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…to give humanity the new structure of magic. Where powers were once reserved for those who studied and worked their entire lives to achieve the enlightenment of Cultivation…
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Excitedly, they entered the room. Nobody spoke as they moved from rack to rack, picking up swords and spears, testing their balance. Matt and Vic continued into the back of the room, where armour was stacked on tables or hung from pegs behind a row of mannequins. Leather and metal shone as if newly polished, and Vic’s grin was threatening to split his face as he reached to touch a leather cuirass with metal studs woven into the material.
Vic lifted it down from its peg, and Matt helped to put it on. The leather was a dark brown, almost black, covering Vic’s torso and shoulders. Noticing something strange, Matt leaned in to look closer.
Vic noticed Matt inspecting him. “What is it?”
“The daggers,” Matt said, pointing to where two daggers were engraved in the supple leather. “There’s… I see glowing symbols. There’s some kind of magic on it.”
Vic’s eyes gleamed. “What does it do?”
“I don’t know…” Matt reached out, touching the insignia with a finger. The weave of essence coalesced around his fingertip, but otherwise nothing happened. “I recognise the symbols…” His voice trailed off as he studied the pattern. “I think these are… This same series of symbols is very common. It’s everywhere, in practically everything in the cave. Buildings, beds, cobblestones… But this is more concentrated.”
While considering the symbols and wondering what they meant, he walked distractedly over towards Pete. Pete was holding a large shield, made from thick, solid wood, and banded with metal. It came with a leather strap that fit perfectly across his shoulder. “Very good to have,” he grinned. “Even with the Shield skill, it’s great to have a backup.”
Curious, Matt leaned in and saw the metal bands held fine inscriptions of symbols. Essence radiated in weaves of threads from the symbols, and Matt recognised the same arrangement as on Vic’s cuirass. Again, that same weave of similar symbols. And there was something else there, a series of patterns that looked like…
“Pete, can you trigger Shield? I want to check something.”
“Sure,” Pete responded, and a moment later, a glowing disc radiated out from his other hand.
Inspecting the magical shield closely, Matt confirmed his suspicions. “Pete, did you notice the inscriptions on the metal? That shield,” he gestured to the large shield in Pete’s hands, “has the same patterns as your Shield skill.”
Pete’s eyes lit up with excitement. “Is it magical? Maybe that means it’s harder to break?”
“Maybe,” Matt answered. “Also, there is another pattern that I don’t recognise.”
Pete smiled as he lifted the shield up to inspect the inscriptions. “Is everything in here magical?”
Matt walked over to a nearby rack of swords and looked over the weapons. “Not everything. Most are not… Just normal. If you can call anything with this quality normal.”
Thor was nearby, looking at a shelf filled with daggers and testing them one by one. Matt pointed to a slim dagger. The handle was wrapped in red leather, and the blade was long and thin without a fuller. “That one.”
Thor grabbed the weapon and held it up for Matt to inspect. Thin threads wove around the blade. “I don’t recognise these symbols at all, but it’s definitely magical,” he said after looking over the pattern etched into the blade.
“How about you, then?” Thor asked. “Did you find anything you like?”
Well, I have a weapon. The thought of exchanging the guandao for another weapon was absurd, so Matt let his eyes travel over the sets of armour on display. He was about to inspect a thick leather tunic when he felt the guandao redirect his attention to another corner of the room where bundles of what looked like robes were stacked on shelves. Sceptical that the cloth could serve as armour, he still walked over and touched the fabric, expecting it to feel flimsy. He was surprised to find it both smooth and robust. Testing the material between thumb and forefinger, it felt surprisingly solid. Letting his guandao continue to direct his focus, he traced his hand from one bundle to the next until it stopped at a specific robe.
He pulled the bundle out and let the material unfold, revealing a hooded black robe. Where the cuirass or the shield or the dagger had smaller magical inscriptions, the robe was covered in an embroidery of red symbols. A large pattern ran up the back to reach over each shoulder, where it split into thinner threads that forked down the chest like lightning, each part of the pattern densely packed with different symbols that radiated with power. Even after inspecting the pattern for several minutes, he only recognised smaller portions of the design.
Matt was hesitant to try out a strange garment that was obviously brimming with unknown magic, but an insistent spark of meaning from the guandao convinced him to pull the robe over his head. He was surprised at how lightweight and flexible it felt and took a tentative lunge forward, feeling the robe split in the front to let his leg extend fully. When he took a step back, followed by a quick pivot, the robe moved with him instead of hindering his movement.
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And there was something more there too, something Matt couldn’t quite put his finger on. Moving around in the robe he felt stronger, faster. A tendril of energy flowed from the guandao and through him, into the fabric, and his breath caught as he looked down to see a flash of essence rippling across his body, ending in a soft glow of orange and white.
His attention was fixed on the threads weaving and radiating from the robe, and he almost didn’t hear Mia. “–and it looks good on you.”
“Huh?” He looked up. Mia was smiling at him from where she was standing, leaning against the doorframe.
“I said, that robe looks good on you.”
