Chương 28: Graveyard

The Chancellor's office was at the highest point in the building, at the helm of the city. It stared eye to eye with Saffron Helm itself, the horn from the boundary wall of the city. It overlooked the entire city. His secretary led Liesel inside his office and then left. The man was a refined and older version of Kurvam. His hair was slick with gel, black and combed. He wore glasses, golden-rimmed ones, of course.

His frame was a little leaner than his son's, but underneath his suit, he would very much be a brutish man. He gestured for her to sit. There was a bookshelf behind him. Most of it seemed to be historical texts regarding the Saffron Realm. There was a plaque on the wall above the bookshelf. Third of the Imperial Houses. A Chancellor was third in the hierarchy, below the Senators and Crusader Generals. The Emperor was not part of the hierarchy.

He was half a step to true divinity, but was considered divine, addressed with the same reverence as the true divine ones in the realms above what the mortal mind could comprehend. The Chancellor kept reading from a tablet. Liesel was served tea while waiting for him to notice her. It was one of those situations where she was better off holding back her annoyance, even if her opinion of him as a person was dipping below the floors this building had. He eventually finished reading.

"Thank you for looking after my son. He's still young and inexperienced. Please keep looking after him." Liesel tilted her head, unsure if those words were honest or something different. He stood up from his chair.

"I have a meeting to attend. You can stay here until the Shade Passage is open."

"It's—" Before Liesel could even get a word out, he was gone.

"That's certainly one way to express genuine appreciation." Liesel scoffed. She made her way back to the reception. She had been waiting in his office for over ten minutes in silence. It was more than just a display of his arrogance and power. It was a sort of warning that she had to keep his son safe. A reminder of her actual status. Did the baby Vera cry to sleep in his father's lap before returning to the Necropolis?

And given how close this was to the injury, she could see it being a very deliberate message to have her actively keep his son safe. At least, he knows his son is incompetent.

[Analysis and Extraction of the Guardian Soul has been completed!] Liesel woke up the next morning with those words hanging in front of her face. Sipping a glass of water, Liesel nodded at the screen. She hadn't seen the Archive Quest completion notification yet, so that was another thing she was waiting on.

[Extraction Result: Materiality: 2100 (1300 Consumed during the sustained Healing) Aspect: None Prestige Point: +10 Possible Soul Assimilation: Strength: +3 Control: +5 Soul Vein Reinforcement: Significantly strengthens Soul Veins (The effectiveness of the reinforcement may be drastically lowered due to underdeveloped Soul Form.)] Liesel was somewhat relieved that it had not been Auram who had helped her heal.

At the same time, she was somewhat disappointed by the lack of anything that a supposedly much stronger opponent should have given her. Of course, she couldn't hold that thought for long. It hadn't been that strong, all things considered. It had died relatively easily once she figured out the weakness. Not to mention, it didn't have anything beyond just raw strength, and that translated into the strength attribute, and it was also low because her Constitution needed to grow first.

She also felt somewhat comfortable picking the Control over the other two options. Soul Veins seemed like a very important thing, since she heavily relied on Materiality to keep herself moving forward. It would come around. Liesel told herself as she settled on Control, for it was the hard requirement for her next Archetype Skill. [Control Assimilation Process started! Estimated Time: 20 Hours]"That's not a long time for five Control points," Liesel uttered. Even so, it made some sense in her mind.

Her control was very well adjusted, and she might still be in the process of realignment, and that might be helping decrease the time. [Archive Quest: Slay the Door Guardian Completed! Prestige Points Granted: 250] Liesel nodded. She waited for some kind of emotion beyond the mild I can buy the skill to reach for her. It didn't. Two hundred and fifty Prestige Points were beyond her wildest imagination. By almost all by herself, she had managed to earn it in less than two weeks.

And yet, she felt as much relief as she'd have if it had been two years. She opened the Prestige Store and looked for the Soul Weaving Skill. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. She was almost there, just a single point in Dominion, and that would be enough. I haven't even seen Dominion yet. Liesel sighed. For now, she had another attribute technique to keep herself busy while she looked for a demon that might get her over the finish line.

She had never raised her Dominion Attribute, and no demon had offered it yet. The second Control Technique was something Liesel looked forward to. It was special. It might solve her worry. Where's the Thread Cultivation?

Liesel had bought a sturdier, blunt impact-resistant vest. She didn't like to wear armor because it wouldn't really help much. A magic-resistant armor was a different thing, but she didn't have any money to do something like that. Sarkot did have better armor, but he was probably disposing half of the expedition fee on it. Since Verka was not in any condition to go to the second layer yet, Kurvam was going to watch over the base today. Liesel was leading the rest of the team into the second layer.

For today, their goal was to gain a better understanding of the dangers and deepen coordination among themselves. As well as finding the parity between them and the demons within. The ice lake had recovered to its former state of a smooth, flat surface. It was cold. She stopped before the dark entrance to the second layer and addressed her team. She'd prefer to be the vice leader. It suited her well. The role of a leader was very different from just shouting commands during battle.

It was an entire course that lasted months, and Liesel had been disqualified from participating in it.

"We only have Yehia as a warder, so we will try to have as few encounters as possible today. With Farki Jan as our eye, it shouldn't be hard to stay away from danger. So long as we sustain only minor injuries and return before dusk, our expedition is a success. I will emphasize again that we are not trying to engage the residents of the Necropolis yet. Hopefully, we can tomorrow." Ten people were too many for Liesel to keep track of. Liesel settled her hand on the sword as she stepped into the darkness.

