Leaving the lich to suffer a horrible fate, I receive the bat I had sent to Atarinsk. I enter into its mind and start to see what it has seen on its journey. After a few days of travel, it had reached the city, now battered and bruised. Cracks lined the walls, as well as dents and breaks. Blood still stained the walls as the corpses of soldiers and undead alike were being carted off by the peasantry for disposal.

The city was quiet, still remembering the haunting siege. The groans and screams of agony were still fresh in their minds and would, in the future, fester into trauma for some. The stronghold still stood strong and flawless, not being affected by the harrowing siege as the outer walls took the brunt of the damage. The bat flew into the stronghold unseen and entered a shadow of a humble throne room where the lord of the city was talking with a paladin who was kneeling on the scarlet carpet.

The Lord moved with a stern demeanor and held wisdom within his pale gray eyes. His opulent blue coat contrasted with the orange glow from the sunset.

"Servant of Solus would you care to inform me of what happened to that vile lich?"

The paladin fear stricken spoke

"Yes my lord. We were pursuing the lich and his entourage of undead for two days and two nights. then he suddenly sent his undead to distract us. He ascended the Orusan mountains and entered a cave where he took refuge within an ancient undiscovered dwarven fortress. And Lumous sent me away to send the news to you my lord."

The lord displeased by the news asked

"Did they survive?"

The paladin looked nervous and unsure of himself and said

"I do not know they didn't meet me at the rendezvous point so I am unsure of their current status"

The lord leaned back on his throne and let out a sigh

"Is that all?"

The paladin quivering said

"Yes my lord that is everything"

Disappointed the lord said

"I see... You are free to leave"

The paladin relieved said

"Thank you my lord may the lord of light bless us all"

After saying this the paladin left the room. After the gates were shut and the lord was left to his lonesome, he spoke under a whispered breath,

"Damn it. Damn it all. First the poor harvests, then an undead horde, then the loss of a high-ranking paladin. Lady luck certainly isn't smiling on me, huh?"

The lord chuckled once more in despair,

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"What am I supposed to do?"

Exhausted from ruling, the lord entered his chambers. Then the bat, cloaked in the shadows, fled back to the dungeon. That lord is very unfortunate. He looks exhausted, and it seems time isn't treating him very well, as wrinkles and gray hairs seemed to roll down his face. Well, I wish him the best of luck in his future ruling, but for now, I have to work on my dungeon some more.

Turning to the ziggurat, I begin to work on its interior. It will serve as the transition from the third to the fourth. I designed ancient broken sculptures and carved Cuneiform script into them. I only dabbled in the language and was hardly fluent, but I knew the basic words. So I carved the words for "eternity" and "night" on the broken statues. Which would add to the lore of the floor further. The plan for the fourth is quite simple the interior of a temple flooded by torrential rains and lined with traps in every corner.

The experience should be something akin to an Indiana Jones-esque adventure, where you would have to brave multiple obstacles in order to reach the end. So I prepared the layout for the floor. It would be separated into two sections, one of which would be an extremely difficult-to-navigate maze system. The walls would move randomly, and so would the exit, making it impossible to map out reliably. For the second, well, I still haven't worked out the mechanics for that one yet.

Designing a moving maze was much harder than initially expected, as I had to make sure the moving walls wouldn't just collide together, or worse, make it so the maze just didn't have a proper path to the exit. I had to also give leeway for any future traps I might install and the fact that every brick of the wall was to be made manually to ensure intruders just didn't smash through them. With the main system of moving walls and doors worked out, I began to lay in the traps.

I set an enchantment to detect when it was raining on the third, and if it was, it would flood the maze until it reached the shoulder level of an average adult man. In the temple, I left the corpses of the eyeless basalisks and other miscellaneous organic items. So when it would flood, the water would fester, allowing disease to run rampant through the flooding waters. Installing another trap, I designed a simple bait trap on two adjacent walls.

I sculpted two water bearers, both men and women of incredible beauty; their facial proportions were perfect, and their bodies too were perfect as sculpted silk covered their more private regions. If anyone were to be enthralled by the sculpture for too long, a thin streak of high-pressure water would emerge from the eyes of the sculptures and would aim at anything that stared at them for too long. As high-pressure water could cut through steel, I see no reason why it wouldn't Pierce through flesh.

As it seemed I had no more inspiration for the second section, for the fourth, I took some time off building. And began to analyze the paladins that had just come under my possession. I prepare the corpse of the hero and place him on a stone table for an autopsy. This human differs from the other one I have locked up. His muscles are far stronger and feel far more attuned to mana, specifically light mana. His bones, too, were far more durable than they should've been. Carefully butchering his body, I see his organs.

I may not be a biologist, but it looks like his organs were far denser than they should've been. I suppose these explain his superhuman feats of strength and resilience. The hero's mana core was something truly special; it was attuned to pure light mana and shone with a brilliant radiance, yet it seemed tainted by some other force. I tried to manipulate it with mana to no avail. Strange, very strange; perhaps this force is similar to that of the Lich's strange magics or that spirit entombed within the forest.

Oh well, for now, I'll place the core within the pile of rare metals for safekeeping. Now that I'm starting to dissect the hero's mind, I notice his brain too was enhanced with light mana, though I'm not sure what function the enchantment served. As entering the minds of humans were a difficult task, to say the least, I steeled my will. Delving into his dead mind was a perilous endeavor, as even though he was kept in a frozen state, his mind was still slowly rotting away, so the memories he possessed were a garbled mess. Through sifting through the miscellaneous memories, I obtained a lot of crucial information regarding the nature of spirits and the undead.