She scanned the room again and the presence moved. Its aura was cold and wrong somehow. It was only at the fourth star of the Expert rank, but somehow it made her skin crawl, and her hair stand on end every time her spirit sense brushed against the creature.
Wings fluttered and a noctilith dived down at her from the ceiling, its mandibles coated in green flame. Jie held the door with her right arm and shoulder as she sent out a finger of light at the creature with her left hand. Dragon lightning qi lit up the room like a blue sun for just a moment as it arced through the air and hit the noctilith dead center on the head. Its head exploded and it dropped to the floor, still twitching. As it writhed on the floor, Jie noticed that pieces of its carapace were missing already, exposing rotting, dead flesh within.
Pan Tian, Ithilix, and Xue all slipped under the door and Jie set it down behind them as gently as she could. Though it still landed with a heavy thud even so.
Her friends studied the body but kept well away from it.
"Is that... an undead noctilith?" Pan Tian asked.
"This one thinks you're correct," Ithilix said.
"Creepy," Jie said, "think I should hit it again just to be safe?"
"That's probably wise," Pan Tian said, "the undead can be quite stubborn about not staying dead."
Jie hit it again with another finger of light attack. The flash and boom didn't bother her all that much as anything that noticed it would surely have noticed the first one and the door opening. Her attack blasted fresh chunks out of the noctilith, but its only movement was from the force of her attack and the spasms her dragon lightning qi caused.
"Well, it's your kill, so make sure you get the beast core," Pan Tian said as she patted Jie's shoulder and moved on to inspect the circular platform, "wherever it is..."
Jie sighed but scanned the room with her spirit sense. It didn't take long to find the core since it wasn't veiled. She ripped it free of the hunk of rotting flesh it was embedded inside and stored it in her storage ring.
"Huh..." Pan Tian said after using a scroll of wisdom on the circular platform, "it says it's a transportation pad. No power though, so it's useless."
"Should we try and take it?" Jie asked.
"No. This pad was built long before this was a dungeon for Crimson Academy students. There's no telling what'll happen if we start breaking things. A door is fine, but a strange device none of us understand? That's just asking to activate some well-hidden security measures that'll kill us all," Pan Tian said, "besides, the statues get angry if you do things like that."
"They do?" Jie asked, "why haven't they scolded us for breaking anything before now?"
"Because we're just doing what we're supposed to be doing. But the hunt happens every year. If we start doing things to interfere with that... the statues can get quite deadly," Pan Tian asked.
"Have they ever killed anyone because of it?" Jie asked.
"Yup," Pan Tian said, "I've never seen it happen, but my brother has. It sounds like a terrible way to die."
"Okay... don't mess with things that make the statues angry... noted," Jie said.
Pan Tian identified the chests with white glowing runes as extremely durable stone chests with an enchantment that protected against undead. But, the second any of them touched one, the runes died and they could slide the top off easily, exposing the treasures within.
Two of the chests were packed with a total of twenty-eight bloodfruit ranging from the eighth to the ninth star of the Expert rank and sixteen twin moons pills. Another was filled with arak-made weapons that seemed crafted out of noctilith chitin, and a fourth was filled to the brim with glittering jewels and a blue, metal scarab the size of Jie's face that gave off a mysterious aura.
"Hmm... my scroll of wisdom says the scarab is some kind of key, but it doesn't say to what. Ah well, some of these gems are worth a fair amount of coin," Pan Tian said, "this is the best hunt I've ever been on, and we're still not done. My brother is going to turn green."
"It's too bad we couldn't take him with us," Jie said.
"Yes... but I'll share some of this with him anyway," Pan Tian said.
"You're a good sister," Ithilix said.
"He's done the same for me many times," Pan Tian said, "we should get moving. We've moved so fast that we're probably days ahead of everyone else, but there's no sense getting complacent."
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***
They continued through endless hallways and rooms. Several times they came across massive, elaborate statues of humanoid creatures with the heads of animals. Most of them were broken. Either deliberately or simply worn down by the relentless march of time. Sadly, the statues were too large to fit in their storage rings.
Occasionally, rustling, scrabbling, and chittering noises echoed around them, but it was impossible to tell which direction they came from or how far away they were. Other than that, it was eerily quiet. Jie cycled lightning step and qi armor as her nerves screamed of danger.
They came to a hallway like many others, with rooms on either side and metal pipes leading to another large door. Though this door was metal and gave off a much more powerful aura than usual. With an intricate design that looked like four triangular sections that met in the center, capped with a large disk indented with an impression of a scarab. Above the door was a hieroglyph depicting a cat person seated in a meditative pose. The entire hallway reeked of an overpowering chemical smell that made Jie's eyes water.
