Chapter 105: A Slice of Paradise Amidst the Chaos

After falling freely for only a few dozen more meters, An suddenly froze in midair. Drifting right up against the wall, he looked around. 'No point wasting my time trying to figure out how to break this formation head-on through the illusions. Easier to find whatever weak spot's bound to exist by now, especially after all these years, and slip through there instead.'

Pressing his hand flat against the wall, An activated his Qi and set up several points on his palm, each vibrating at a different frequency.

Carefully, he began carving a circular hole into the wall, wide enough for his shoulders. Turning stone to sand, he shifted his body horizontal and kept boring a tunnel straight through the rock.

'Judging by the Qi, this is roughly where the formation's weak point should be.' After several minutes of digging, An had bored a tunnel more than a kilometer long, weaving back and forth but staying close to the formation's boundary the whole way, searching for the right spot to break through.

'Heh, glad I don't have lungs anymore for something like this... this dust would've killed anyone else a long time ago.' All the dust from the drilled stone had built up into a thick, stagnant haze, and the deeper he dug, the denser and thicker that dust became.

Finally reaching right up against the formation's wall, he pinpointed the weak point.

Forming an extremely thin Qi Blade, barely thicker than a strand of thread, he carefully guided it to within less than a millimeter of that weak point.

Holding the dagger steady in the air, he focused a massive amount of Qi into his fist and drew back.

"Huh!" In one lightning-fast motion, he struck the dagger, channeling a huge surge of energy through it, aimed precisely at that microscopic point on the formation.

Crack! Crack!

He felt the formation, along with the layers of stone around him, start to crack.

"Oh no! Fu-!"

CRACK!

Unable to hold, the tunnel collapsed completely, burying An under its weight.

Quickly activating the outer membrane of his defence, he started reading the information coming off the formation. 'It's finished. Just need to wait a bit for it to tear itself apart from the damage I caused.'

Watching Qi travel between the formation's key points, he saw how, at the ‘wound’ he'd created, that energy simply fell out of the loop, and the points, never getting an answer back from wherever they'd sent their ‘request’, began burning through their own reserves like mad, just trying to force that request through and get some kind of response.

'Strange that whoever set up this formation never accounted for a flaw like this... Even if you don't understand how Qi works, you should at least know the blueprint, the actual process keeping the formation running.' Settling in comfortably inside his own collapsed tunnel, buried under massive slabs of stone, An waited and watched the self-destruction process.

A few hours later, the formation's walls finally stopped giving off any Qi at all. 'Guess it finally ran out of whatever reserves were keeping it going...'

Slowly and carefully, he used his Qi to carve a new tunnel, heading toward wherever that old pill Qi flows was coming from.

.

.

"Finally..." He stopped, realizing a massive chamber lay just a few dozen meters of tunnel ahead of him.

Turning the last of the stone to sand, he finally broke through into that vast space and climbed out slowly. "Wow!"

Trees of every color imaginable were everywhere, some towering dozens of meters high. Right up near the ceiling hung clumps of snow-white mist, carefully mimicking clouds. Through those clouds shone a massive source of light, resembling the sun. 'Huh, judging by the Qi, that's an artifact with a massive concentration of the Fire element packed inside... an artificial sun. Not bad.'

Hovering almost at the ceiling, he looked around and spotted the nearest wall to him, entirely covered in drawings, judging by the style and quality, clearly drawn by a couple of children with colored chalk.

Descending from the ceiling, he flew over to the wall of drawings and landed on the ground. He crouched down, dug through the grass, and pulled out a small red piece of stick. 'It really is just ordinary chalk.'

He tossed the chalk back on the ground and studied the massive drawing in front of him.

'Obviously drawn by a couple of kids... but the scale of it is impressive.' Studying the shapes, objects, and scenes drawn on the wall with real interest, he smiled slightly.

