FENG SAI

The canopy suffocated the sky above me. I kept running, further and furhter into the treeline. I saw the Titan above me as flashes between the thickening canopy. It screeched in rage. Then the first of the monsters in the forest rose to greet it, a bird three times its size, with wings that cast a shadow even over the canopy.

There was a clash like the noise of thunder. Branches and leaves fluttered from the trees above. I kept running, though I heard the cries of a dozen other monsters. Almost everything here seemed to fly. Their movement radiated danger in the sky above me as I darted over rugged ground and exposed roots. The forest raced by me as the trees in its heart grew older and taller.

Monstrous, ancient trees blotted the sky until everything here was covered in shade. I kept running, leaving the sound of monsters fighting behind. Something else had confronted the Titan — another monster I was sure I wasn’t prepared to fight. This chamber was bigger, more dangerous, and filled with many more threats than any previous one.

Every detail seemed to be remembered or impressed upon the chamber precisely. I shattered the Anti-Light movement technique, slowing until I returned to a regular pace in the forest. I could see the fine details on the bark, the vines creeping up the sides of trees, the remains of decaying wood on the forest floor. The place might as well have been real.

I panted and turned, looking up to the sky. The canopy blocked it out entirely, but I could still hear the booms of monsters fighting.

I was lucky, nothing else. I needed to reach the mountain at the center of the island and escape this chamber before the monsters caught up and fought me. Behind me, I found an opening in the forest, where the treeline cleared over a small meadow filled iwth flowers that followed the sun. Floating blobs in a dozen gem-like colors spun in slow circles below the treeline.

They folded over themselves as they drifted on the breeze. When I walked toward them, they drifted away.

[Cloudseed Jellyfish, Level 2]

[These passive manabeasts school and reproduce inside of clouds in massive number. They absorb water from the environment around them. Once they reach a critical mass, they explode out of the cloud and seed others.]

There were no threats here. Just a moment of calm.

I needed to get the hell out of this dungeon. The escalation between chambers had been fast and intense.

In the clearing, I could see the foot of the mountain. It was closer than I had expected.

This chamber was far, far larger than any I had seen before. And I had almost died at its entrance; a single direct strike from the memory of the Titan here would’ve killed me. Its power was horrifying. It had come so close, I had sensed its presence. The worst part about the monster was its presence; a heavy weight in the world, but not the refined weight of a cultivator that impressed their very dao onto the world.

The Titan had no cultivation at all. It was only power and destruction, no guiding principle.

I had nearly died to a monster that lacked cultivation. A mortal.

The thought sent a shudder through me. The hunts throughout my childhood had put me in significant danger; danger of maiming or dismemberment. Not of instant, violent death.

The alert that had appeared when I entered this Chamber came to mind.

[Warning: You have reached the Core Chamber.]

I hadn’t known what that had meant; now I did. This chamber was far more powerful and dangerous than the preceding ones. Qualitatively so.

Littlebird, the dungeon-spirit that had become a pseudo-companion to me, had climbed my back and sat now on my shoulder. It chirped happily in the sunlight in the clearing.

Each chamber of the dungeon seemed like a memory of significant import to the Titan’s life and history. They were almost puzzles at times; bringing the bird to the creek and sitting with it while it recovered had opened a door to the dungeon.

Using the broken formation to kill the desert Titan clearly hadn’t been an intentional part of the chambers. No door opened; the room exploded instead. The room I had fallen into when I broke the dungeon chamber was different from the previous ones.

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There was no puzzle there. Just corpses.

Whatever Trailblazers came before me were having a completely different experience in the dungeon.

“What’s the puzzle here, Littlebird?” I asked, folding my arms and looking around. I had to find out how to get out of this dungeon before that bird caught up to me. I didn’t have a chance at killing that monster. Not on my own.

And I had already gained plenty of benefits. It was time to leave the dungeon and look for easier game. Before Dale found me again and decided that he didn’t want witnesses.

Littlebird chirped a sing-song tune.

“Whatever the puzzle is, it has to be near the mountain. The entire chamber is built around it.” I ruminated aloud. Littlebird chirped along happily.

I listened for the sound of fighting. I heard the noise of bugs and birds in the trees, of wind roaring ahead, and of the little Jellyfish swirling around behind me. But I didn’t hear fighting. I cautiously made my way through the clearing, pushing through the tall flowers.

