Chapter 103: The second door
Felix Sythias’ POV (continued):
The design on the door was the same as it had been on the first door, with two dragons rearing to the sky and two small stocky people beside them, which was strange. The first door only had the design on the outside of the door, with the inside of the door being blank. Maybe this was the outside of the doors? Or maybe going off just one example was a bad idea.
The dragons on the door were different from the first door, and so were the stocky people. They were both slimmer, and one didn’t have any decorations on his neck at all, while the other had a frill of spikes running from her head to the tip of her tail. And while both of them were about the same size, they were smaller than the dragons on the other door had been—but still quite a bit bigger than me. The thing that really made them stand out, though, were the weird sacks that hung on their sides, right beneath their wings. They looked to be filled with water.
All in all, I got the feeling they were meant to survive in arid environments where water was scarce. So they were smaller and carried a small store of water around with them. I was kind of jealous of that, as silly as it looked on them. I would’ve killed to have more water with us.
Which I supposed we did. Those monsters didn’t hand it over freely, in any case.
The two stocky people were mostly the same, though they were a small bit larger, with shorter beards. And they held battle-axes instead of those weird crossbows of the people on the first door.
“So, we go through?” I asked.
Alex, who was running a hand over the art, turned to me, blinking. “Right, sorry. Yeah, I think we should. I can’t think of a reason why we shouldn't, anyway. Though I want to copy these dragons and such into my notebook first, if you don’t mind.”
I shook my head. “Go ahead. And while you do that, I’ll carve a stone stick out of the wall to block the door with. I don’t want it to close on us again.”
Alex nodded and took out his pencils. I turned to the wall and brought my earth magic to bear. What I was about to do would’ve been impossible for me to do in one go before we got stuck down here. I simply hadn’t had the mana. But now I did.
I channeled the earth magic into claw with only one intent—move aside. I ran the claw over the wall in a long rectangle shape while I pushed the mana deep inside. The stone moved aside like it was tar, but it moved. Slowly but surely, I dug a rectangle-shaped trench into the stone. Then I repeated it with the backside, too. Getting my mana where I wanted it to was more difficult for this, and the shape turned out to be a little lopsided, but I made it work.
Not long after, I had a meter long stone stick in my talons. It was maybe ten centimeters thick, so it was rather heavy. I estimated it to be just under a hundred kilograms. Dense stone for sure.
I put it to the side and turned back to Alex. He was almost done, so I waited for a little bit, watching him draw. His drawings were a lot more detailed than when he’d drawn the first doors. It seemed he leveled the Skill for it quite a bit.
Soon, he was done. He put the notebook away and stepped aside, gesturing for me to open the door. “It’s all yours,” he said.
I glanced at the doors, then back at him. I remembered the logs he’d snapped with his hands, and how he pushed me onto my back before we made out, then had an idea.
“Why don’t you try opening them?” I said. “With your improved Attributes, I’m sure you should be able to now.”
Alex looked at the door with renewed interest and put his hand on the handle. He turned it and tried to pull. For a moment, nothing happened, then the handle glowed a little in my mana sense, and the door opened. Alex grimaced with effort as he pulled it open enough for us to pass through, then grinned at me when he was done.
If he noticed the handle glowing, he didn’t say anything. But before I could mention it, I was distracted by the sights on the other side of the door.
The first thing I noticed was the warmer and much drier air on the other side. It rushed over us like when you opened an oven, only less intense. The second thing I noticed was the gigantic hall on the other side of the door. The ceiling was several hundred meters above us, and the hall stretched out for kilometers. I couldn’t even see the end of the space.
The walls of the hall were lined with pillars, lights, and murals made of metal and paint, not unlike the doors, and not unlike the decorations that lined the walls of entrance to the Third Grandest Library back on campus. It was eerily similar, actually. Unlike the art for the library’s entrance, these murals didn’t tell much of a story. Not at first glance at least.
When I looked up at the ceiling, I noticed beams of metal hanging from chains. There were also just rods and little platforms sticking out of the walls all over the place. Some of the platforms still even had furniture on them, or old bookcases. It was like my own room back home—a giant bird’s cage. Now that I looked closer, I noticed small beams and handholds all over the walls and murals, allowing dragons—and their human-like companions—to get to the platforms even without flying.
