened its mouth, and like a pelican, stretched its jaws apart. The resulting flap of skin created the appearance of a mouth several times bigger than the monster, enough so that Sylver couldn’t see the tail part.

All he saw was two very large dark brown billowing skin flaps becoming larger and larger with each passing second. Sylver also noticed that the edges of these flaps, the “teeth,” for lack of a better word, were very thin, and perfectly smooth, like the edge of a curved razor blade.

Sylver clasped his hands behind himself and stood up straight as the monster continued soundlessly slithering towards him. He just stared at it, as it seemed to be completely unconcerned at the fact that it had been spotted.

[??? – ??? – 129]
[HP: 19,880 – 94%]
[MP: 0 – 0%]
[Stamina: 4,890 – 97%]
[Corpse – Common]
[Soul – Petty]

“Huh…” Sylver said as the serpent disappeared from view, and Sylver lifted his head to look up at the two giants inflated half-spheres falling onto him. The monster’s timing was perfect, it clamped its jaws, and Sylver’s head was sliced clean off his body.

Or rather, that’s what would have happened, if Mora’s strings hadn’t tightened and froze it in place. Sylver stepped out of the way as Mora slowly lowered the statue still creature towards the ground.

Sylver used [Deadly Darkness] to turn the wrapped-up monster onto its back and jumped up onto the monster’s chest. Now that he was physically touching it, Sylver could tell it was screaming, albeit it was having a hard time of it, given the extremely strong strings constricting it.

“Can you understand me?” Sylver asked the creature.

Its jaws remained inflated, through some kind of foldable bone structure. Sylver waited for a response but didn’t feel any reaction from the screaming serpent.

A dagger appeared in Sylver’s hand, and he discovered that there was a very good reason as to why the creature was so unconcerned with being spotted.

Sylver couldn’t cut it.

He couldn’t stab it.

He couldn’t even get a grip on it.

It was like trying to grab hold of a soap bubble, it was that smooth. Sylver continued trying to stab it with his [Necrotic Mutilation] coated dagger, but even when he enhanced the weapon with enough mana that Sylver’s hand started to smoke, he couldn’t get through the monster’s seemingly impenetrable armor.

It wasn’t impenetrable because it was hard, it was impenetrable because of the exact opposite reason. It was so squishy and stretchy that Sylver couldn’t apply enough pressure to stab it. Even when he thought he pierced it, it turned out that he had simply pierced the floor underneath it, and the monster was completely unharmed.

Thankfully the smoothness didn’t do shit against a cloud of [Draining Blight]. The second Sylver’s cloud of HP draining smog touched the monster’s skin, it buckled so hard it made Mora lose her footing.

Sylver could feel its screaming through the vibrations in the floor, as the monster slithered out of Mora’s stings, and tried to bite a piece of Sylver off.

Luckily Ria stepped in at that moment and stabbed the monster through the head as if Sylver hadn’t failed to so much as scratch it a couple of seconds earlier.

[??? (???) Defeated!]

[Draining Blight (VI) Proficiency increased to 42%!]

[Necrotic Mutilation (IV) Proficiency increased to 2%!]

“Is it suffocation?” Sylver asked, as he made the corpse float into the air, and continued inspecting it.

As he turned it over, one of the “teeth” fell, and lazily uncoiled within the creature’s mouth.

“Alright, I see. It catches something, and then lets this flap of teeth act as a blender…” Sylver explained as he found that the creature’s impenetrability stopped working once it died.

Sylver’s dissection revealed a couple of interesting things.

For starters, it didn’t have any internal organs.

There was a long tube, that Sylver had to assume acted like a stomach, but that was it. It had eyeballs, but they weren’t connected to anything, it didn’t have a brain, it didn’t have a heart, it didn’t even have any proper muscles, the only thing inside was a dark red ground beef-like substance.

He had seen similar types of monsters in the past and had to assume this was the Ki equivalent. Some monsters depended on mana so much that they literally couldn’t exist or function in environments that weren’t extremely mana dense.

The problem with these kinds of monsters was that Sylver struggled to understand how they functioned, without literally spending weeks studying them. Even if he didn’t get the feeling that raising this thing as an undead would bring back its squishy invulnerability, as a necromancer, Sylver was still curious to figure out what made it tick.

His attempt to store the two corpse halves in his [Bound Bones] storage showed that it was still soaked through with Ki, and Sylver’s mana-based storage perk didn’t want to play ball.

Sylver turned one half into a dense sphere of [Necrotic Mutilation] and mixed it into the semi-liquid armor he was wearing over his torso. And because she had asked for it he gave the other half to Mora, who slurped up the whole thing the way someone might slurp down a long piece of pasta.