The wall showed a small house surrounded by dozens of animals, something like farm livestock. Beside the house sat a small lake, where an old man with a fishing rod tried to catch fish. A little way off, a young woman and an old woman prepared dinner, sitting on a large blanket right on the ground. Near them stood a man with an axe over one shoulder and a log tucked under his other arm, head tilted back, laughing by the look of his expression. And a little further off from all of them, in a meadow thick with flowers, two children, a boy and a girl, ran around with little nets, trying to catch colorful butterflies.

Having pieced together the whole story on the wall, An turned and spotted a small house half-hidden behind the tall, colorful trees, and began walking slowly toward it.

Finding a narrow stone path, he followed it, looking around as he went.

Passing between the colorful trees, drawing closer to the house, he found two pools of crystal-clear blue water on either side. Behind those pools, hundreds of tiny waterfalls trickled down through the ceiling and along the walls.

Getting closer to the house, he spotted several small structures. A rope hung from one tree. A swing had been rigged between two others.

Closer still, he saw a few small pens, once home to livestock.

Nearly at the house itself, An noticed four graves with headstones under an enormous tree.

Walking closer, 'Here lies... our always-smiling grandmother... Our beloved but strict grandfather... Our dear, loving mother... Our strong-willed father... So two of them, a brother and sister, buried their whole family and left this place?'

Studying the headstones, 'Judging by the shape of these stones and the ink used to write on them, all four graves were made at the same time... Did something happen?' Looking around, he tried to spot anything that might explain everyone dying on the same day. 'Strange, if this had been some outside attack, the formation would already be destroyed... unless it happened long enough ago that the formation had time to repair itself? Sounds far-fetched, but it could genuinely be true. If a formation isn't destroyed outright, just partially disabled or lightly damaged, it can repair itself, given enough energy reserves.'

'Besides, even though this place has held up remarkably well, I'm pretty sure a family couldn't have survived long with the level of demonic energy concentration here now... so this must date back to before this place turned into some kind of demonic paradise.'

Lingering a moment longer in front of the graves, An turned and headed toward the house.

Reaching the porch, he stopped. 'There's nothing here. Besides, the Qi from those old pills is coming from behind the house.' He came back down and took a different path, one leading through the woods, circling around the house.

Coming around the building, a backyard opened up in front of him. A large stretch of level ground, cleared of trees, laid out in a near-perfect square. 'Judging by the faint deformations left in the soil, this must have been a garden.'

Looking around and finding nothing else of interest, An moved on.

Passing the garden, he entered a dense stretch of forest. Stopping right at its edge, he looked around for a path, but finding none, he lifted off slowly and flew just above the treetops, continuing on toward the source of Qi that had drawn his interest in the first place.

Reaching the boundary wall of this space, nearly half a kilometer from the house, he stopped. 'Ugh, another formation... and judging by its structure and the layout of its key points, this one's only hiding the entrance, not the space beyond it.'

Once he'd worked out the formation's structure, An didn't even bother figuring out its function. Gauging its size, he dropped a little lower, activated Qi around his hand, and pressed it against the wall, setting up a few vibration points.

Carefully turning the stone to sand, he worked his way around the formation and came out onto a stone spiral staircase.

"Oh?" Stepping onto the staircase slowly, he started making his way down.

Reaching the very bottom, he found a sealed iron door covered in runes. 'Judging by the runes, even without understanding them, I keep seeing the same kind on all these formations... Hm, and if I'm right, this whole place used to be wrapped in formations, one after another, everywhere.' He realized the main formation and the one on the wall by the entrance were two separate systems, unconnected to each other. Given its likely massive scale, the main one had probably burned through far too many resources and, once they ran out, simply stopped working, leaving only this smaller one on the door, running on its own separate reserve.

He touched the door and gave it a light push.

"Oops!"

Thud!

The door dropped off its frame and crashed to the ground at the barest touch.

Once the dust settled, he found himself facing a massive chamber with a low ceiling, barely under two meters high.

