Chapter 468: The Eye Beneath Greyfen [ 2 ]

Smaller veins from beneath the southern forest curved unnaturally backward. Even energy moving through underground water was being stripped gradually from its natural route and dragged toward the same location. Sage had initially imagined an enormous reservoir waiting below, something absorbing the mana and storing it.

He had been wrong.

The mana wasn’t simply collecting.

It was building.

At first Sage couldn’t understand what he was seeing. There was no cavern at the convergence point, no buried temple and no enormous creature waiting beneath Greyfen.

Instead, mana was gathering inside solid earth where nothing should have existed, forming geometric layers that overlapped without obeying the surrounding physical terrain.

Sage narrowed his eyes and pushed harder. The image sharpened, and his breathing stopped.

There was space where there shouldn’t have been space.

The surrounding stone had not been excavated or displaced. It simply ceased to matter near the center.

Mana folded inward upon itself, creating an area whose dimensions didn’t correspond with the physical ground surrounding it.

One moment Sage perceived something no larger than a room; the next his vision caught a depth extending impossibly farther than the distance available beneath the forest.

Half-formed boundaries appeared and vanished. Corridors existed for seconds before dissolving back into raw mana.

Vast shapes resemblingchambers slowly assembled from condensed energy, collapsed and began forming again differently.

Sage had seen descriptions of this before.

Every Kingdom had records of the phenomenon that changed entire regions when it occurred.

Adventurers didn’t exist before his Guild, but dungeons certainly did. Nations fought over them. Noble Houses claimed them. Knight Orders and Mage organizations sent Warriors into them because dungeons produced, rare ores, magical plants, artifacts, crystals and resources unavailable almost anywhere else.

Yet by the time anyone normally knew a dungeon existed, the process had already reached its conclusion.

The dungeon manifested.

An entrance appeared.

Then everyone fought over who controll edit.

Sage was staring at something that wasn’t supposed to be observable.

"A dungeon," Sage whispered, the words escaping before he realized he’d spoken aloud.

Iris heard him. She stepped forward instinctively before stopping herself, remembering his instruction to remain back.

"Guildmaster, did you say dungeon?" she asked, disbelief sharpening her voice as she stared at him. Sage didn’t answer immediately because he was still looking beneath Greyfen. Now that he understood what he was seeing, the individual phenomena suddenly made sense.

The massive mana absorption wasn’t accidental.

The distorted currents were feeding the formation process. Space itself was being constructed around the concentration, and the growing disturbance had begun affecting the surrounding ecosystem long before the structure became stableenough to manifest physically.

Sage finally released the Aetheric Insight Eyes.

Ordinary darkness returned so abruptly that he needed several seconds to adjust. A dull ache pulsed behind his eyes, and Iris was already beside him when he raised one hand to his forehead.

Mina looked worried, while Rowan and Lucan were waiting silently for an explanation. Sage breathed slowly until the discomfort eased, then looked at the four of them.

"There’s no underground structure down there yet, at least not one that exists normally," Sage explained. "Something is constructing space itself. The mana veins are feeding it, and whatever is forming is becoming larger and more stable."

Iris went completely still before asking, "You’re certain it’s a dungeon?" Sage met her gaze and nodded. "I’ve never watched one form before, but I’ve studied enough records to recognizethe signs now that I can actually see them. Greyfen isn’t suffering from some unknown mana disaster. We’re standing above a dungeon before its manifestation."

Lucan’s expression changed immediately. As a member of House Auremont, he understood the implications without needing them explained.

"How long before anyone else can detect it?" he asked, his earlier humor completely absent.

Sage considered the question carefully before admitting that he didn’t know. It might be days or weeks before the dungeon stabilized enough to produce conventional signs.

Until then, anyone entering Greyfen would see displaced Magic Beasts, strange mana fluctuations and abandoned territory without understanding why.

Rowan glanced upward as though he could see through hundreds of feet of earth to the forest above.

"Then nobody knows," he said quietly. "Dunmere doesn’t know. The Capitald oesn’t know. The nobles don’t know."

Sage looked toward him and confirmed, "As far as we currently know, only the five people in this cavern understand what’s forming beneath Greyfen."

Iris’s eyes widened as the full significance settled over her. A dungeon near the Royal Capital would attract Knight Orders, Mage organizations, merchants, nobles and eventually the Crown’s attention.

More importantly, the Adventurer Guild had discovered it before there was even an entrance to claim, map or contest. They possessed something more valuable than treasure at that moment.

Time.

Weeks ago, Greyfen had been nothing more than several suspicious monster missions appearing on the Guild’s boards. Rowan had noticed the pattern. Sage had followed it. Now they possessed advance knowledge of a resource capable of changing the Guild’s position in the Capital.

Sage looked toward the fracture beneath their feet, but excitement didn’t make him careless. They still didn’t know what kind of dungeon was forming, how dangerous its manifestation would be, or whether the abnormal Cindermaw had been the strongest creature affected by it.

Before thinking about ownership, expeditions or profit, they needed to understand exactly what was happening around the forming dungeon.

Sage rose from the slab and looked toward Rowan, Mina, Lucan and Iris, his expression settling into the calm seriousness they had learned meant his decision was already made.

"Nobody outside this group hears the word dungeon until we’re back at Headquarters and I decide who needs to know," Sage told them, making sure each person understood the importance of what they had found. "We came to Greyfen to discover why the Magic Beasts were fleeing. Now we have our answer, but we still don’t know what this forming dungeon is doing to everything around it. Before the rest of the Kingdom discovers there’s something beneath this forest, we’re going to learn everything we can about it."