Chương 75: Chapter 76: Adventure Times (II)

Ember put his full weight into pushing the stone door, pouring in all twenty-six points of Might. Even empowering his strength with mana augmentation did no good. The door just wouldn't budge. Standing over twenty-five feet tall, his cumulative Might was barely anything against its sheer weight. The door appeared to be made of black granite, adorned with lines of runes formed into various shapes as decoration.

Still unwilling to give up, he flung a few mana bolts at it, only to find they left not even a single dent. Considering the lair of the basilisk was nearby, the Great Serpents had likely tried to smash their way through on a few occasions to find out what was on the other side of the door. But looking at the polished, immaculately crafted stone gate, whose structural integrity seemed to have stood the test of time, he doubted they had managed to do anything to it at all.

"It's the runes, isn't it?" he asked, turning towards Dawn. She looked at him with mild amusement before joining him.

"Leave it to the professionals, will you?" She didn't press with all her Might as he had. Instead, she traced a dainty finger over the rune symbols etched on the stone. Her eyes cast a silver glow, as though piercing through the mysteries concealed within the ancient gate.

"It's not the most complicated thing I've seen," she muttered, "but—""Please tell me you can open this," Ember pleaded.

"I probably can," she said, a little uncertain, as she turned towards him.

"Sit down, rest. It might take a while." Ember couldn't be at ease, much less rest, when they were so near the basilisks' dwelling. As he paced around, Dawn continued probing the wall, weaving several threads of her mana to work around its mechanics. At her prodding, several symbols lit up in colourful arrays of light, though whatever mechanism was at work was still far from turning. As seconds blurred into minutes, and minutes flowed into almost half an hour, Dawn remained fully concentrated on the magic gate.

Ember's panic reached new heights as he continued to pace. Hopefully, the goblins are still keeping the basilisks at bay, he thought. He suppressed the urge to question her, lest he break her train of thought. Runework was one of the most demanding disciplines, he had been told; best to leave it to her, since he had little knowledge of it himself.

"I got it, I got it!" Her words cut into his thoughts, and Ember quickly faltered to a stop. Her eyes met his. A brilliant smile lit her expression, which could lift anyone's mood.

"Come up, you will want to see this." With a swift motion, he landed beside her.

"Use the new mind spell you learned to see what I'm actually doing," she said, then quickly shook her head.

"No, your spell won't have the range to reach that far. Just try to probe it with your mana sense and glimpse the brilliance at work." Her enthusiasm was palpable as she discovered the crux of the door's mechanism. Ember swiftly complied, pouring more of his mana to heighten his senses. He was mostly blind to the runes and the intricate mechanism concealed within the gate's formation, but once Dawn's breath of mana flowed through the veins within the gate, he could glimpse its intricate designs.

Wherever her mana reached, his eyes opened to more of its magic. He couldn't quite decipher it, but the sheer control and mastery she displayed left him enthralled. Awed beyond anything he'd felt before, Ember still tried to commit the entire image to memory. Dawn was weaving not three or nine strings of mana, but twenty-seven of them at once.

His limited experience didn't allow him to fully appreciate how sublime and exquisite her control was, but she seemed to have no trouble weaving her threads of mana through the sinuous rune formation. Then he heard gears turning, mechanisms rolling against each other, as a quake ran through the walls and then the ground beneath his feet.

"Stand back," she said, retreating a couple of steps. The grand entrance opened in a spray of dust and debris.

"Told you I could open it," Dawn said, displaying the fullest depth of her dimple. Ember smiled back.

"I never doubted you in the first place." She sniffed a laugh.

"You've barely been my underling for a couple of days, and you've already learned to bootlick." Following her lead, he stepped into the grand opening.

"The architecture seems more like a catacomb," she muttered after covering a few paces.

"An old, majestic one, for sure—but these rune scripts..." She paused, inching closer to the snaking pathways.

"I'm not sure I've seen this kind of design before." Like the surface of the stone gate, strings of rune scripts were etched everywhere inside the catacomb. Dawn tried to read whatever was etched there, but she didn't seem to be having much luck deciphering them. Runes were one of the more prominent languages of magic, capable of communicating with the very forces of magic. They were usually somewhat legible, even if you couldn't start a conversation with the runes.

To both our dismay, her expertise seemed limited to opening doors and fixing artefacts, not deciphering ancient scripts and hieroglyphics. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"At least I don't have to flex my muscles on another gate," she said, shooting a smile in his direction. She brought out her spider construct and let it scan and drift away ahead of them through the archway.

"This place is fascinating."

"Hopefully the gate won't close behind us," Ember muttered, joining her. Dawn laughed.

"You read too many novels. Even if there is such a mechanism in place, I can still reopen it."

"Hopefully that's the case," he thought,"or else our deaths would be far too anticlimactic." So they went on along the snaking pathways, their eyes constantly scanning the scripts etched on both sides of the walls. Fascinating as they were, despite Dawn being unable to read them, her annoyance caught up to her, as the path soon split into six different routes, each closed off by a stone door similar in build to the first.

