Chapter 358: The Aegis Records

The lights kept leading them deeper into the ruins, waking one ancient symbol after another along the walls as Kai, Sera, Lily, and Gabriel followed.

The further they went, the older everything looked. The polished stone gave way to rougher walls, and massive pillars held up the ceiling, each one covered in symbols none of them could fully read.

Every few dozen meters, another chamber opened beside the corridor, some filled with broken machines and others with empty shelves, while a few looked like old control rooms.

What struck Kai was that none of them felt completely abandoned. There was always something still working, a faint light, a soft hum, a machine still turning, or a crystal still holding mana. It felt as if Aegis had been waiting for someone to come back.

Lily looked around. "This whole underground section is connected."

"That’s what our researchers believed," Gabriel said.

"Believed?"

"We were never able to reach this deep. The lower sections of Aegis were sealed."

Kai looked down the glowing corridor. "And now they’re not."

"No." Gabriel glanced at the symbols lighting their way. "They opened when you arrived."

Sera looked at Kai. "That’s becoming a little concerning."

"Agreed," Kai said.

Lily smiled faintly. "Personally, I think it’s fascinating."

Sera stared at her. "Of course you do."

The corridor eventually widened, and a doorway at least twenty meters tall appeared ahead of them. Its two stone doors stood open, and beyond them was a circular chamber whose walls were covered from floor to ceiling in writing. There were thousands of symbols, some carved straight into the stone, others engraved into metal plates, and a few painted in what looked like ancient ink.

Lily’s eyes went wide. "Records."

Kai looked around. "How old?"

Lily was already examining the nearest tablet. "Older than anything we’ve seen above."

"This may be one of the original archive chambers," Gabriel said.

Sera gestured at the walls. "So after all that, we finally found something that might tell us what happened here."

"Maybe," Lily said.

She walked to a large stone tablet whose surface had been badly damaged, with half of its writing destroyed, and carefully traced the symbols that remained. "I can understand some of this. It’s describing the city." She read slowly. "Aegis was established after..."

"After what?" Kai asked.

"That part is missing." Her fingers moved past the damaged section. "The next part says the city was designed to survive future catastrophes."

Kai’s eyes narrowed. "Future?"

"That’s the word."

"Then they knew something was coming," Gabriel said.

Sera crossed her arms. "Or they were just being cautious."

"No." Lily pointed to another line. "They weren’t preparing for one catastrophe. This mentions earlier events. More than one." She moved further along the tablet. "There’s a reference to a cycle, a repeating cycle of destruction."

Nobody spoke, and the chamber suddenly felt much smaller.

Kai stared at the writing. "Keep going."

Lily moved to another tablet, frowning at the damage, though she could still read enough. "After the first destruction, the survivors rebuilt. The second civilization inherited the records of the first."

Gabriel turned to Kai. "So they weren’t the first."

Lily had already moved on to the next tablet, and she stopped halfway through reading it. "This civilization knew about the one before it."

"How many civilizations?" Kai asked.

"I can’t tell. The records aren’t complete." She scanned another section. "But there are several references at least."

Gabriel walked deeper into the chamber. "Then Aegis wasn’t the beginning."

"It was one of many," Kai said.

The city above had seemed impossibly old to him, and now he realized that even Aegis had been standing on top of a history far older than itself.

"Wait," Lily called out.

She was standing in front of a massive circular wall divided into three carved sections. The first was almost completely destroyed, and the second was partly intact, but the third was surprisingly clear.

"This one’s different," Lily said as Kai joined her. She studied the symbols, and her eyes slowly widened. "It isn’t describing a civilization. It’s describing events."

Gabriel stepped closer as Lily began translating the first surviving section. "The First..." She hesitated. "The Dragon of Destruction."

Sera turned to Kai. "Dragon?"

Lily nodded and read the full line aloud.

FIRST: THE DRAGON OF DESTRUCTION

Beneath it were several smaller symbols, and Lily leaned closer. "This describes destruction on an enormous scale, and it sounds like it lasted a long time."

"The First Disaster," Kai said.

Nobody corrected him. The words weren’t written exactly that way, but the meaning was impossible to miss, and it didn’t read like a myth. It read like history.

"Keep going," Kai said.

Most of the second section had been damaged, but its title had survived, and Lily’s expression changed the moment she read it. She swallowed. "Second. The Sixfold Calamity."

Kai went completely still. Sera’s eyes widened, and Gabriel slowly turned to look at him.

"Sixfold," Lily repeated quietly. "Six disasters."