He and Mora jumped down from the metal roof and landed on the empty dust-covered street below.

Sylver poked his head into the house he had been standing on and found it to be completely empty. No tables, chairs, flowerpots, just walls, windows, and a doorframe without a door.

Every building Sylver inspected had the same empty interior. It was as if everything that wasn’t bolted down to the floor had been taken, and the empty husk that remained was turned into metal.

Sylver made his way towards the only thing that wasn’t made out of sand that had fallen in through the cracks, or the odd metal plastic material that the buildings, and roads, were made out of.

Sylver crouched down near the shattered cup and very carefully picked up the biggest piece he could see. There was a part of a symbol visible on the piece of green clay. Sylver brought it up to his nose and covered it in his mana.

The fact that it had enough of a scent for Sylver to smell it, meant it had been used very recently. The sand and dust around the cup didn’t appear to be disturbed, but even if they had someone who could cover their tracks, it wasn’t good enough to trick Sylver.

He followed the slightly off-colored sand, and in a matter of minutes, arrived at what seemed to be the exact center of the metal city. With a single kick of the foot, Sylver made the sand fly away from him, and found a small dark red hole on the otherwise completely perfectly smooth metallic floor.

The only reason Sylver didn’t dismiss it as a random hole in the ground, was because it was a hexagon. Sylver stuck his finger into the hole and could feel the inside portion wiggling about.

“Ria, would you mind? Look for gears, or possibly magnets, and try to turn it anticlockwise,” Sylver said, as the liquid metal woman’s staff floated out of Sylver’s robe and turned upside down.

Her golden tendrils entered the small hexagonal hole, and within moments, Sylver could already hear clicking and the sound of metal grinding against metal.

The hole began to glow a pale blue light, and as Ria pulled her tendrils back into her body, the light spread out from the hole. It extended out until the lines of light stopped and started moving clockwise towards one another.

Sylver and Mora both jumped back, as the glowing circle on the ground began to rise. It spun as it rose, and reached a height of about 5 meters before it stopped. Everything disappeared in a cloud of dust, as the floor shook violently for a split second, and caused all the sand on the ceiling of the enormous cave to fall like rain.

When the dust and sand had cleared, or rather, when Sylver blew it away, he was greeted with an opening within the tall spiral. Sylver allowed himself a slight smile, as he saw a crudely drawn bright blue symbol painted inside, along with an arrow pointing downward.

“Either the Blue Tiger sect heirs came through here, or this is a very elaborate trap,” Sylver said, as he extended his mana towards the room, and inspected it.

Sylver turned to look at Mora in the meantime. He could both see and feel the moment his thoughts reached her, and she saw the problem Sylver saw.

The opening was tall, but it was also narrow.

If they were attacked while inside, Mora wouldn’t be able to move out of the way. And that’s not addressing the fact that she wouldn’t even fit inside.

They would be fine as long as Sylver used [Fog Form] but the volume of the room was smaller than the volume of Mora’s, already extremely compressed, body.

Just as Sylver was about to make a suggestion, Mora made a whining noise as her whole body curled into a ball, and a giant crack formed along her back.

Sylver just stood there and watched, as a much smaller arachnid crawled out of her larger spider-shaped body, which was now dead enough that it fell within the influence of Sylver’s [Dead Dominion].

The small white spider shook itself the way a dog would, and then proceeded to lift every one of its 7 legs to her head, to wash herself, the way a cat would.

“Did you know she could do that?” Ria asked.

Mora stretched herself, and Sylver was surprised to see just how flexible her new body was. It was downright gelatinous.

Her body, head, torso, and abdomen included, were about as big as a large dog. Her legs were thin, ended in barely visible claws, and she moved around with a speed she hadn’t had before. She looked like a very large pale black widow spider, except there wasn’t any kind of marking on her abdomen, it was just more white.

Actually, she looked a lot like the spider chimera’s Tera and the kids had on their heads, except Mora wasn’t gold-colored, she was as white as snow.

“I did not… But I think I know what happened,” Sylver said, as he used [Arcane Insight].

[N/A – Corpse Melder – 181]
[HP: 26,000 – 100%]
[MP: 6,107 – 81%]
[Stamina: 3,577 – 46%]
[Corpse – N/A]
[Soul – N/A]

“She got a new class… Wait, did you?” Sylver asked the distracted arachnid, as it conveyed an enormous grin.

