Chapter 154
Regrets of Days Past
“Ugh…!”
Illlumca let out a painful grunt as she landed heavily onto hard stone floor. It was all she could do to change her orientation so that she did not fall on her back. Fortunately, as her level rose, so too, did her toughness.
She slowly got up and looked at the place where they fell from. However, the trap seemed to have mended itself as she could no longer see the hole.
“Connie?! Anyone?!” she tried calling out, but heard no response. She looked around and saw that she was in a curiously empty chamber with a pathway leading to another chamber.
Deciding that staying put would do her no good, the Dark Elf decided to make her way forward. She took out a torch from her Item Ring and made use of it.
After what felt to be an hour of walking and a Pill later, she arrived at a chamber unlike the ones she had been before. This one looked to be in disrepair, cobwebs and little crawlers dotted its edges. An eerie, crude picture of seven eyes had been drawn using chalk on the wall. Four to the left and three to the right. It seemed to have been drawn quite some time ago.
There were four pillars surrounding a raised floor. Upon which she could see a mound of dead bodies that rose above her head. Decomposing, bug-ridden bodies with signs of bitten off flesh piled on top of older, innumerable skeletons. The smell of it overpowering her senses. She heaved a dry heave, before wrapping her scarf around her mouth and nose.
Illumca realized that more than one of the corpses were of her Race. A feeling of disgust and pity came over her. But she kept it to herself as she made the quick decision to have nothing to do with the suspicious altar,
There must be hundreds of them! This does not bode well.
She hurried to another pathway to the left of the altar.
But then, as she was about to reach it, a slab of stone fell from above, blocking her way. She quickly made her way towards the path she came from. But a slab of stone had also barred the way.
Illumca’s ears the perked up as she heard movements. She turned around with the torch in front, the other hand grasping her dagger.
The sound became louder now.
Here eyes darted around to see what made the movement. And to her horror she saw what was making the noise.
The mound of corpses was trembling.
And then, one by one, they rose.
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Illumca had never seen Undeads before. She had seen dead people, of course; mostly her handiwork. Yet she had never seen them moving after the life had been taken out of them. And definitely not the ones that had been reduced to bones.
And the smell.
Undeads?! Undeads in a Dungeon with poisonous monsters? How is this possible?!
“Fireball!” She cast the spell out of reflex. The butterfly-shaped fire slammed into one of them, instantly knocking a few down with it. However, there were still many of them, lumbering towards her mindlessly.
The skeletons were not strong, but their numbers made up for their lack of strength. That, and their inability to feel pain or fear made it hard for Illlumca. As she cracked the skull of one of the opponents with the hilt of her dagger, she began to feel it was getting hard to breathe.
She immediately realized that the Pill was wearing off. She quickly took out an extra Pill from her Item Ring while erecting a Firewall. As she was about to pop it into her mouth, the skeletons burst forth from the flaming wall, piling on top of one another.
The surprise attack caused her to react instinctively. She raised her dagger, only to see the Pill fell onto the ground and rolled into the middle of the pile of skeletons.
“Dammit!”
Her throat felt like it was on fire and she coughed profusely. The dry coughing caused her stomach to tense up and became unable to focus. She tried to get in more air, but this caused the poison within the mist to enter more readily. Causing her to become sicker.
“Hillumgha!!”
Illumca heard a voice awkwardly calling out for her. She saw Arryn jumping down from a broken wall hidden by the shadows atop the crude seven eyes drawing.
“Haim here!!” she yelled. A few of the skeletons aiming for Illumca turned around and changed their target to her. As they lunged awkwardly at her, Arryn leaped onto a nearby wall and ran across it to get to Illumca.
“Hillumgha! Harr yhou oghay?!”
“Path’s…blocked!” Illumca said with difficulty through bouts of coughs.
Arryn bit her lips. Without her magic, dealing with the swarm of Undeads would be foolish. She quickly assessed the environment and realized that the only way out is through her way in.
While they lumber towards them, she saw that one of the pillars was tilted dangerously as time had eroded its base. She grabbed Illumca who had started to lose consciousness from lack of air and dragged her towards it. She then braced herself between the wall and the pillar and pushed with all her might using her legs.
“HHRRRAAGHH!!”
With her push, the pillar gave way and fell onto the Undeads, crushing them with impunity. The force of the fallen pillar broke it in half, half of which broke through the wall, revealing a hidden passage.
“Ghome hon!!”