"The Six Calamities," Kai said.

One by one, they said the names aloud as if they needed to hear them again. Red Storm, Black Flood, Burning Earth, White Frost, Black Swarm, and Falling Sky.

The chamber went quiet. There was no room left for doubt. The Second Disaster hadn’t belonged only to their era. It had happened before, maybe many times.

"So these weren’t random," Lily said.

"No," Gabriel said.

"They knew," Kai said, and his thoughts went to the Candidate. He remembered the simulations and the recreated civilizations, and the way the Candidate had talked about the Disasters as if he had watched them happen himself. Kai’s expression turned cold. "Keep going."

Lily hesitated at the third section. Unlike the first two, it had been carefully preserved, and there was only a single line of symbols on it. She read it, and then she stopped.

"What?" Kai asked.

She didn’t answer.

"Lily."

She turned slowly and read it aloud.

THIRD: THE KING OF THE SKY

For a long moment, nobody moved. Sera’s expression was the first to change, and Gabriel stared at the wall while Lily looked between all of them.

Kai didn’t need to react, because the name was already burned into his memory. The Candidate had spoken it before the Third Disaster ever appeared, and now Aegis was confirming it.

He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, Gabriel was watching him.

"You knew," she said. It wasn’t a question.

Kai nodded. "The Candidate told us, before the Third Disaster."

Gabriel stepped closer. "What exactly did he say?"

"He told us there would be a Third Disaster, and he called it the King of the Sky."

Lily looked back at the inscription, and her voice dropped. "Then the Candidate wasn’t predicting it."

"He already knew," Kai said.

Gabriel’s face held something Kai had never seen on it before. She looked shaken. "How?"

Kai didn’t answer, because he was asking himself the same thing.

The Candidate had recreated ancient civilizations and shown Mythal how they had prepared, and he had known both the Second Disaster and the Third before either one arrived.

Now Aegis was showing that those same events had happened before. The Candidate hadn’t been guessing. He knew the sequence.

Kai walked to the wall and held his fingers just above the inscription. "How many times?"

"I don’t know," Lily said.

"Can you find out?"

She looked around the chamber. "Maybe. There could be more records."

"Then we search," Gabriel said.

Sera was still staring at the writing. "But if Aegis knew these events were coming..."

"Then they knew another one could come," Kai said.

Lily looked at the remaining records. "The Disasters aren’t isolated. They’re a cycle."

Kai nodded toward the third inscription. "And if this record is right, the Third Disaster wasn’t the end."

Gabriel’s eyes narrowed. "How many are there?"

"We don’t know."

"Wait," Lily said, brushing dust away from the stone behind the main record. "There’s more."

Another section had been carved there, and most of it was destroyed, but one symbol was still visible.

Lily stared at it. "I don’t recognize this."

"Neither do I," Gabriel said.

When Kai looked at the symbol, Distortion stirred around him, only slightly, and he felt the same sense of recognition he had felt on the road above.

Then the entire archive came alive. Blue light spread across the walls, and one record after another lit up until images began to form in the air.

There was a dragon, then a sky covered in darkness, then six different symbols and a massive winged figure.

Cities burned and civilizations fell before rising again, only to fall again, over and over.

Lily stared. "These are..."

"Records," Gabriel whispered.

Kai watched one civilization appear and vanish, then another rise and disappear, and then another after that, each one rebuilding only to face the next Disaster.

It wasn’t just history. It was a pattern that had repeated across eras, and somewhere inside that pattern, Aegis had tried to break it.

The images stopped suddenly, and the chamber went dark. A single line of writing appeared on the wall.

"What does it say?" Sera asked.

Lily translated it slowly, her voice barely above a whisper.

"We prepared for the next one."

The light faded, and a second line appeared beneath it.

"We were not prepared for what came after."

Gabriel’s expression hardened, and Sera turned to Kai. "What does that mean?"

Kai didn’t answer. For the first time since entering Aegis, he had a terrible feeling that its people hadn’t failed to survive the Disaster at all.

They had survived it, and something that came afterward had destroyed them.

The archive trembled.

Lily looked around. "Did you feel that?"

Kai nodded, and Gabriel raised her staff. "Everyone, stay alert."

A low sound rolled through the chamber, and the records began to display one final symbol. None of them recognized it except Kai, and his eyes widened.

He hadn’t seen it in Aegis or in Nexus or in any ancient record. He had seen it in the distorted space that formed around him.

"What... are you?" he asked.

The symbol pulsed once.