While we found many remarkable things in the Cradle of the Daughter of the Silent Moon there are a few things that stand out as being particularly interesting. While we didn’t use a lot of the Cultivation and Martial Techniques as they were many of the techniques that we teach today are based off what we learned from them. We also learned a lot about Inscribing from the golems and other Inscriptions that we found there. Many of the rare plants that we grow today were also found in the ruins. However, it was probably what we found last that changed the most for us.
-Excerpt from Telram’s memoirs on the exploration of ruins.
Lelland grimaced in irritation as the head of his new spear bounced off one of the strange puppets that had attacked them when they walked into this newest room. His weapon wasn’t really effective against these things which seemed to be made from some sort of ceramic and despite learning the Body Strengthening Technique that Telram had been teaching his friends and students he didn’t have the same level of physical strength that the rest of his friends did. Even Jai was stronger than he was now that he had evolved into a Soulfire Tiger.
On the other hand, Telram was doing much better than he was which only served to hammer home to Lelland that his friend was going to be incredibly powerful in a few years. He still looked like he was wrestling his massive, spiked club rather than wielding it to Lelland but every blow that landed sent chunks of the ceramic armor protecting these new enemies flying.
“These things are much tougher than that statue we fought earlier,” Lelland grunted as he blocked an attack from one of the puppets. Each of the puppets was armed with a different weapon, including many that cultivators usually didn’t use. The weapons themselves didn’t seem to be anything special but they did serve to make the puppets much more dangerous than they would’ve been otherwise.
“Yeah, the worst thing is that Soul Energy doesn’t affect these ones as much,” Telram grunted as he swung his kanabo at the head of one of the puppets which shattered into pieces before what remained fell to the floor with a crash. As he’d said these puppets were affected much less by Soul Energy than the statues and traps that they had encountered so far.
Ryu snarled in irritation as he pummeled another one of the puppets with his mana coated fists. While he had been hoping that he would be getting a good fight these opponents weren’t what he had in mind. He could damage them relatively easily if he managed to land a hit due to his physical power but unless he hit an important part of the Inscription that powered them, they simply ignored the damage and continued to attack him. Despite the appearance that he usually kept up these days Ryu was a Mana Beast and a carnivorous one at that which meant most of his growth came from eating the Mana rich flesh of his victims. Which meant he wasn’t getting very many benefits from fighting these puppets. The only reason that he hadn’t lost his temper yet was because he was at least able to practice the Martial Techniques that Telram had taught him.
The fight continued for a few more minutes before Telram spun on his heel and swung his kanabo through the head of the final puppet which Gerry had been fighting. The old man almost said something to Telram about destroying the puppet that he was fighting for him but then he saw the strange look on his disciple’s face.
“What is it Telram?” he asked cautiously as Telram turned towards the massive door that the puppets had been guarding.
“Someone’s calling to me,” he replied almost absently as he stepped towards the door. “I have to go to them.”
“Telram, wait!” Gerry exclaimed. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to them,” Telram replied as he looked over his shoulder at Gerry and the old man opened his mouth to respond but before he could Telram smirked. “So that I can tell them to shut the fuck up.”
“What?” Gerry gaped at his student. “I don’t understand.”
“Whoever is trying to contact me seems to think that they can control me,” Telram explained as his friends stared at him in surprise. “However, their soul isn’t strong enough to overwhelm my defenses. I’ve managed to convince them that I’m under their control for now but if they figure out what’s going on then they’ll try and take one of you over instead and you might not be able to hold them off.”
“So, you’re going to defeat them before they can work out that they’re not controlling you,” Jai nodded. “But wouldn’t make more sense for us to run away while they think that they’re controlling you. You only noticed them trying to influence you just now, right?”
“That’s true,” Telram nodded. “But I want to see what I can learn from them first.”
“Why?” Lelland asked. “That seems extremely reckless.”
“Also true,” Telram nodded. “It’s entirely possible that something could go wrong but if it doesn’t then there’s a chance that we could find out if there are other places like this.”
“Just let him do it,” Ryu sighed as he started walking back in the direction that they had come. “It’s not like there’s anything else for us to do here right now.”
