Chương 569: Chapter 560: Mansion of Roses

When we finally escaped the inner district, we spent a few hours catching our breath, making new plans, and trying to figure out what to do next. After several minutes of discussion, the first conclusion we came to was that we needed far more preparation before we tried to buy more lives. I had absolutely no idea what kind of monster had set its sights on us when we were in the inner district, but I had a strong feeling that it was the final guardian we needed to face. It felt incredibly powerful.

We had two years to power up. We had, at the very least, gathered some new intelligence. The guardian had some method of coordinating the other monsters in the inner district of the Market, gathering them into some sort of horde.

It seemed to use some kind of conceptual ability to lock on to us and make this horde of monsters start hunting us down - although it was possible that it had multiple types of abilities that could do the same thing, so I needed to avoid tunnel-visioning on ways to avoid conceptual abilities. Unfortunately, we also couldn't farm resources from that inner district of the Market. If we did, we ran the risk of getting wiped out by a horde of monsters at any time.

That meant that if we wanted to get stronger, we needed to find other places to gather resources and spend our Achievement. Eventually, we decided that now that we had two years to prepare, we would first find another inner district, and grab some resources there first.

An inner district was a necessity for my friends and I to advance, since shops selling things like Tier 6 and above soul fragments were very rare in the outer districts of the Market, and the outer districts outright didn't have several kinds of shops that were present in the inner districts of the Market. Kexley and Valeksi weren't quite as dependent on finding an inner district to keep improving, but they would certainly have an easier time of it if we found an inner district.

That meant that our entire group needed an inner district to make the best use of our remaining two years. Once we finalized that idea, our group left the house we had taken over, and started our search for an easier and weaker inner district. We spent the next four days wandering around as we searched for another inner district. We avoided every shop, because they just didn't provide us with enough value to justify wasting time with them - though we still killed the occasional skeleton as we advanced.

After four days, we finally found something unusual - though it was hard to figure out whether it was an inner district or not.

"I admit, I have no idea what I'm looking at," said Sallia, as she looked at the unusual building we had found.

"I wonder why they styled it this way." In front of us was what appeared to be a rich, opulent mansion. It had a massive walkway in front of it, which looked as if it had been paved with marble and gold. The area directly surrounding the mansion was artificially darkened somehow - it was like there was a small bubble of near perfect darkness surrounding it, somehow shutting out the old neon lights that illuminated much of the rest of the Market.

A slice of cold, silver moonlight illuminated the mansion and the opulent walkway. However, even the overly opulent walkway looked normal in comparison to the mansion itself, since the mansion's exterior had two layers to it. The inner layer looked like more marble and gold, which seemed normal enough - but the gold and marble walls of the mansion were almost completely covered in vines.

Thousands of flowers grew out of those vines - and the flowers themselves vaguely resembled roses, although since roses didn't grow on vines, they must have been some other kind of flower. They came in a variety of colors - especially pink, white, and red, with the occasional blue and yellow flower mixed in to highlight certain parts of the mansion.

Every twenty seconds, a flash of lightning consistently flashed in the darkness above the mansion, briefly illuminating the flowers - and, somehow, making all of them transform into what appeared to be severed human fingers. Since it was so consistently looping every twenty seconds, I was actually pretty sure this was an intentional design choice from whoever had built this manor, rather than some kind of aftereffect from a monster taking over the area.

However, I had no clue whatsoever why someone would decorate a mansion to look like this. Even by the strange aesthetic standards of the Market, this seemed altogether too sinister. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

"Apart from the lightning strikes, it looks really pretty," said Anise.

"But I have no idea what the lightning strikes are here for. Is it supposed to show us what's going on in the mansion? Is this some kind of absurd advertisement that I'm not getting?" I considered Anise's question. Given the Market's usual spam advertisements, I wouldn't be surprised if anything was an ad that I just didn't get. That being said, the Market's advertisements were usually comprehensible, if irritating. This just seemed strange.

I glanced around the mansion, to see if there were any advertisements or signs that could tell me more about what the mansion was supposed to be. There was, indeed, a billboard placed prominently nearly the entrance. Unfortunately, it had been melted into slag by some kind of fire spell, which meant that any words on it were no longer legible.

Now the whole thing looked like a blacksmith had started trying to make a pyramid, lost interest halfway through, and then threw it into a pile of horse manure and left it there for a century. I sighed. It didn't seem that we would be getting any convenient information on what this inner district of the Market was supposed to be.

"I wish we had a better idea what this place sold," said Felix.

"Miria, what do you see on the inside of the mansion using your special types of eyesight?"

"I'll check," I said. I started out by using my spatial senses to try to see if the inside of the mansion was warped, or larger than it appeared to be. A moment later, I chuckled to myself. The interior of the mansion certainly seemed like it was part of an inner district. Just like the strange research lab/carnival hybrid district we had seen, this place had been so warped an stretched out with spatial magic that it could have housed a decently sized town inside of the mansion.

Even though the interior of the inner district was spatially distorted, it was a bit less difficult for me to get a glimpse of what the inside was like. I could see several souls that looked potentially dangerous. Fortunately, none of them were grouped together, and I couldn't even detect any signs of most of them having any packs or minions to support them in a fight.

The monsters with the highest life force seemed to reach around grade 20 to 25 in the Market's System, and if their other attributes were in a similar range, they were probably manageable as long as we didn't run into other problems or get swarmed. If we could find a way to boost Sallia's perception, she could even manage a battle with that kind of enemy on her own. Even if we didn't, I believed that the six of us, working together, could overcome enemies of this level. We needed to be careful, but we could win.

Unfortunately, because space was so mixed up inside of the mansion, I had no idea where anything was in relation to the front door, and there were still various parts of the mansion that were hidden from my view. I hoped that there wasn't anything too deadly lurking in those areas, but it was possible that we might face a deadly surprise if we got too confident. I shared my vision with the group, before I checked through my conceptual vision, too.

Through my conceptual vision, I learned that the area was a massive 'dead zone' for concepts - which I had never actually seen before. Clearly, someone had gone through a lot of effort to stifle conceptual-type abilities in this area - though I had no idea why. On the bright side, that meant we wouldn't need to worry about any monsters using conceptual abilities - although it weakened me a little bit, too.

"I think we can try it," said Sallia. I nodded.

"I'm also in favor," said Kexley.

"We need to get resources somewhere, and nothing here seems unmanageable." Sallia led the group as we approached the front door. She popped it open. The other side of the front door shimmered with light - almost like a portal to another world.

"It's a portal," I said, after checking it over with my spatial senses. Sallia nodded, and stepped through the portal. <Clear. > Her voice carried a note of uncertainty to it, which made me nervous. Was there something strange here? We stepped inside, and then I scratched my head in confusion. Right in the middle of the room, there was a giant bar with some kind of booth attached to it.

There was a pool for Achievement collection located just outside of it, and there was a row of metal bars blocking easy access into the mansion. Clearly, we were expected to pay in order to move further inside. I checked the cash register, before I sighed. Already looted. Sallia cautiously climbed over the row of metal bars, and after a few seconds of waiting, she laughed.

"Doesn't seem like their security system still works. We can avoid paying ticket prices," she said. We made our way over the entry barrier, before we moved past the ticket booth. Just behind it, there was another portal. Sallia once again led the way, before she stepped into the portal. It was time to see what this inner district of the Market held for us.