She carried Illumca into the passage while fending off a few skeletal stragglers that managed to survive the fallen pillar.
When she saw what some of the Skeletons were wearing, her heart jumped in her chest. Her voice was stuck in her throat. She swallowed her pain and went beyond the broken wall.
The newfound space looked like a storage room. It even had a door on it. Seeing this, a fire appeared on Arryn’s eyes. She quickly got through the door, threw Illumca aside and jammed the handle with her short sword.
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Arryn cursed as she carried Illumca deeper into the room.
“Cough!” Arryn heard the cough, saw the blood coming out from Illumca’s mouth and panicked.
She then remembered the symptoms that Connie described beforehand and without thinking twice, fed Illumca her own Pill. Within a few minutes, Illumca’s lightheadedness subsided and her throat no longer burned.
Seeing Illumca’s breathing steadied, the wheat-haired Dark Elf suddenly felt very tired and she sat down a few meters from Illumca.
Then she heard the scratching and banging behind the door. Suddenly she felt overwhelmed by everything. She hugged her knees and began to cry.
“Haagh!!” Arryn hugged herself tighter. “Ghhaa - !!” Tears of sorrow and despair flowed out of her eyes. When she saw what some of the corpses had on, she realized that some of them were her clans-people.
Their bodies defiled and cursed. Even in death, they had not the dignity of being returned into the earth.
Was what I’m doing so meaningless? Is this our punishment for merely wanting to survive?
“(Cough)! (Cough)! What are you crying for?” Illumca slowly sat up, her throat still sore from coughing too much.
Arryn wiped her tears with her sleeves and wrote on her slab. Are you okay now?
“Did you feed me your share of the Pill?”
I did. I don’t know what else to do.
“You could have left me to die,” she said with a bit of spite.
The young Dark Elf felt her heart ache. Then she wrote after a bit of hesitance. It’s better if you live instead of me. You are the only one capable of avenging our fathers.
Illumca narrowed her eyebrows. Surprised at how defeated she sounded. “What brought this on?”
Arryn began to write on her slab. Seeing this, Illumca scolded her. “I know you can still talk with your mouth, Arryn. I can understand it still despite you sounding like you are gargling stones. Why do you need to write it down?”
Don’t you find my voice ugly? Hearing it reminds me of what we had lost.
For Dark Elves - who love all things beautiful and are beautiful themselves – losing the ability to speak and sing was unbearable. Especially hearing such unsightly noise coming from themselves. It was torture.
“Ugly? Yes. But what does that have to do with anything?”
Her old friend said nothing, though her eyes were wet. She wiped her tears again before writing once more.
They turned our kin into Undeads. Defiled their corpses. They hid them from us! And laugh at our obliviousness!!
“So?”
If they could defile our corpses like that, what would stop them from undoing their promise to us? There’s no point anymore.
Illumca scratched her head in irritation. “Why in Sud-Ghazid are you acting like a victim?! If it’s like this, why don’t you all just rebel? The Clan could forsake a child but could not gather their courage to do what’s right?”
Rebellion? Not a day went by without me thinking about rebellion. But as I said, they took hostage of the weaker members of the clan. The old and the young. The separated us into batches, even took away the newborns from their mothers. They promised to spare them if we do obey their orders.
To protect our Clan even if we had to suffer this indignity, that was my promise to my father. But to turn the dead into Undead is to curse their souls into eternal suffering. If they can do something like that, what would stop them from lying to us?
Arryn’s writing became harsher and more slurred.
The Bereaved Dead Banner are meticulous in their cruelty. Ingenious in their quest to serve their King and their God. I have been with the Demons for many years, Illumca. And the things I’ve seen haunts my dream.
“Enough,” Illumca said. “There is no use for self-pity now.”
Hearing that, Arryn laughed. The sound was more like someone choking on a bone. She then wrote on her slab with a thin smile.
You are strong, Illumca. You are everything that I aspire to be. Perhaps if you were the one in my position back then, things would be different.
Merida and her daughter might be the one who betrayed the Clan, but I was the one who failed you. Arryn trembled as she wrote the words. She hiccupped as tears flowed from the edge of her eyes.
“The me back then wouldn’t be able to do anything,” she spoke. “It’s my suffering and meeting with Connie that made me what I am now.”
“…,” Illumca stared at her old friend with a cold, impassive face. However, a trickle of sympathy leaked from the corner of her eyes.
