Chương 154: 11. People of a Millennium Past 3

The moment we passed through that half-open gate, the air changed completely. The outer zone—the section the Blazing Yanxia Empire and sea-dragon people had been using as a supply depot—had at least retained the chaotic fingerprints of our era: wooden crates, rope, waterproof sheeting, rough fire pits, the damp-salt smell of human occupation. The instant we crossed this threshold, all of that fell away like it had been sealed behind a different century. The ground underfoot was no longer rough stone.

It was hard and level to a degree that felt almost offensive—the kind of flatness that doesn't occur in nature. The walls were still embedded in the island's bedrock, but their surfaces carried a smoothness that had nothing to do with geological process, as though someone had carved the interior of the entire island hollow and inserted a skeleton that didn't belong to this age.

My boots struck the floor and produced not the scrape of stone, but a deep, hollow resonance—a metallic echo that had no business existing down here. A chill ran up my spine. My first association wasn't the capital, or Black Dragon Pass, or anything a reasonable knight ought to be thinking about. It was that bizarre underground structure Alvira and I had fallen into together. The same wrongness of order. The same immediate certainty upon entering that this place had not been built for people like us.

"The ventilation in here probably hasn't cycled properly in several thousand years," Ignicia said, running her fingers along the wall as she moved. Her hand traced over grooves and lines that meant nothing to me, then stopped at a section that was slightly more recessed. She frowned—the expression of someone trying to read lettering that time had nearly worn away—then pressed down. Nothing happened at first.

I was preparing to ask whether she was certain she wasn't pressing random surfaces, when a deep, resonant groan rose from somewhere beneath our feet. Not an animal. Not a mechanism. Something closer to a vast subterranean organ that had been forcibly awakened after millennia of silence. The walls around us shuddered in sequence—a series of deep, intermittent vibrations.

Dust and stale air erupted from overhead fissures, followed by a steadier, lower sound of subsurface flow—invisible currents being dragged from somewhere else into this buried structure. I stepped back instinctively and covered my nose and mouth.

"What is that?"

"Ventilation," she answered matter-of-factly.

"Without it, you'll eventually suffocate if we go deeper." The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. I looked at her.

"You can read Old Civilization script?"

"A little." She withdrew her hand, and something in her expression shifted—an oddly evasive quality.

"I studied it once. When I had nothing better to do."

"A Dragon Princess's idea of having nothing better to do sounds more terrifying than most humans' ambition." She made a sound of dismissal, had already turned to continue—then paused. Half a beat. The pause of someone who'd just remembered something they hadn't meant to say out loud.

"If you want to learn," she said quietly, "next time... I wouldn't necessarily refuse to teach you." I went still for a moment. She'd said it fast. The speed of someone hoping to lose the sentence in the ambient noise before it could be examined too closely. And her ears, I noticed with considerable effort to keep my expression neutral, had gone faintly red. That image—a Dragon Princess with pink ears, standing in what amounted to a multi-thousand-year-old tomb—was so absurd I nearly laughed out loud. I didn't.

Self-preservation remains one of my more reliable qualities.

"Let's get out of this alive first," I said, with complete and genuine sincerity. She looked at me. She didn't argue. The footsteps behind us were audible now. We moved without hesitation. Ignicia swept the space once and found a large metal frame nearby—half-toppled, the remnant of some ancient heavy-load transport, its base still fitted with flat wheel housings rusted into permanent stillness. She said nothing. She grabbed the side and pulled. The shriek of metal on stone was not subtle.

I watched her—wounds barely stabilized, somehow moving this thing with her bare hands—and felt compelled to note: "Your Highness, weren't you just recovering?"

"I am recovering," she said flatly.

"Not convalescing." She drove the frame into the passage entrance, wedging it hard across the corridor's center. Then she wrenched a half-collapsed shelf panel free and jammed it diagonally on top. The entire procedure had the aesthetic refinement of a controlled demolition, but its practical value exceeded anything more civilized by a considerable margin. The first impact from the other side came almost immediately after she finished. Metal boomed, reverberating down the corridor like a war drum in the depths.

Someone had discovered the blocked entrance. Each muffled thud echoed through the corridor, making my throat tighten. Ignicia, however, walked ahead as if she couldn't hear them at all—her pace steady and unhurried, displaying absolutely none of the urgency one might expect from someone being hunted through an ancient ruin. Another door appeared ahead of us. This one was considerably heavier than the outer gate.

Its surface still bore traces of dark paint and large patches where the coating had flaked away in slabs. It had clearly been built to last, but several millennia had quietly negotiated it down from "impregnable fortress barrier" to "structurally questionable obstruction." I was just stepping forward to examine how the locking mechanism might work when Ignicia simply raised her leg and kicked it. The detonation that followed very nearly separated my soul from my body.

The entire door panel buckled inward with a groan like ancient bones snapping, then collapsed into the room beyond with a crash that echoed in both directions down the passage. I stood there for two heartbeats of stunned silence.

"... When the people who designed this door were drawing up the blueprints," I said with complete sincerity, "I don't think they included 'dragon kick' in their stress calculations."

"Then their engineering was flawed." She delivered this verdict with such absolute conviction that I couldn't even summon the energy to argue.