Chapter 61 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

POV Tristan

"I’m nearing the end of the rope; let down some more," I called up to the four adventurers that I had hired for this particular room exploration. Slowly, I was lowered even further, and then I heard the telltale sound of crossbow fire.

Behind me, I heard a bird squawk in pain, and I looked backwards to see it was falling downwards. It was going to be a long way down. This was one of the most unique rooms in this dungeon, and I had only heard rumours from the stronger adventurers who delved way deeper about these kinds of rooms or even entire floors where the challenge was not only the monsters but the landscape itself.

Climbing down wouldn’t have been that much of a problem, or fighting the monsters of this room at the same time, no, the problem was that about 170 metres from the cliff line were some covered ruins with text on them.

Once again, everyone else was convinced that those were just random scribbles or runes the dungeon had made up, but there was just some sort of a pattern there. Unfortunately, I have only seen maybe singular words, that have survived the march of time. Of course, that didn't really work as an explanation because everything here, no matter how old it looked, was at max made only a few years ago.

Finally, I made it to the location where I immediately saw the smooth rock that was half buried underneath the rock the cliff was made out of. That was interesting in so many ways because usually, the dungeon was quite firm in its rules about how landscapes form.

So, it's quite curious why there would be a different kind of smooth rock hidden under the more brittle rock the cliff was made out of. Now, of course, I could understand why the cliff was made out of this kind of rock; it was so if you used too much strength, you would easily break your handholds, and falling the kind of distance this room had was going to kill most who didn't have skills to help with falling from height.

From my back, I took out my chisel and hammer and started to expose the underlying rock some more. One second, I heard the crossbow sounds, but when I looked towards the other side of the room and upwards, I was pleased to see that the birds were attacking the other adventurers and not me. It took me a while and a lucky drop to be able to hire them, but knowledge required sacrifice, even if it was just my coin.

Slowly and carefully, one piece at a time, more and more of the writing started to appear, and this time it wasn't just one word. I could already see three of them, and they were kind of arching. That was curious, but soon I discovered that the writing was on approximately a 30-centimetre area of different rock.

Further exposing it seemed to show that it was like an archway. "Is this the door?" Multiple hours later, I finally finished exposing the entire archway or doorway, where there was writing from the left side of the arch all the way to the right side.

I took out my notebook and started to write down all the symbols, but there was a problem: after comparing them with my previous finds, while they were similar, they weren't the same. This was an unpleasant development and supported the other theories more than mine.

"There must be something I’m missing," but even after another hour of looking over the symbols, I couldn’t find the answer I was looking for. At first, I had hoped that perhaps this was written in code, but that didn't feel right.

Looking at the time, I saw that I was running out of it. Just in case, I hit the rock inside the doorway once again, but it seemed completely solid. I felt a tug on my rope and knew my time was up. "Next time, I should bring a pickaxe."

I was so distracted that I didn’t notice they continued to tug on my rope. So, I looked up and saw that they were fighting quite a few aerial monsters, but when I saw the adventurer who was giving me the signal point towards my right, a shiver ran down my back.

I looked towards there just in time to see a lizard-looking monster that was easily walking on this vertical cliff as if it were flat ground, rushing towards me. I had just enough time to push myself off the cliff, and thanks to my rope, I knew I wasn’t jumping to my death.

The monster ran past me, but I used my wind control skill to push the creature off the cliff. At first, I thought it wasn’t going to work, but whatever it was using to keep itself from falling failed, and I saw it starting to fall towards the bottom.

The way I used my skill, however, had a side effect, and it pushed me even further away from the wall. Now I was moving way too fast back towards the cliff, and I didn’t have time to use that skill once again, so all I could do was harden my body as much as I could for the coming pain.

Thankfully, that skill was fast to activate; otherwise, I might have died. The impact was painful, but then I heard a large crack and couldn't believe that this impact had actually broken some of my bones. Then everything went black, and when I woke up, I felt how I was being dragged.

Fortunately, it was just the rope that I was attached to, pulling me out of this tunnel. Wait, how was I in a tunnel? In only a moment, I was back where I was before the monster attack, looking at the doorway that was now opened, with half of the entrance blocked further in by the broken stone that must've blocked the way in. On the wall, there was more writing. I let them pull me up, and towards the end of the cliff, I also started to climb up.