Letting out an irritated grunt, she randomly chose one of the gates and set to work opening it. Thankfully, it didn't take as long after she had figured out the mechanism from the other gate. While she worked, Ember observed, committing everything he saw to memory. Though he might not be able to replicate her skill, watching her approach such complex work was an eye-opening experience all the same.

"I think," Dawn said, after opening the gate, "whoever built the stone dwellings the goblins now inhabit also built this catacomb."

"But unlike the stone dwellings, this place seems fully intact," Ember added.

"Perhaps because there's been no human or goblin activity nearby?"

"That, and the structural integrity of all these runes."

"Which begs the question," Ember perked up, "What are they preserving this empty dungeon for?"

"Well, despite all its grandeur and mystery, it's still a catacomb. You should know what catacombs are for."

"To bury the dead." He eyed her.

"They must have been figures of some note, to build monuments this palatial for their graves."

"We'll see soon enough." Despite their fascination with the runes, they picked up their pace, dashing through the snaking archways at nearly full speed. Every so often, they had to slow as a stone door obstructed their path. Though Dawn's rune-lockpicking cost them a few more minutes here and there, they breezed through the obstacles and finally reached the very end of the catacomb.

If Ember had imagined to see some groundbreaking mysteries at the deepest part of the catacomb, he had to be thoroughly disappointed, coming across another dead end. A massive stone wall blocked their path. Unlike the other walls, it wasn't a solid block of black granite, but seemed to be built from various three-dimensional geometric shapes, each etched with rune scripts, to form the wall.

"I don't know if whoever made this was simply incompetent or trying to annoy people," Dawn fumed.

"At least I'd understand if they'd made it into a maze. Why bother with all these pathways, when it just led to a dead end?" Backtracking, they chose another gate to try their luck. To their dismay, it too ended before the massive wall. A couple more attempts led to the same result as well, infuriating Dawn further. She stopped before the wall, her gaze glaring at its geometric patterns.

"Maybe there's some mechanism in place," Ember suggested.

"A trapdoor or secret passage of some kind, one that only reveals itself after you work on the runes, like before."

"I don't think so," Dawn said tentatively, tracing a finger over a line of hieroglyphic script.

"And if I'm wrong, if there is anything to unearth here, it'll take a master of runes to find it." He didn't need to press her to look more closely. Dawn was curious by nature. Although they hadn't come across many things to pique her curiosity, he could already see it in her. Just as now, the deeper she gazed into the patterns, the more fascinated her eyes became. He decided to leave her to it. If she found anything, she'd let him know, as she'd done before.

Instead, he brought out his notebook and pen and began sketching the alien patterns and runic scripts to the best of his capabilities. Although his memory was better than it had ever been, it was still far from perfect, and writing things down was another way to commit them to memory. With the added effort, they'd likely stay there longer.

"You said runes came from demons," Ember said absently.

"Could this place have been built by them?" Dawn didn't answer, as though she hadn't heard him. That was likely the case, given how absorbed she'd become, practically flying around the surface of the wall as she worked her magic on the rune formation.

"It's possible," she said after a while, letting him know she had heard him and appreciating that he hadn't pressed the question again.

"But the chances are slim. These runes are more nuanced—ancient, even—but too complex to have been engraved by demons." He eyed her with more questions that needn't be said for her to figure out what he was asking.

"I've seen weaponry crafted by demon artificers, and every one of their rune formations was simpler than anything of comparable artefacts made by human crafters." That gave him something to think about.

"Would you say they're better at runes than humans, then?"

"It's hard to say," she said after some thought.

"Runes are a large field of study. I think they're better in some respects, but they've failed to adapt to certain improvements and changes that we've mastered." That makes sense, he thought, and fell silent, still working on his drawing. There was simply too much to capture on a single page. Hell, his whole notebook might not be enough if he were to render every single detail. Thankfully, many of the sections on the wall were seemingly etched with identical runes.

Looking at it as a whole, he muttered, "It feels more like a maths problem than something magical." He moved to one corner, tracing his finger over a spiralling line. Following it, he reached a spherical form that seemed to protrude slightly from the wall. He tried to push it, hoping it might reveal some secret door from within, but found that his strength couldn't even budge it in the slightest.

"Hmm, did you say something?"

"It's nothing," he said.

"I was just thinking maybe all this is simply some kind of puzzle."

"Well, runes usually are a puzzle."

"No, I meant more of a mundane kind." He poured his mana through the spiralling lines, guiding it to see if his mana could move it when his physical strength could not. His mana flowed into the spherical form, and suddenly he felt a pull. The sphere spun within the wall, devouring more of his mana.

"Dawn?"

"Trust me, I'd be the happiest if that were the case," she said, her voice growing fainter to his ears.

"I just feel I'm too inadequate in this field—" The sphere stopped in its tracks, now glowing with a golden radiance. Everything turned to complete silence as something powerful yanked him through his weave of mana. Darkness spread across his vision. Somehow, Ember was lulled into somewhere else. When it all cleared, he found himself in a completely different space.

He was still under a stone ceiling, a chamber of some kind, spacious, but more on the rougher side compared to what they had come across throughout the catacomb so far.

"This wouldn't happen to be the dungeon master's chamber, would it?"