“Of course, you did… Where did you get the experience? Oh… Right, those guys that attacked Faust… Why did you wait until now to tell me this? Don’t you “you didn’t ask” at me! How was I… I see… I see… Yes, alright… I see…” Sylver said.

“What’s she saying?” Ria asked as Sylver gestured at her to give him a minute.

He nodded at Morana several times, as she did her best to explain what exactly a [Corpse Melder] was, and what it did.

“Alright… I think she got the new class at some point while we were out hunting monsters in the swamp… Along with perks and skills, that she can’t explain in a format I understand… This molting body augmentation thing she just did was 1 of them… You have another 1? No? 2? She has 2 more perks related to her new class, and… 2 new skills…” Sylver puzzled out, as Mora was concerned with getting all her threads sorted out, as opposed to telling Sylver what she was capable of.

Her new body came with several drawbacks, although the only one Sylver could understand properly was that she wasn’t as strong or as physically tough as she had been. But she was faster, and apparently, this shape made it easier to use her wild magic, specifically her thread magic.

The horse shape had been “made” for speed since Bruno’s dungeon had a lot of tough, but slow, monsters. Unsurprisingly someone with a soul compatible with Sylver wasn’t as attached to her physical body as most people, or monsters, would be.

“You sound jealous,” Ria said, and Spring nodded along.

“She isn’t thrilled about this form, because… I am too heavy to ride her… Yes, I see…” Sylver said as he chose to ignore Ria’s comment, and instead walked over to Mora’s discarded horse/spider-shaped body and stored it away within the safest bone inside his chest.

Mora had been very specific about keeping the old body safe. Apparently becoming smaller was significantly easier than becoming bigger.

“You know what? This is fine. Considering who Bruno is, and considering who I am, it only makes sense that she’s able to do these sorts of things. You did great, Mora, thank you,” Sylver said as if this was normal, even though he wasn’t convincing anyone.

Nonetheless, sitting around and trying to puzzle out Mora and her biology wasn’t going to get them any closer to finding the two Blue Tiger heirs, or Edmund.

“Sure,” Ria said, with a tone that implied she was just as curious as Sylver, but simultaneously understood why he wanted to move along.

Sylver walked around the large pillar and looked for a crack, or an opening big enough for him to use [Fog Form] on, but despite being seemingly abandoned, it was still airtight.

Sylver used a paper-thin beam of abyss magic to make a hole in the floor, but the metallic plastic was extremely strong. He lost all the skin on his pointer and middle finger by channeling that much mana, and all he got was about half a centimeter in return. The surface was somewhat brittle, but the metal underneath was significantly stronger.

“Are we waiting for something?” Ria asked as Sylver continued pacing near the opening.

“I don’t like the idea of having to go through an entire dungeon, or whatever this is, to get out… I’m just trying to see if I can come up with a better idea,” Sylver explained, as he continued to consider his available options.

The main problem was that if Sylver didn’t find and kill those two heirs, the Bucklers would likely cut contact with him.

Or they would kill him, given that he’d seen some of their faces.

And as fun as it would be to watch them try, the real issue was Wolf and Lion, who posed a very serious threat to Sylver, and Faust.

If he quit right now, what would be his next move? Just sit around, and wait for the chain to snap? All while the bucklers quietly sneak the shield girl into the city, and somehow the emperor ends up impregnating her.

Then Sylver would have about 20 weeks before the child could be “born.” Assuming these people had a bit of medical know-how, and cared more about the child’s bloodline, than they did about its health, it wouldn’t be all that hard…

All they would need is a handful of healers…

Or a very large group of elven healers…

Shit…

“I sincerely hope I’m wrong, but if we assume for a moment I’m right, then we have to gain Owl’s trust very quickly. Fuck me!” Sylver said as he grabbed Ria, and with Mora in tow, walked inside the pillar.

***

There was a gut-wrenching handful of seconds when the whole thing started to move downwards, and Sylver watched the only exit out of here become smaller and smaller until it was closed off completely. Even if Sylver knew he would eventually dig his way out of this stone elevator, the thought of being trapped underground still made him sweat.

Thankfully the pillar continued spinning downwards, in a corkscrew motion, and eventually opened up into a somewhat large hallway. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all made from that same metal/plastic material the buildings above had been made out of.

It was dark, but his [Perfect Night Vision] made it look as if everything was brightly lit.

Sylver stepped into it, and just in case, sent his shades ahead of him to scout it out.

They returned almost instantly.

As Sylver had expected, they couldn’t see shit. They could materialize and could very easily move through the darkness, but otherwise, it was as if they were in a dungeon.