This was true. They had already explored all of the other rooms before they reached this one. None of them had anything particularly interesting in them and one of them had even collapsed. As far as Telram could tell the room beyond this door was the last one that they had left to explore which meant that the person that was trying to control him was probably the Daughter of the Silent Moon herself.
“Just go back to the garden room with Ryu you guys,” Telram told the rest of his friends. “Jai will know if something goes wrong.”
“That’s true,” the tiger agreed. “Let’s go you two.”
Gerry sighed heavily before nodding in agreement and following Jai. Lelland frowned slightly at the cavalier attitude of the rest of his friends but Telram was just standing in front of the door staring at him so he too turned to leave.
The voice in Telram’s head had been getting louder while he had been waiting for his friends to leave. The voice would normally be quite pleasant but right now the girl who was speaking was not only trying to control him but was also doing so with an incredibly arrogant and imperious tone of voice.
“Alright princess,” Telram snorted as he reached out to open the door. “Don’t get your panties in a bunch just yet or you’ll have a real problem when you work out that you can’t control me.”
As Telram stepped into the room the girl’s voice grew even louder and for the first time Telram actually had to work to keep her from overriding his will completely. This also meant that the girl realized that she wasn’t in control.
“How dare you trick me!” she shrieked inside Telram’s head. “If you don’t do what I say right now then I’ll rip your soul out of your body!”
“Feel free to try,” Telram shrugged. “But as far as I can tell your people might be more advanced than we are in the use of Mana but you’re trailing a long way behind us in the use of Spiritual Energy.”
With a scream that dug into his brain like a white-hot needle the girl attempted to do just that. However, as Telram had predicted her struggles were to no avail. Apparently, this girl wasn’t used to not getting her way and even less used to not being able to overwhelm anyone stupid enough to oppose her.
Sadly, for her Telram had been correct. His defenses were much too powerful for her to breach with her limited knowledge of spiritual attacks. In many ways it was actually impressive that she could use a technique that allowed her to take control of someone at all. Telram looked around the room with a bemused expression on his face as she continued to assault his powerful spiritual defenses. The room had been built from a beautiful white marble and the walls were covered in carvings depicting things like a beautiful girl which Telram was assuming was supposed to be the person who was attacking him right now, the moon in its various stages and flowers. In the middle of the room was a large altar that had what seemed to be a sarcophagus on top of it.
Telram continued to ignore the increasingly desperate attempts of the girl who was attacking him as he approached the sarcophagus. Carved into the top of the sarcophagus was the visage of the same young woman who had been carved onto the doors and walls of these ruins.
“Is this you?” he asked out loud.
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“What?” the girl asked as she stopped her attack. “Of course, it is. How could you possibly not know that?”
“Look, miss,” Telram sighed. “I’m obviously not the person that you’ve been waiting for. I you want to keep attacking me then you can, but it might be more beneficial to you to calm down and we can have a talk.”
The girl’s spiritual presence withdrew for a few moments before returning. This time she wasn’t trying to assault him and claimed that she was willing to talk. However, since she was currently in a spiritual form, she requested to be allowed access to his Mana Core so that they could talk properly.
“Very well,” Telram agreed as he weakened his spiritual defenses just enough to allow her spiritual body to enter his Mana Core before joining her.
To his surprise the girl’s spiritual body was actually very well crafted. What he wasn’t surprised by was that her spiritual body resembled the same woman that he was assuming was the Daughter of the Silent Moon.
“My name is Telram,” he told the girl as politely as possible. He was still annoyed by the fact that she had attempted to take over his body but if his suspicions about how long she’d been here alone then he couldn’t really blame her for being a bit desperate either. “May I know your name miss?”
“I am the Daughter of the Silent Moon,” she replied in the same imperious tone that she had used before. “Grovel before me mortal. You are in the presence of royalty!”
“Yeah, I don’t think that I’ll be doing that,” Telram replied drily. “And if you keep talking to me like that then I’ll kick you out of my Mana Core and leave you here alone.”
“No!” The girl exclaimed desperately. “Please don’t do that. I’ll behave!”
“Then would you mind telling me your real name?” Telram asked her calmly. “The Daughter of the Silent Moon is a bit of a mouthful.”
“Um, I suppose that you can call me Mingxia then,” she sighed as she seemed to deflate slightly.