There were no surprises, no predators, no traps. Just the raw, untouched nature, more impressed onto the birds memories than anything before had been. I moved toward the mountain, shaping my techniques to accelerate, avoiding the openings and meadows wherever I could.

The canopy provided a comfort.

Breaks between the treeline featured jagged sections of ground, and, at one point, an entire river pouring down off the mountain. It was shallow but wide, eroding a section of the floating island. I jumped across the rocks that it carved up out of the dirt.

The forest turned upward, the ground at a grade as I made my way closer and closer to the mountain.

Then the treeline ended.

The dirt was too thin. Trees clung desparately onto what earth remained, roots spreading across exposed stone as I stared up at the mountain.

I must have crossed fully to the side of the mountain; the angle at which I had seen it previously hid an irregularity. There was a discrepancy in the huge stone face of the mountain before me.

A city split the mountain in half, carved out of the stone itself, built into a gouge that looked like someone had cut a c hunk of the mountain with a sword.

Unlike the desert city, which had been nothing but a shattered ruin, the city here was whole, barely touched by the ravages of age or nature. No animals had nested here. It was almost suspiciously clean and barren, though its location at the floating island certainly kept many creatures away.

Sparkling veins of ore criss-crossed the valley that bisected the mountain, glimmering in the sunlight of the memory chamber.

This place was too vast — too great to be something remembered. Rather than memories, the chambers seemed like pieces of history that had impressed themselves thoroughly onto the Titan that experienced them.

I crept toward the city, watching the shadows in empty buildings and missing doorways, bnut nothing moved. The qi moving in the air impressed upon me the size and scale of a massive formation beneath the city. It seemed to also stretch far beyond it, more subtle from farther away, manipulating the qi of the entire island.

The qi through the entire chamber shifted so subtly that it was possible to believe it was just the normal ambient movement. Whatever was here was already powered.

A main thoroughfare stabbed directly toward the heart of the city, a paved road across the way. Looming pillars crumbled where they once supported bridges that connected the disparate sides of the city crawling up the valley walls. Hundreds of empty buildings pockmarked the walls like long forgotten scars.

I walked on the left side of the valley, staring at the middle where I felt the qi perturbed by the formation. It must have been some kind of defensive formation — the city had no walls. But maybe floating in the air was enough.

[Anti-Earth Spirit Vein]

[An Exotic Material transfigured by an elaborate technique. The spirit-veins in this island have been converted to create an anti-gravity affect.]

Farm tools littered the side of an open warehouse. The door was missing, wood long since rotten away. But the tools remained, handles and all. I felt the buzz of qi on them.

[Sickle of the Otherworldly Cultivator]

[Shovel of the Otherworldly Cultivator]

[Till of the Otherworldly Cultivator]

[An Enchanted tool made of exotic materials. Identify level too low to identify properties.]

A peek inside the open window showed more of the same piled on the floor. It was an entire warehouse of farm tools. I continued forward. There had been an entire city here; hundreds of people.

“You think if I take things out of the Chamber they’ll still exist?” I asked Littlebird. “Or are they just memories?”

Littlebird chirped less happily than it had in the forest as I made my way toward the mountain.

There was a line of rubble I had to climb over, left behind by the bridge that had once existed above. Time and weathering had claimed its remains.

The city’s walls closed in as I approached the end of the city at the mountain’s foot.

A waterfall fell down the side of the mountain and accumulated in a massive pond, now laden with algae so thick it seemed solid. The water accumulated and drained away through a hole in the top, probably deep down and off the side of the island. There were more water wells higher up, draining melting snow from the mountain’s distant peak.

The air was wet as water misted off the wells. The houses and buildings and even the rough stone surface were gone, replaced by reinforced, polished brick, piled stories high. Killing slits in the stone appeared at regular distances, angled inward, like the city was preparing for invaders from the city’s own heart.

The first doors I had seen in the entire chamber stood before me, embedded into the stone.

[Fortress door, Anti-Metal]

[A Fortified and Enchanted door, designed to resist attacks. Built into an Anti-Light Order city-fortress.]

I stopped, looking back at the door, then down the street. The entire fortress was built around a central point, and it wasn’t the entrance to the city on this side.

It also confirmed what I suspected — this was another Anti-Light ruin. They seemed to dot this entire continent.

I approached the door, sword in hand. Anti-Light ruins only meant one thing.

Loot.