Stepping inside, An hunched his back slightly, since his height meant his hair kept brushing the ceiling, which left him mildly uncomfortable.

"Echo... echo... echo..." he called out, his voice spreading through the huge room, sending low vibrations through the walls.

Walking forward, he stopped, spotting several shelves lined with books.

He approached carefully and tried to pick up the first book within reach, but it crumbled apart in his hands the instant he touched it. "Oh? What if I wrap the book in Qi first and try that instead?"

A few minutes later, he stood frowning in front of an enormous pile of sand. 'Sigh, not a single book held together... Did whoever built this place really not bother including a preservation function in the formation? Like my own plot back at the sect? Or has the formation been down for so long that it had all the time it needed to reduce the books to this?'

Looking displeased, he moved on toward a dark stretch along one of the walls. Even standing right near the entrance, he'd already spotted another staircase leading further down.

Reaching it, he looked around once more before starting his descent. 'What was even the point of that room? Just for a few bookshelves?'

Going down, he found another identical door in front of him, its runes barely visible.

He gave the door a light push.

Thud!

'Oh? Something more interesting this time.'

This room's ceiling stood much higher, around four meters.

"Ugh! That smell..." A strange odor hit him suddenly, and the moment he stepped inside, he felt the thick humidity in the air. Every wall was damp, and in some spots, plants had burst clean through, slowly reclaiming the room for themselves.

'This room's clearly been abandoned for a long while too.' Rising slightly into the air to avoid wading through the flooded floor, he drifted toward the staircase on the opposite side.

Reaching the next stairwell down, he started descending without even glancing back. 'Hm, maybe whoever owned this place cleared everything out before they left... So why am I still sensing such a massive concentration of pills down below? Sigh... I figured I'd reach this Qi source quickly, but between winding through tunnels and dodging formations, one kilometer's turned into dozens.'

Reaching the third floor down, he pushed the door open again and stepped inside.

Once through, he suddenly stopped. A strange chamber awaited him. Along the walls to his left and right stood odd metal capsules. Inside each one was a thick, black liquid.

'If there's anything alive in there, it's long dead by now.' After reading the Qi in the surrounding air a few times and confirming none of these capsules gave off so much as a trace of it, only then did he risk flying closer to one.

Ten meters tall, five wide. Studying it closely, he found a handle on the front of the capsule, perfectly sized for a human hand.

He turned it as far as it would go.

Wooosh!

The door swung open, releasing a crack through which a burst of gas, mildly toxic to a person, escaped first, and right behind it, the black liquid began pouring out through the widening gap.

Floating back slightly, realizing the pressure inside might blow the door off entirely, 'This isn't how it's supposed to work... Right, because the formation's down, this whole system's broken too. If I'm understanding this right, opening the capsule used to trigger some mechanism that drained the liquid into a specific holding tank... probably reusable, too. Who'd want to keep refilling that much strange liquid by hand every single time? No one's got that kind of patience.'

Crack!

The capsule's door finally burst open under the pressure, and the whole mass of black liquid came pouring out.

Once it had all drained away, he flew closer to the capsule and, grabbing the same handle, yanked the door open the rest of the way in one sharp motion.

"Wow! What is that?" Stunned, An stared at whatever remained inside the capsule.

A massive creature, something like a golem, entirely made of metal, with a huge hollow sphere set into the middle of its chest. This giant, standing nearly three meters tall, was connected by hundreds of tubes running from deep inside the capsule.

An frowned suddenly. 'The style of this technology... why doesn't it match? These tubes look like some kind of rubber, and the internals are built in a distinctly modern style, light bulbs, circuit boards, not all that different from my first world... And the golem itself, its level of detail, the material it's made from...'

An suddenly fell deep into thought. Even though he hadn't paid much attention to the surroundings, the daily life of people or the architectural styles around him, everything he'd seen since arriving in this world had reminded him of somewhere around the fifteenth or sixteenth century back on Earth. Filth, ruin, no machinery, no factories, no mass education, open slavery, and sharp divisions between classes. Everything here felt like the late Middle Ages.

