Chương 144: The Abyssal Depths

Ch. 144 - The Abyssal Depths One hundred Life Force was a lot of power. It was the value of the average human soul, or the vitality of a strong man. A hero could have double that, or even more, and orcs often had several times that amount for it to drain, but it was still a lot of energy, and the blade burned that in a single instant, feeling the dark thrill of that much power burning through it. -100 Life Force.

Then it did it again, and again, because in the grand scheme of things, a hundred life force meant little to it now.

Then it did it again, and again. In the space of three seconds, it spent three human lifetimes' worth of energy, and the results were noticeable, though they felt very strange. -200 Life Force. While it rarely used the ability for its intended purpose these days, Blade's Aura of Hunger reached about 225 feet, and in an instant, the blade shrank that, reducing it to just over thirty feet. While that might be an interesting way to strike someone that was out of reach, for now, the blade used it to move faster.

Its wielder's normal stride was over four feet; now it was advancing thirty feet with every step forward. The Ebon Blade could look behind them and see just how far apart its large, muddy footprints were. It was impressive, but was it worth it? That was a different question altogether. The blade was following the current under the assumption that it was taking it where it wanted to go, but what if that was wrong? What if it were taking the blade in exactly the opposite direction, or if it didn't matter at all?

There's no way of knowing that, it told itself. For now, I have to keep going until I learn more. If that was the plan, then it behoved it to go as fast as possible. That wasn't a bad bet. Since the weapon had gotten Golden Storage, its Life Force capacity had increased to 15, 600. Even now, after spending 300, it still had just over 15, 000 remaining.

That was almost half a year of power under normal conditions, but the last thing it wanted to do was spend six months down here in the dark, wandering in circles and hoping to reach land. The blade increased its pace. Running on the ocean floor was hard, but not impossible. The crushing pressure did nothing to it as it began to speed up; its metal wielder would never be capable of the speed that it was on land, but it still began to move with terrifying quickness.

When each stride was nearly fifty feet, a mile was merely a hundred steps, and a second later, when it used Position of Privilege again, it was only half of that. The blade was running faster than a mile a second now. On land, it would have been going two or three times that. -100 Life Force. It was a thrilling experience, and the weapon already wanted to speed up again, but that seemed unwise.

As it was, it had to warp space in more complicated ways to navigate around the very occasional obstacles without slowing down. That wasn't very hard, though. The hard part was doing so in such a way that it kept going straight; wandering in circles would be a waste of energy and time. As the blade kept up its speed, it was forced to spend several hundred Life Force a minute.

This was unsustainable in the long term, but in the short term, it devoured the worthless lesser demon souls it had, as well as any of the damned souls it happened to approach as it went. -1200 Life Force. +37 Damned Souls. Though the level of souls it had in reserve went down steadily, it was able to keep its Life Force Levels high for more than ten minutes. That's when it noticed that the water around it was starting to boil in those brief moments when it slowed down to ensure the current hadn't changed.

-2500 Life Force. I suppose I've never pushed so hard for so long, the blade thought, remembering poor Evelyn. She was proof that there was too much of a good thing, and it was seeing hints of that now. Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. What will happen when I get a mortal wielder again? It wondered. Will I be able to hold them together with regeneration, or will I have to resist using this foul power?

While it might survive any abuse, there was an upper limit to the amount of abuse its wielder could endure. In this case, though, the metal man it puppeted offered no complaints. It simply did as it was bid. The blade might have gone on like that indefinitely, until it had eliminated all of the worthless demon souls from its system, but when he saw a strange landmark, it finally slowed to a stop and let the strange powers it had been wielding lapse as it approached it and stopped in front of it. -800 Life Force.

At first, it thought the landmark was a rib sticking straight up from the muck, but that did not seem to be the case. It was too smooth, symmetrical, and straight for that. No, it was a column, carved from stone, and though it could not see it visually, examining the weave of the world revealed several more further on that had collapsed and were mere piles of stone now. The blade studied the one that still stood at length, but found only markings far too eroded to read.

That didn't stop it from feeling the stones of a well-made road beneath its feet. The thing was hidden under a foot of cloudy silt, but it was there, and the blade contended itself with following it. It wasn't precisely in the direction the current had been; it was even down slope a bit, which was the opposite of what it wanted, but this was too interesting to pass up. Is it some kind of sunken temple complex? It wondered.

The waters seemed far too deep for such a thing, but then, it supposed that sense was not required in this place. What the blade found as it descended into the black abyssal valley on the ocean floor was hardly a temple complex. It was bigger than that, much bigger. It was an entire sunken city, done in white marble. They were so deep that there were scarcely any barnacles or other aquatic undergrowth on them. Someone had simply drowned a whole city at once, freezing it in time.

That, however, was not the strange part. The strange part was the current of drowned souls flowing through the place and above it. It had seen them elsewhere at random. They were scattered through the ocean and drifted completely at the mercy of uncaring currents. While all of the spirits it had seen in this circle had glowed faintly, they hadn't produced any light worth mentioning. That was no longer the case.

There were thousands of them here, maybe even tens of thousands, and they swirled above the pale ruins in streamers of light that reassembled schools of listless fish. It made for a strange scene, and the more the blade studied it, the more it knew this place was important. It was dangerous, too. The Ebon Blade couldn't say exactly what made it think that, but the further it walked into the quiet, ancient place, the more convinced it became that it should leave.

It should turn around and follow the road up, to wherever it led, because if this was the end of the road, it certainly wanted to be at the beginning. Still, the blade did not like the idea of running, and certainly not for no reason at all. It was at a loss to figure out what was provoking a sense of dread. It wasn't the leviathans that drifted fat above, illuminated by the eerie blue light, nor was it the empty city. It was the feeling that something terrible dwelt here.

I need a clue as to where I'm going next, the blade told itself as it pressed on. I could wander around in the dark forever without more information. It was with that thought in mind that it approached the center of the city, eager to find anyone that it could steal that information from, or any signs that might point the way. There was nothing, though.

Every scrap of paper or paint had been torn away by the water, and as it walked up the stairs of the largest building in the dead city, it worried that this might be a dead end. What if it was Prince Cerirvall that lied to me? It asked itself. What if there's no way out of an endless ocean for a man who cannot swim? When it entered the temple's spartan main chamber, it realized that it had been worried for nothing. There was a spirit there, sobbing on the floor in the center of the blasted room.

No, not a spirit, it corrected itself, A demon. Even as a demon, though, it was rather pathetic. It had almost no power flowing through it. It was just a weeping, blue-skinned devil that was all but wasted away. The blade felt its pain there. If it kept eating these pathetic spirits, it would end up that way before long, too, no doubt. It should have simply left it there and moved on, but it was the only lead that it had found in this realm to date, so it didn't.

If I kill the thing, it might at least know where it should go next, the blade reasoned. The blade couldn't strike them down, though, because as soon as its metal wielder moved within arm's reach, the pathetic-looking man opened his eyes and fixed it with a stare. That was when the blade knew that it wasn't any demon that it faced; it was the Prince of the Fifth Circle. The blade was utterly paralyzed as it was pinned with an emotion that it had rarely experienced in its existence: sadness.