You must lover her a lot.
“She is my sun. She is my everything. She is the only one who would touch me even when I was covered in filth and pus. She would let me kiss her even as my fire was burning her skin and my lips scorched her lips.”
Not everyone can have the luck to meet someone like that.
“That is the only good thing I have in this wretched life of mine.”
She hated her clan. But she hated even more the Demons who caused her suffering, and the mother and daughter that succumbed to their whispers of temptation.
“But the past is the past. There’s no use regretting what had been done. You all still need to pay your dues,” Illumca said with a scoff. “One way or another.”
Arryn wrote with a small smile on her lips.
If we make it out of this alive, I will spend the rest of my life making it up to you.
“You can never make it up to me.”
I will try.
“…don’t make promises you can’t fulfill,” Illumca said as she handed Arryn a spare dagger from her Item Ring. “Now, enough rest. We should move on.”
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In another part of the dungeon, Connie was walking along a path with Chen following closely behind. Behind them were remnants of broken skeletons and dead bodies.
She stopped occasionally when meeting a fork, taking a sniff of the air before choosing a path.
Every time she went through a doorway or a hole, she scratched the edges with her weapon. She had mistakenly done a turnaround twice and did not want to do it the third time.
Chen plopped to her side with a curious wiggle. To which Connie responded with a sideways glance. “You are asking me if I know the way? Heavens know I don’t. Then again, I’m not looking for a way out. I’m looking for the source of the Poison. Notice how the Poison Mist is getting thicker.”
“Be careful now, I think we are nearing the source,” Connie said as she ducked through a gap between two broken columns. She dusted herself and found herself looking at what she had been looking for.
“What a specimen,” Connie sighed.
In front of her was a large, flower-like growth; stuck into the body of a centipede the size of four full grown men. Its roots seemed to have taken over the dead centipede’s body. The roots pulsed as if it was breathing. With every pulse, the bulb let out plumes of green mist into the air.
“And what a treat you will become,” she took a stance and destroyed it with a swift claw attack. The bulb was cut into pieces, its pieces immediately disappeared. The tendrils withered as quickly as snow in a warm summer day, followed by the subsiding of the mist.
“How unnatural. The Poison Mist should not have been so fast to disappear. Is this one of a Dungeon’s Idiosyncrasies?”
As she pondered her next action, Chen came back from salvaging the bulb’s leftover and handed Connie a green Essence Crystal that fit right into herpalm. Within, she could sense a baleful energy formed from the grudge of those that it killed.
After a brief thought, she sat down and began to refine into her Poison Core. But instead of using it to bolster herself, she pushed the Energy within into her Contracted Beasts. The orb with the symbol ‘Sui’ shone as it took in the Energy.
After a while, Connie stopped and the orb returned to its dormant state. She would rather not risk overfilling the bowl that was her foundation at this time.
Normally, such a thing would be a great news for any Cultivator. However, Connie was aiming for a perfect foundation. That was, to use a material of Extreme Yin as a catalyst for breaking through to Treading Earth stage.
Especially now that she had begun to become enlightened with the use of disease.
By combining both disease and poison within her Poison Core, she would embark on a path no one had ever walked before.
And for that, a perfect foundation is a must. And perhaps this Ur-Nagud Bet-Zebek might have what I needed.
With that thought, Connie could not help to have a high expectation for their inevitable meeting.
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“Ugh…”
Nick lit the torch in his hand and held it above his head, trying to see where he was. He groaned as he shifted his arm slightly. His body felt like it had been hit by a Centaur at full speed; his head had a small bump that rubbed uncomfortably against the roof of his full-sized helmet.
He had had the worst luck today. And he wondered if this was because he got up on the wrong side of the bed today. Not that he had a proper sleep. Despite his high level, he was getting on in years and honestly, it was just the thought of fulfilling his promise with her Mistress that he took on this job.
He had met with Akula and one member of the Bearkillers a while ago and had met a dead end.
As his thoughts wandered a bit, he noticed a particularly odd slab of stone next to him and nudged it a little bit.
When it moved, his eyes quickly did a look around of his surroundings. When he saw that nothing happened, he pushed on it harder. Seeing that it did nothing much, he took two steps back and then kicked it.
The stone fell back, revealing a path large enough for him to squeeze through.
He gingerly stuck his head through the hole and realized that he had made a path into the quarters of the Dark Elves.
And the stone slab did not fall silently.
“Well…shit.”