Her Materiality had risen to one hundred and twenty, so she had a little more power to spare. Almost three times her original pool, and it had only taken about three months. The darkness gave way to the night sky. A dull white moon hung in the sky, surrounded by countless teeming stars. It suited the land beneath their feet—grey and dusty, no different than how Liesel imagined the moon would look from up close. A land that stretched infinitely in all directions, and the door seemed to be some kind of Shade Passage.

An illusion, of course. It was the edge of the realm. As such, it wouldn't be larger than ten miles total. The land was not empty, of course. Shelves upon shelves, hundreds of feet high, carved from stone, rose from the ground. In the compartments of those shelves, instead of books, there were coffins—turned to dust, and that dust covered the land. The second layer was a graveyard.

At the end of the maze of graves, the Tomb of the Demon General Sirmal stood, a mile-high monument, piercing into the blackish-purple clouds in the starry sky. A stream of energy escaped from the middle of it, sweeping across the entire Necropolis—an aurora of red and death flowing through every crevice of the graveyard. Liesel shuddered as she felt a cold breath brush her ears. A whisper from something invisible. Ghastly and sharp. Beconing her to come and claim its power. She was not alone, of course.

But they seemed to have handled it well, perhaps even better than she had. It thinks I will be the easiest to influence. They were at the top of a podium, above the ground—as if created solely for them to regard the entire realm and be awed by it—looking down a series of blood-stained stairs. Is the Necropolis only two layers? Though the second one seemed too large. So the second and third must've merged, and she didn't feel confident about it as being a good thing.

The average strength of the demon in the second layer should be comparatively weaker— a merger might mean they would face stronger demons, and that was over and above the influence of the tomb's leaking energy. She turned her head towards the Observer, Farki Jan.

"Did you draw the map of the lair last time?" She could see the tops of the shelves and almost make out a passage that led to the monument. But that would be impossible to follow once they were at the bottom. The Observer shook his head.

"Then we should start there." A few of them were somewhat frustrated at the idea of waiting, but none made their objections heard. Not after the disaster Kurvam had brought about last time. This would be a far worse place than the ruins. The shelves had depth, so naturally, some crawler demon was hiding inside. The observer would negate that disadvantage, for the most part, but some demons could camouflage themselves.

"How did the demons even sneak up on you last time while you were with them?"

"I..." Farki shrugged his shoulders.

"Kurvam asked me to locate the demons so that he could hunt them down."

"Continue," Liesel nodded.

"So long as we have a path that we can follow, you can fill in the details from the ground while we explore."

"Are we hunting demons for their cores or not?" Garvin asked.

"We will," Liesel said.

"Not today."

"But..."

"You tried two days ago, and then spent a day resting and healing. We can't do that again and waste another day. Let me try now," Liesel said. With a whole group of twelve, under normal circumstances, no demon should be able to hurt them. They covered almost all the bases. Lacking a warder, especially, Liesel didn't want to push her luck too far. I'd rather return to the base quickly and spend time working out the second Control Technique.

"First, we explore and understand the nature of the demons. We still have twenty days, so there's no hurry," she addressed the entire group.

"We are too close to the Primordial Vein to actually rid the layer of demons, but we can vastly cut down their numbers. That's not for today. First, we must internalize the new terrain, the possible maneuvers you and the demons can make here, the points of ambush, and the likelihood of it happening, even with an Observer Archetype. Only then can we engage in effective combat. Anything less is... well, you have most likely heard the story of my previous expedition."

"Was your previous leader also like Kurvam?" Healer Borran asked.

"The exit collapsed behind us. We were overwhelmed by hordes of demons, filled with a blood frenzy to consume, and the only path to escape was deeper into the dungeon. We had no opportunity to rest, to see, or to understand anything. He did everything he could. It just was not enough." Once Observer Farki was done, Liesel memorized recognizable points on the map. Healer Barron and Observer Farki were in the back, flanked by Garvin and Charbil.

In front of them, both mages were ready to evoke spells, and Yehia stood before them. Her goal was to keep the healer and the Observer protected first; everything else was secondary. But they were expecting most demons to come from the front, so Yehia could serve as a warder for the fighters as well. Markil and Sarkot were in the front. They would engage in combat. Liesel is between the two combatants, a little behind. She didn't have the sword skill to be as quick with the demons as they were, after all.

"It's coming from the right," Farki said. A moment later, a pair of two-meter-tall spiders crawled from the shelf on the right, each with a bulbous back. Their round, hairy faces were too human-like and yet far too inhuman to be mistaken for one. Fiya shot a pillar of light that pierced one spider's back, killing it instantly. She glanced at Liesel, who shook her head. Fiya sighed, lowering her staff.

"Sorry." Liesel approached the spider. With a swing of her blade, she opened its hard shell. She stabbed her fingers inside and ripped out the Materiality Core from its body. Her arm hadn't completely healed, but she could do some light strikes for now. The Soul Unravelling skill had given her quite a bit of healing boost overall.

"I want to see its magic," Liesel said, regarding the strange tinge of presence in the core. She hadn't ever felt anything like this before. It, however, matched the tint of the strange light above. She dropped it into a satchel. Unfortunately, she could hear a hundred more feet coming their way.

"I will have to wait, I guess." She stepped out of the way as the mages began channeling their mana.