Although this wasn’t a case of mana interference. Sylver’s [Lesser Perception] felt like its range had been halved. He still had his eyes, thankfully, and he could feel things with his mana, but either by design or due to back luck, he no longer possessed a full 360 degrees of vision.

The uncomfortable shivering he felt from Mora, confirmed that he wasn’t the only one being affected by this blinding effect. Sylver could feel it interacting with his primal energy field, but he could also feel that it would react very badly if he attempted to mess with it.

At the moment it was an annoyance and wasn’t worth accidentally alerting the entity in charge of this place. Assuming it wasn’t fully automated, but even if it was, people capable of building these sorts of spells were always significantly smarter and more prepared than Sylver used to initially assume.

A mistake he paid a very steep price for and promised never to repeat.

With Mora walking alongside him, Sylver quietly walked forward and very soon found himself standing before 3 passageways. One that veered left, another that continued forward, and a third that veered right.

Luckily, Sylver didn’t need to rack his head regarding which passage to take, since there was a very convenient blue arrow drawn on the wall of the passage on the left.

As Sylver approached it, he noticed that there were 2 similar arrows on the other 2 passages, that had been crossed out.

“We’re in a maze…” Sylver said, as he touched the arrow without the cross with his finger and sent a pulse of mana through it.

He proceeded to do the same for the 2 with the crosses.

“And they’ve been here for a while,” Sylver said, as he traced his hand along the edge of the passageway.

“How long?” Ria asked, as Sylver continued feeling up the perfectly smooth edges, but couldn’t find anything out of place.

“The paint on the middle one is at least 2 years old. The paint on the one on the right is a year old, and strangely enough, so is the paint on the arrow on the left passage,” Sylver explained.

“So, they’ve just been guessing where to go, and it took them a whole year to realize the middle path was wrong?” Ria asked.

“Could be…” Sylver said, as Ria floated out of his robe, floated up to near the ceiling, and stared at an empty spot above the path that lead left.

“Can you not see this?” Ria asked as Sylver did his best to focus on the perfectly smooth piece of metal she was pointing at.

He threw a sheet of paper and a pencil towards her, and after a couple of seconds, Ria had drawn a perfect picture of what she was seeing.

Sylver squinted at the symbols on the page, and it took him too long to realize what he was looking at.

“It’s… One of the precursor languages… In fact, I think this is the same dialect the dragon spoke in…” Sylver murmured to himself, as he once again had to beg his mind for a translation.

“The one on the left has something like “thrust, swipe, slice,” the middle one has “stab, pummel, throw,” and the one on the right has “shoot, slash, and twist…” No, that’s not quite right…” Sylver murmured to himself, as he closed his eyes and tried to reach so far back in his memory, that he may have looped around.

“They’re all verbs, but there aren’t any nouns. Why would there be a random assortment of verbs like this?” Sylver asked although he didn’t actually expect an answer from Ria.

“The only one that’s consistent is the first one. Thrust, swipe, and slice, all things someone could do with a knife,” Ria offered, and as far as explanations went, that fit surprisingly well.

Sylver strained his brain for a while longer and managed to translate another 5 words.

They fit.

Only the text on the left had verbs that could be done with a bladed weapon, the other two either spoke about 2 separate weapons or some sort of very strange chimera of a weapon.

More importantly, Sylver’s gut was halfway through the left-most passage, it was sure Ria was right, even if Sylver wasn’t. Clearly, it understood more of the words Ria had written out than Sylver did, and to his experienced gut, the connection was crystal clear.

“My best guess is I need to either be of a certain bloodline to see the text or possess some kind of special item for the text to be made visible to me… But since whatever is blocking my senses can’t affect you, you can see it as if you had the item or bloodline…” Sylver thought out loud, as he stared at the empty spot above the passage, extra hard, as if that would achieve anything.

He stored the page away, and with Ria and Mora following closely behind him, entered the passage on the left.

To his surprise, a wall didn’t close behind him, and he didn’t find an invisible barrier that stopped him from going back. Sylver could very easily leave the passage on the left, and try his hand at the middle passage.

“Given the fact that they had to guess, and seemed to guess wrong twice, can we assume this group doesn’t have the right item and bloodline either?” Ria asked as Sylver kept one hand on the wall while he walked, and Mora copied him, even if she didn’t understand why he was doing it.

“Unless there’s a different entrance, they have a key or something. Although it could be there are multiple keys, and the real test is further ahead… Anyway, since you’re unaffected by magic or Ki, this whole thing should be a piece of cake,” Sylver said, as he heard a very high-pitched screech further down the corridor, followed by the sound of something very small and fast-moving towards him.

Lots of somethings.

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