On the floor, many smaller cubbies were carved into the walls, with stone chairs, and all the necessities for a communal space. Even from a distance, they were oddly small.
If there had been any doubt about dragons having used the tunnels and having lived there, there weren’t anymore. I did wonder why they lived underground, though. And who this other species was. What had happened to make them leave the skies? Or was I maybe just the weird one for loving them so much?
“Whoa,” Alex said, breaking me out of my thoughts.
“That’s the understatement of the year,” I said.
Alex chuckled and walked through the door. I held it open for a moment and put the stone rod I’d carved in between the two doors. It wasn’t going to be closing itself on us this time. I hoped. I stepped through and carefully let the door close until it hit the rod. Letting go, I stood back and watched the thing for a while. Nothing much happened, even after a minute. Trusting it would stay safe, I turned to Alex, who had wandered down the hall.
We explored the hall for quite some time, Alex frequently stopping to copy down a mural. He soon had to stop though, since he was quickly running out of space in his notebook. That thing was probably worth a fortune now, if he ever decided to sell it.
Like I’d thought, the murals didn’t really tell much of a story. They were mostly just paintings and depictions of landscapes and skies. I even recognized one as being a mural of the floating islands the Academy was built on.
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Time had faded a lot of the colors and details, but even so, it was clear this hall had once been a wonderful place to be. Bright colors everywhere, lots of little nooks to read in, or platforms and similar stuff to climb over and to fly to.
The deeper we got into the hall, though, the more confused I became. While most of the furniture had been rotted away, it was clear a lot of the furniture on the ground and on the platforms had been beds, divider walls, remnants of tents, stuff like that. And they were placed about haphazardly, too. It reminded me a lot of that one time the Academy branch I grew up at took in a bunch of refugees after a terrible storm had destroyed half the countryside.
There had been tents and beds all over the empty halls then, too.
After walking for a while, the hall opened up into a much larger, spherical room, which then split off into another four halls like a five-sided star. For the sake of efficiency, Alex hopped on my back and we flew through the other halls. Three of them were the same as the first. Murals on the walls, platforms sticking out, and a feeling like a refugee camp. But the fourth one was a little different. It started out the same, but quickly lost that sense of refugee camp. The platforms got bigger and better organized and even had actual buildings on them.
If this underground place really was a refugee camp, then this part was where the rich and nobles—if they even had nobles—had stayed.
We decided to land at one of the houses, but we found it in much the same state as all the other spaces we’d come across—nothing left but walls and traces of what had once been furniture.
Since it was getting late, we made this building our camp. We put our stuff down and talked about our findings today for a while.
“I wonder what drove the dragons underground,” Alex said.
“I’m more curious where they are now, to be honest,” I said. “I mean, I haven’t seen any bodies or skeletons, so where did they all go? I can’t imagine they’d just abandon a place like this without a good reason.”
Alex shrugged. “I don’t think we’ll find out here, honestly. If there ever were any records, they’ve long since rotted away.”
I sighed. “Yeah, I think you’re right. Still, I want to spend tomorrow doing a more thorough search if you don’t mind. We still have plenty of time before we need to turn around.”
Alex agreed, so our plan for tomorrow was formed.
The next day, we started with exploring the nearby houses. I’d drop off Alex at one of the platforms, then search the next house over while Alex searched his. This way we saved some time. For most of the morning we didn’t find much, though one of the buildings Alex had searched had a mural depicting a family. They were three dragons, a female red dragon, a female blue dragon, and a child, a male yellow dragon. Though the details were faded, it was clear they wore jewelry and fine clothing. That last part weirded me out the most. Why would any dragon voluntarily wear clothing? Or was I just the weirdo for flying around mostly naked?
The other houses didn’t contain much else, aside from a few more murals. Turns out I wasn’t necessarily the weird one. Not all dragons on the murals wore clothing. One mural was quite interesting, though, as it depicted a family of a dragon and one of those weird stocky humans; though seemingly without children. Clearly these two species had been more than just allies.
Another thing I noticed was that a lot of the adult dragons were quite scarred. A missing wing, a nasty scratch across the face, a large tear in the wing membrane, painful burns, and so forth.
It didn’t tell us much aside from the fact that something bad had happened, which we already knew.