'Hm, maybe this technology's from the past? That's usually how it goes in novels... Or maybe it's from a different continent... assuming there even is one.' He rolled his eyes, realizing that after three whole years in this world, he still didn't even know the name of the place he was living in. Whether he lived on a continent, whether the whole planet was one single landmass, or whether there were countless separate ones. The only thing he actually knew was that the territory, whose name he didn't know, was ruled by a Royal Family, whose house name he also didn't know.

'It's always struck me as strange. In a sect this massive, one of the giants, I'd assume... there's just no information at all about where we actually are, or anything like it.'

Tilting his head slightly, studying the circuit boards in front of him, An kept turning it over. 'Maybe it really is like I always figured, no one could've expected any disciple wouldn't already know something this common, this widely known. After all, sects are ninety-nine percent filled with people from big clans and families... Peasants, and especially slaves like me, are almost nonexistent here. You have to be extremely lucky to end up in a sect at all, without some massive banner backing you.'

Climbing inside the capsule, An pulled out a few circuit boards and rubber tubes, trying to keep them intact.

Turning them over in his hands, he tucked them into his ring. 'Who knows, maybe I'll find the time to study these someday, see if I can make sense of any of it.'

Taking a few pieces from the capsule that he'd managed to remove without damaging them, he moved on to check a few more capsules.

Once he'd confirmed the rest held roughly the same thing, he flew toward the wall opposite the main entrance.

He stopped, looked right, then left. 'A staircase and a shaft?' Flying closer to the shaft, he looked up first, then down. 'Hm, is this shaft for the golems? Maybe it leads straight out of this strange underground base.'

Without much thought, he chose the staircase. Descending to the fourth basement level and opening the door, he didn't step inside right away, what he saw made him tense up.

Tens of thousands of dried-out bodies, all different kinds of spirit beasts. Nothing left but hide and bone, dried out so thoroughly the bones themselves had lost their shine.

He walked in slowly and stopped by the first body. 'Everything's been drained out of it. Even the synovial fluid's been pulled straight out of the bones.' Spotting the tiny holes, hundreds of them across every single bone, An took a step back and looked down at the floor directly beneath the body.

"A drainage system?" Beneath the body sat a section made of metal mesh, with a narrowing channel running down beneath it.

Walking past several more bodies, he found the exact same setup on each one. He stopped and looked back at the staircase he'd come down. 'So the metal golems found the beasts, killed them, and dragged them here?' Turning, he headed for the opposite side, toward the staircase leading down to the fifth basement level. 'Hm, why not put the staircases right next to each other? Some kind of security measure? Or just a design flaw?' He never once stopped scanning everything around him, careful not to miss even the faintest trace of Qi.

Realizing there was nothing in this room besides the bodies, he continued down even further.

Reaching the bottom, he stood in front of the next door, about to open it, when he suddenly froze. "What's this?" Frowning, An muttered, barely above a whisper.

Inside the room, right past the door, he sensed an enormous number of extremely faint Qi sources. Only once he'd gotten right up to the door could he actually feel them at all. Through the wall and the door, his eyes couldn't make out a single trace of Qi.

'I don't sense a formation... So why can't I see anything? Something's definitely here. Oh!' Looking around, scanning everything carefully, he finally spotted an almost invisible formation stretched over the whole floor, so faint that unless you were specifically looking for it, it would be easy to miss entirely. 'Is its only function to visually mask the Qi? Because I can still feel it just fine... Hm, this whole place is strange.'

Closing his eyes, he started sensing the Qi throughout the floor, and grew more and more tense the longer he focused. 'Holy shit! Millions... tens of millions of identical signatures! Creatures that look almost like clones? Yeah... their Qi's identical. Hm, they're clearly alive, but in some kind of deep hibernation.' Standing at the door, An opened his eyes, unable to decide what to do. "Should I even go in?"