“Yeah,” he said distractedly, unable to lift his eyes from the essence flowing across the robe’s fabric. “I wish I knew what this magic is,” he added in a near-whisper. “What it does…”
“I am sure you’ll find out,” Mia said, bringing his attention back. Matt looked at her, noticing she hadn’t moved from where she was standing.
“Are you not taking anything?”
“Oh. Well. No, not now. Maybe later. I was just thinking…” Mia sighed, frowning as she looked down at her feet. “There is… there is a lot of stuff here. Magical armour, weapons, tools… We need to figure out how to distribute it. If our plan succeeds, this city will fill up with people. Hundreds of strangers. Do we just let people take what they find, first come first serve? I’m guessing there are hundreds of buildings with useful items. Can we even stop them from looting this place?”
She paused a moment before continuing. “I think we need to collect it somehow. To control it, and I just don’t know how we can do it.”
Matt realised she was right. They had gone from decently equipped warriors by the standards of the soldiers outside the cave to wearing equipment that was finer than anything anyone had seen for hundreds of years. Human greed was not to be underestimated. If we don’t handle this right, it’s going to be chaos. A very bloody chaos.
“Do we need some type of currency? Can we sell it?” Thor asked. “We can gather all of this up… Then we can use it as payment for work that helps the city.”
“How would that even work?” Pete asked. “Why would they do that? Why wouldn’t they just take whatever they want? We are five people, and if our plan succeeds, everyone here will be powerful. We wouldn’t be able to stop them.”
“We can’t just let people freely grab whatever they want,” Vic said, crossing his arms. “That’s going to result in mayhem.”
“I agree,” Mia said. “We need to figure this out…” Her voice trailed off. “But I have no idea how. There are so many things I… We need to figure out.”
“Enough,” Pete said with a steady voice. “You can think yourself into a knot, Mia, but we need to get moving. You can think about it on the way. All ready to continue?”
A wide street led off towards the centre of the city. Matt and Pete walked in front as they moved down the smooth cobblestones, scanning the buildings and alleys they passed for danger. With each building, Vic would Hide and step inside for a cursory search. So far, all the buildings they passed had been empty.
Matt thought the air smelled… empty, with vague overtones of dust and stagnant water. The dim grey shadows of structures surrounded them on all sides, monuments to a society that had existed long before them. When other streets or alleys broke off from the main street they were traversing, Matt saw rows of more buildings stretching out into the distance and his mind was going numb from the sheer scale of everything. Searching the entire city was a bigger task than he had first imagined.
After more than an hour of walking in tense silence, the street opened up into a larger space. They stopped and looked around, trying to peer into the shadows ahead. Matt was about to ask how they should proceed when Mia spoke up behind him in a soft voice.
“Guys? Is it getting… brighter?”
Matt looked up to the pinpricks of light above. They were almost at the centre of the city, and the cavern ceiling was far, far above them. “Maybe,” he said after considering it for a moment. Then he noticed something else.
“It’s changing in colour,” he said in a low voice. “The light. It’s growing more… red. And orange.”
“It is,” Thor said. “Like a dawn.”
Matt realised Thor was right. The atmosphere of the cave changed as the gloom of night gave way to softer shades of blue tinged with orange and golden yellow. The light increased as the colours changed, revealing the space ahead more clearly.
They were standing at one side of a giant open space, easily a thousand strides across in either direction. The buildings here were significantly taller than the ones they had passed on their way, with imposing doors and grandiose windows set into intricately carved walls of stone and wood. The buildings gave the impression they were leaning in, encircling a vast square that appeared to be the midpoint of the city.
And in the centre of the square, an enormous building appeared out of the dimness. Surrounded by the green colours of a woodland garden, the structure reached up towards the ceiling, nearly touching the stone ceiling far above.
Wordlessly, they walked towards the centre, weapons held ready. The cobbled street soon gave way to gravel, and that gravel became grass pathways. Vivid green colours replaced the greys and blacks of the city behind them, and a garden surrounded them. Trees in perfect health dotted the landscape, beautiful flowers in full bloom lined grass meadows, neat rows of bushes and perennials artfully filling in the greens of the garden. Boulders, rocks and stones spread through the area, arranged carefully and with purpose.
They had just walked through an imposing city of stone in near darkness, and now it smelled like a spring morning. The mood was strangely upbeat as they approached an area where clusters of maple trees surrounded a large, white square encircled by a rope fence. Matt walked closer, confused and intrigued when he realised the white material was immaculate white sand; in some places smooth and in other places rippling like water. A simple rake was leaning against a nearby tree.
Something even stranger stood in the centre of the rippling sand. What is that? Matt hesitated to step over the rope barrier and disturb the rippling surface. He stood by the fence and looked at what might be the strangest sight so far: a small tree, reaching no higher than up to his waist, perched on a large, flat boulder. But instead of the thin trunk and delicate leaves of a sapling, the tree was gnarled and twisted. It looked hundreds of years old, its branches reaching out with serenity and elegance, curled roots stretching across the ground below. What kind of tree is that? I’ve never seen anything like it.