After we finished exploring the nearby houses, Alex suggested we search the floor, too. I agreed, so we flew down. As we searched the floor and the outer wall of the hall, we quickly found something interesting. Aside from numerous smaller tunnels leading into the walls and towards industrial rooms, this hall had doors at the end—just like the one we had entered from. Except, these doors were at least three times as large. We had to push them open together, and even then we only barely managed to nudge them open far enough to get through.
Was I really that weak of a dragon? I imagined the dragons in this place would’ve been able to open it with relative ease. After all, why else would they make the doors so heavy?
We made our way inside, and for the first time since we’d gotten stuck in these tunnels, the lights went on by themselves. Unsurprisingly, the doors opened up into yet another tunnel. At least I could already see the end in the distance. We both sighed at the same time, causing us to chuckle, then set off. Less than half an hour later, we arrived. There was another set of the large doors, which we quickly opened.
On the other side was a sight like I’d never seen before. The room was large and spherical, but not as large as the halls had been. Cables and organic root-like things crawled across the ceiling, all of them culminating in a single pillar in the center of the room. There was a gap in the middle of the pillar, halfway off the ground, and in that gap sat a large crystal ball, maybe the size of my head.
It all looked… dead, for a lack of a better word.
“Do we really need to go in here?” Alex asked. “It’s immensely creepy.”
I turned to him. “If you want to wait outside, that’s fine with me. I’m going in, though. I want to know what that crystal ball in the center is.”
Alex shifted nervously, but followed me inside anyway. As we walked around the room, I spotted another set of doors on the other side of the room. I hadn’t seen it before because the pillar had blocked it. The door was marked with more dragon-scratch, but it looked… newer. And to my surprise, I could understand it. I still couldn’t get the exact meaning, but the words exuded a vague sense of what they meant. It was like the words imprinted it directly onto my brain. It was weird and felt kind of invasive, but it worked. Though I couldn’t read it, I still understood what it said—emergency exit.
“Alex!” I yelled, startling him. “I think I found an exit!”
I pointed at the doors and Alex looked over. The moment his eyes landed on the dragon-scratch, he groaned and grabbed his head. “Fuck, that’s unpleasant. But I think you’re right, yeah!”
We rushed over to the doors and tried to open them, but they were locked. I tried to push my magic inside but weirdly found nothing on the other side. It was like the doors opened up into an impenetrable wall.
I turned to Alex to lament this discovery but found him reading a System notification. Slowly, he turned to the crystal ball at the center, then back at me.
“Hey, Felix? Could you inject some mana into the ball? I just got a System prompt about unlocking the door. Something about using my Prime privileges or something. I guess that they turned out to be useful after all.”
I nodded and walked over to the ball in the center of the room. It was a bit high up, so I had to stand on my hindlegs to reach it. I put my talons around the ball, and unable to resist giving it a try, I gave it a small tug. The ball was solidly stuck in place, though. So I shrugged and poured some mana in. There was every chance this was a stupendously dumb idea that would go horribly wrong, but I genuinely couldn’t care. We finally found an exit, and I wasn’t taking the risk of us finding another one. We’d deal with any possible fallout after.
The crystal ball glowed underneath my talons, and it started pulling in ambient mana, as well. Within moments, I could feel the mana inside flaring up. It was like I was holding a miniature sun made of mana, a powerful reaction, mana fusing into purer forms, creating and attracting more mana as it did so. It was a feedback loop at this point. Self-sufficient. Like a ball rolling down an infinite snowy hillside, it only got bigger and bigger. I’d kickstarted it, and there was no stopping it now.
I stepped back and watched as the crystal ball—no, core—started growing brighter and brighter, before stabilizing. Then the pillar lit up with a faint blue light, and the organic things on the ceiling squirmed and throbbed as immense amounts of mana rushed through them, going off to places unknown.
“That’s… disconcerting,” I said, and I was about to say more when something entirely unexpected happened. I received a System message.
> [Global System Message]
>
> Prime privileges accepted. Core #82 powering back on. Title system reactivating. Eighteen cores still unpowered. Please reactivate cores to restore full System functionality.
>
> [Global System Message End]
But before I could react to the message, a large groan echoed through the chamber and I looked over to the door, which was opening. And right on the other side was a large monster, its hairy butt facing towards us.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I yelled.