"Thank you, you saved my life there," I said to them, but they didn’t look that happy. "Yes, I know that you are now over the time I hired you for, and I’m really sorry for that." I pulled out four more gold coins and offered them.

"Here, for the trouble. I know that this probably isn’t enough, but it’s all I have. I’m probably going to stay here and camp until I’m fully recovered, and then push forward to the next way station. You are welcome to tag along if you want."

"Keep your money, scholar, but we won't be providing you with extra protection to get you through this section. Find your own way out, and while I didn’t like it, it was just an unlucky situation, and that happens. But next time, don't push your luck so much. You coming back up shouldn't come out of our time, remember that. But that being said, if you ever need our services again, feel free to contact us," the leader of this adventure party said.

I was glad that my contact could be trusted, and they were able to bring me into contact with a decent team. I pocketed 4 gold coins that were actually my last and started to set up camp while they prepared to leave.

I didn’t react when one of the party members said they wanted to try to clear this section once again, but it was a close one because if they started to descend, they would immediately notice the tunnel. Fortunately, it seems that the leader wanted to get to the way station as fast as possible, and the fastest way was to backtrack.

I only sighed in relief after they had been gone for over 5 hours. It was time to go back down, but this time I didn’t use the rope as I could get down there safer and faster by just climbing. There was also another reason why I didn’t like the rope; it was a singular point of failure, and the monsters here could easily slash a rope using their skill attacks. When there wasn’t anyone up there supporting me, it was just a stupid idea.

When I got back down to the tunnel, I pushed the rocks blocking the way down the cliff, leaving me with an open tunnel where there was a lot of writing on the wall. I marked everything here, but the further I went down this tunnel, the more I felt that this was a burial chamber of some sort.

The stones inside here were obviously made by an intelligent species and were incredibly smooth, but there weren’t any lines where I could see that they connected. They must have brought them one piece at a time because they didn't match the geology of the rest of the room.

Unfortunately, this was a burial chamber, but it was half broken. It seems that half of the burial chamber was crushed by the stone that the cliffs were made out of. I could only see the very edge of the coffin, and even it had a large crack through it.

There was probably nothing left beyond that but rubble. There was, however, writing on it, so I took out my brush and used my mage light to see what was written on it. The first three lines were in the same language that was in the tunnel and on the archway.

Then, however, there was a larger than usual gap, but after that was a completely different language, something I hadn’t seen before in the dungeon, but for some reason, it looked familiar. There were also three lines of it. Then another gap, and once again a different language with also three lines. But the more I exposed the final lines, the more my hands started to shake.

That was the old way of writing Marylander, an ancient language of the desert kingdom of Durastal. I was no expert in it, but my lexicon of languages did have it, and I pulled it out. Channelling mana into the book, I was able to open it.

It was my most expensive magic item as this book held enough pages that you could write 100 books with it. It took a while to flip through it, but before I reached the proper page, I stopped. As the writing on the page looked awfully familiar. Looking up to confirm, it indeed matched the second block of text.

The language of Hollerin of the Himmel people. This language wasn't fully understood or translated, but there were a few dozen words in my book where the exact meaning was known, and the entire alphabet was also shown.

I marked the page and continued frantically searching for the Marylander language. When I finally found it, I was able to confirm that it was indeed the full language, and for this, I had a proper dictionary, even pronunciations, basically everything needed to know the language, even a few stories written in it.

Comparing the known languages, I was able to confirm three words that were at similar places within the three lines written. If these were the same three lines written in 3 different languages, then I would be able to crack the language most of the ruin was filled with. It was at this moment that I heard a sound from my necklace. I connected to it with my mind and saw that in my quest tab, there was a new entry.

‘Decipher the language of this ruin and discover who could have built this burial chamber.’

That was all that the quest said, but the absolute excitement I was feeling after reading that was indescribable. It took me minutes to start calming down, and then I started to record everything I could, as I knew I couldn’t stay here for long.

At least when I leave, it wouldn't take long for the tunnel to be hidden once again, but then again, no one else would be trying to solve this mystery, and the quest didn’t appear before I realised the three languages wrote about the same thing.