"I think we've found the door the key goes to," Pan Tian said.
"This one thinks it's likely," Ithilix said.
Panels slid back in the wall behind them. Mummified arak and a variety of other races stepped out while even more stepped out of the doorways and into the hallway in front of them, surrounding them. The mummies' bandages looked fresh, but their flesh was dried out and stuck to their bones. Some carried maces, swords, or shields, but most had only their long bony fingers that looked more like claws. Green fire pulsed through gaps in their bandages and burned in their otherwise empty eye sockets.
"Jie, you take the ones in front, the rest of us will handle the ones behind us," Pan Tian said as she fell back behind Jie to join the others.
The mummies opened their mouths, exposing dried, rotting, tongueless mouths as they roared. The sound was harsh and empty and filled with a crackling undercurrent as the green fire suffusing them flared, boiling up their throats like a furnace coming to life.
The mummies cycled martial skills as green fire swirled around them, covering weapons and bony fingers, forming swirling orbs of green fire, and engulfing one of the mummies in a green, burning shroud. They charged Jie but the strongest of them was only at the sixth star of the Expert rank and the entire group moved as though stuck in syrup with Jie using lightning step.
Jie unleashed a barrage of chain finger of light attacks that arced between them all. It vaporized the weaker ones into dust, while the stronger ones exploded and burst into blue flames. Before the mummies had taken more than three steps, they were all annihilated. Green fire drifted up like smoke from what little remained of the mummies strewn about the floor.
Jie looked back at those her friends were fighting. It seemed the strongest ones had all been in the group she'd killed, and she didn't see anything her friends couldn't handle, so she waited and allowed them to fight it out. The whole point of this was to grow as cultivators, and she didn't want to rob them of that by destroying everything they came across.
Still, she watched the fight carefully, ready to jump in the second one of her friends got into trouble.
But they fought well together and as the last mummy fell, they breathed a sigh of relief.
"Nicely fought," Jie said.
Her friends beamed at her.
"This one thanks you," Ithilix said.
"Woaaaah did you even leave anything left of them?" Pan Tian said as she looked over Jie's side of the hallway.
"Should I have?" Jie asked.
"I'm not sure..." Pan Tian said, "I've heard some parts of undead can be valuable for components but... I don't know which. Do you know anything about it Ithilix?"
Ithilix shook her head. "This one does not," she said, "such things require specialized knowledge that this one sadly lacks."
"What would anyone want with undead body parts?" Jie asked.
"I think metal affinity cultivators, necromancers, alchemists, scribes, and a few other people can make use of some of them... but I don't know enough about any of them to say what's valuable and what isn't. I don't think these are worth taking with us, though," Pan Tian said.
Jie shrugged. "That's good enough for me. I'd rather not carry these things around anyway. They give me the creeps," she said.
"We should take their weapons though," Pan Tian said.
They did as Pan Tian said and stored the mummies' weapons in their storage rings before inspecting each of the rooms.
There, they found another twenty-four bloodfruit ranging from the eighth to the ninth star of the Expert rank, fourteen steel body pills, six rapid thought pills, eighteen tireless endurance pills, four Yang Asha's blessing pills, four Adonis's blessing pills, more chitinous weapons, and forty gold coins.
They also found three beautiful paintings depicting scenes from an ancient battle in sequence, though the paintings looked too pristine to be from the ruined city itself.
What appeared to be the first painting depicted eight wildly different characters, one of which seemed to be a massive walking castle, led by an armored warrior as they did battle with a beautiful, graceful man with perfect features and a sadistic, twisted smile on his lips.
The second painting showed only the armored warrior still standing. Alone against the beautiful man, whose visage now took up the entire canvas. The sheer scale of his depiction made the armored warrior seem small and powerless.
The third and what seemed to be the final painting, showed an enormous dragon with onyx black scales casting the beautiful man down into a dark abyss. A winged serpent cried behind the dragon and the armored warrior knelt as though too exhausted to stand.
Several of the rooms also contained limestone jars with beautifully carved heads of various animals with runes inscribed on the jars themselves. The jars contained various organs in a green liquid.
"Ugh," Jie said, "this is disgusting."
"Yes," Pan Tian agreed, "but I think that these are likely to be some of the more valuable undead components. And, if not, the jars will likely be appealing to someone. Perhaps as decorations."
Jie shuddered. "Rather them than me," she said.
Jie's skin crawled as she stored some of the jars in her storage ring. She tried to console herself by reminding herself that she was already carrying magical beast corpses and what was left of some past students. But that only made her feel sick.