“Thank you, Mingxia,” Telram said with a smile causing Mingxia to blink as she realized that the young man standing before her was quite handsome in a wild way.
She hadn’t really been paying attention to what he looked like when she had been attacking him and now, she could be said to be inside his very soul. However, Telram decided to ignore her face suddenly turning red and kept talking.
“Now, I was wondering if you could tell me why you’ve been stuck here for so long?” he asked the increasingly flustered looking young woman.
“I was mortally wounded in a fight,” Mingxia replied awkwardly. “So, my family sealed my body here until someone who was strong enough to heal me arrived, but they never showed up. Can I ask a question now?”
“Go ahead,” Telram nodded. “If you want, we can swap questions until we’re both satisfied.”
“Why are you here?” she asked. “This place was only supposed to be found by the healer that my family hired.”
“That’s a long and complicated story,” Telram said after a few moments. “It all began many years ago. Before I was even born in this world.”
Mingxia listened in silence as Telram told her his story. Every now and again she stopped him so that she could ask a couple of questions, but she didn’t seem surprised by anything that he was telling her.
“I see,” Mingxia sighed once he was done speaking. “Your situation is quite an interesting one. What question would you like to ask next?”
“Why were your people so bad at using spiritual energy?” Telram asked after thinking for a few moments. He thought that this question might offend Mingxia but to his surprise she just snorted in amusement.
“Well, I have to admit that you’re not wrong there,” she replied. “My family believed that the use of spiritual energy was a weaker path than pure cultivation. If only they could see the two of us right now. They would probably have a fit. You’re not even an Immortal and I can’t even touch you in my current state. I used to be so powerful that I could kill someone as weak as you with a single glance but the damage to my soul from both my injury and being sealed away for so long ha left me as less than a shadow of what I used to be.”
“Sorry, can I ask another question?” Telram asked suddenly.
“I suppose that I do owe you a few questions,” Mingxia admitted begrudgingly.
“Was the attack that led to you being sealed here a spiritual one?”
“Yes, it was,” Mingxia nodded. “At least in part. I never expected an attack like that to be so effective against me. The cultivator who used it was a specialist in the use of soul attacks. They were known for using techniques that tore portions of the soul of whoever they attacked away and devour it to increase their own power. They attacked one of the worlds that my family controlled out of nowhere. Each of his attacks tore the souls of my clansmen to shreds which he devoured right in front of me. We lost thousands of clansmen before reinforcements arrived and most of the others who managed to survive until they arrived died shortly afterwards. I was the only survivor if you can call my current state survival.”
“I see,” Telram nodded thoughtfully. “Thank you for answering my question.”
“That’s fine,” Mingxia replied. “Now, can you tell me how your soul is so strong even though you’re still a Mortal?”
“I have what is known as an Enlightened Soul,” Telram explained. “Which means that my soul is naturally much stronger than that of a normal person. I have also developed a technique that allows me to strengthen my soul. As such I decided to specialize in the use of spiritual energy.”
“Yes, of course,” Mingxia muttered to herself thoughtfully. “That makes sense. Of course, you have an Enlightened Soul. But why do you remember your past life?”
“I don’t know,” Telram shrugged causing Mingxia to blink in surprise as she’d thought that he wouldn’t be able to hear what she had been saying. “I’ve been assuming that was normal for someone with an Enlightened Soul.”
“No, it’s not, or at least not really,” Mingxia replied. “I don’t know much about it, but Enlightened Souls don’t normally remember their previous lives from the moment that they’re born. They can be made to recall their previous lives but doing so requires a pill made from incredibly rare Mana Plants.”
“Huh, that’s weird,” Telram said with a frown. If there was one thing that he was certain of it was that he hadn’t eaten a Medicinal Pill to recover the memories of his previous life.
“It is,” Mingxia agreed. “Hmm, actually that might explain it.”
“What?”
“I was thinking that you might actually be the person that was supposed to heal me,” Mingxia explained. “You see they made a Karmic Oath to heal me so if they haven’t shown up yet then they were probably killed. However, the thing about Karmic Oaths is that they’re supposed to bind the very soul of the person who makes them. So, it’s entirely possible that encountering that stone tablet in your previous life awakened something in you that led you here today.”
“That seems pretty far-fetched,” Telram replied. “But I suppose that it might be possible and it’s not like I have any better theories as to why I can remember my previous life. Can I ask the next question?”
“Sure,” Mingxia agreed.
“Why did you try to take over my body?”
“I was desperate,” Mingxia replied. “I’ve been stuck here for thousands of years with no one to talk to, and I saw a chance to get out.”
“But why me?” Telram pressed. “Why not one of the others. Their souls are weaker than mine.”
“That’s actually part of the reason that I came up with the theory that you’re the reincarnation of my healer,” Mingxia explained. “There was something about you that felt familiar. I actually assumed that you were a servant of my clan when I first sensed your presence. I am sorry for doing that by the way. I wouldn’t have done it normally.”
“Really?” Telram asked. “Some of the carvings in these ruins would suggest otherwise.”
“What do you mean?” Mingxia asked so Telram explained what the carvings in the doors that he and his friends had found depicted. From the surprised and slightly horrified look on Mingxia’s face she hadn’t been aware of the way that she had been depicted which struck Telram as odd.
“Hmm, it seems like there’s something fishy going on here,” Telram mused. “Perhaps this could explain why your healer never showed up.”
“You think I was betrayed by my own clan?” Mingxia asked before sighing. “No, that’s definitely possible. I didn’t get along with some of the factions in my clan.”
Mingxia fell silent for a few moments after saying this. She seemed to be deep in thought, so Telram decided to leave her alone for a bit and let his friends know that everything seemed to be going pretty well so far.
“Telram, could I ask you a favor?” Mingxia asked after a couple of minutes.
“You can ask,” Telram replied. “I can’t promise that I’ll agree to it though.”
“Alright that’s fair,” Mingxia agreed before taking a deep breath. “Would you consider letting me stay here in your Mana Core?”
“Hmm, I’ll think about it,” Telram replied. “As long as you answer a few questions for me.”
“That seems fair,” Mingxia agreed. “That’s honestly better than I expected after I tried to take over your body earlier.”
“Like you said, you’ve been stuck here a long time,” Telram replied. “I can’t even imagine what that was like. Besides, you failed, so no harm done really. Anyway, why do you want to inhabit my Mana Core? How will that help you?”
“Well, part of the reason that I’m stuck here is that my soul keeps getting weaker,” Mingxia explained. “However, I’ve noticed that this strange cultivation technique that you practice has properties that should help me recover from the damage to my soul. If I can heal my damaged soul and recover some of the power that I used to have then I should in theory be able to create a new body for myself.”
“Alright that makes sense,” Telram nodded. “Now for the main question. What’s in it for me?”
“If you agree to this then I hereby swear on my Karma that I will aid you in any way that you wish until such time that I can create a new body,’ Mingxia replied as her spiritual body suddenly flashed with light. “Once I have a new body, we can reassess our relationship.”
“That’s actually a pretty good deal,” Telram nodded. “I take it that was a Karmic Oath?”
“That would be correct,” Mingxia agreed. “If I break my oath then my Karma will be cursed until the end of time itself.”
“Alright then, I swear on my Karma that I will provide a safe place for Mingxia the Daughter of the Silent Moon to recover from her injuries until such a time that she can create a new body for herself,” Telram said causing his own spiritual body to flash with light.
“Wait, really?” Mingxia asked. “I honestly didn’t think that you would agree.”
“Neither did I,” Telram replied. “But I have need of both power and knowledge and you have promised me the knowledge that I need to grow much more powerful than I am right now. I also feel sorry for you despite the poor first impression that you made.”
“Then I thank you from the bottom of my heart,” the beautiful young woman said as she bowed to him. “I will do my best to make this up to you.”
“Oh, by the way. I forgot to mention this earlier, but my friends and I have taken a number of the treasures that were left in these ruins,” Telram said with a slight wince. “I hope that doesn’t change anything.”
“Of course, it doesn’t,” Mingxia replied. “I’d be more surprised if you hadn’t done so. Shall we go over what you need to do to help me properly separate my soul from my body?”
“Alright, once we’ve done that we should probably get out of here,” Telram said. “We’ve kept my friends waiting for too long.”