Chapter 952 - Looming doubts

The Nymphs left Sofia in the first open space they found. The air was stale, but breathable, and there was also some gravity, although light, helping her slowly touch ground in the correct orientation.

Inside, the walls were clean gray panels, and despite some visible mechanical parts here and there, it truly felt nothing like the chaotic dark epoch style of technology.

There was some faint light, feeble orange dots of light on the floor along the walls. Sofia could feel that they were powered by mana, but it was clear that they were not getting enough power.

Upping the luminosity of her horns to have some proper light, Sofia walked toward the nearest door. It had no handle, and was already slid open three quarters of the way inside of the wall.

“Hmm… All weird machinery like in Sun’s temple.”

Not bothering to explore this room more in depth, Sofia walked to the next door, which was more of the same. The machines were all silent, there was no one, it seemed that the place had been abandoned for a long time.

She continued down the corridor, until she reached the end door, with a sign above it in a blocky language she had never seen before.

“I’m assuming those are words…”

The last door, like all the others, was stuck in position almost fully open.

The next section of the long corridor that followed the ring shape of the place was quite different. It mostly contained large vats of dirt and other containers full of dust. Things were in a worse shape than in the previous section around here.

Maybe that used to be some kind of garden?

The entire section was in ruins, after looking around some more Sofia managed to find a single plant, solidifying her guess. Said plant was long dead, only a dark, brittle shadow of its past self that crumbled when Sofia walked near.

How long has this place been abandoned for things to be like this?

Sofia’s exploration turned out to be quite boring. There seemed to be no danger, no riches to find, most of anything that wasn’t heavy duty metal like the machinery had long turned to dust. Even when she found some objects with Mithril parts, the metal was so old and eroded it would need significant reforging to be of any use.

Then, entering a new section, she started finding ‘them’. Dust piles. In the corridors, in rooms, around the rare windows to the outside, sometimes with a mithril ring or similar jewelry sitting in the dust. It was not hard to understand what these dust piles used to be.

“It’s just like… Those piles of ash in the closed hands. Were those just people trying to escape? It seems the cataclysm is not so simple… Is the entire universe really getting wiped every thirty thousand years? Like that? People just turn to ashes? And even the Lords cannot stop it?”

Sofia turned around and left that room, the sight of a smaller pile of dust between two bigger ones next to a window was making her sick.

She quickly walked deeper into the unending corridor, until she found a grand room, with the largest window yet, and the ground fully covered in a thick layer of dust.

A single tall seat was still standing, facing the grand window that showed nothing but the darkness of space, with ‘someone’ sitting on it. It was a corpse, in much the same state as the one she had found in that dungeon with Henry, a shell of charred skin on rotten bones that her aura did not recognise as such.

Wading through the dust, Sofia approached the seat to get a better look at the corpse.

A cat beastman? Kind of? It looks more like a cat avian kind of. A human cat more than a cat beastman. Hard to really tell, though.

Despite it all, despite the charred skin and the racial difference, what Sofia could still decipher beyond a doubt, was the expression of utter terror of the cat man, which was etched on his face since lords only knew how long.

The corpse was not wearing anything, his clothes long lost to time, but something reflecting Sofia’s light was still held in his right hand, a singular object he had been clutching tightly until the last second. Pinching the protruding part of the small object, Sofia pulled it out of the corpse’s hand. The entire corpse crumbled from the slight disturbance. Becoming just another pile of dust. Even his mana heart spontaneously shattered as it hit the seat of the chair, becoming little more than some scattered powerless crystal.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Well… That is it for the last representative of that race, I imagine. Save for the lords I might be the only person around who is aware they ever even existed…

Feeling suddenly depressed, Sofia left behind a small statuette in the space station, and transposed herself back to another one near the southern outskirts of Ser’Extra. East of the city’s growing port, right on the edge of the spirit forest, Sofia sat in the sand, watching the waves for a while, clutching the strange item in her hand.

She was usually not one to give up and feel hopeless, but the more she encountered remnants of ancient civilisations the cataclysm had erased from history, the more she realised just how bleak and uncertain the future truly was.

The current era was already nearing or even over thirty thousand years old.

The rate at which I am progressing does seem exceptional… Everyone is trying their hardest just to follow my pace…

And we might still be too slow. Those ascended from the previous epochs… It looks like they didn’t even have a fighting chance.

Should I really just give away the level 550 coin to someone else?

How much time do I have left?

Couldn’t I have… Been born just a bit earlier?

Sofia sighed, lying down in the warm sand. Crowie was silent next to her, watching the clouds above pass through the blue sky. She held the object over her face, she couldn’t really tell what it was even made of. It looked like a small totem, or an extravagant wax stamp, carved from a cold light-blue material, accented with several small mithrium rings along its length. It was without a doubt a magic item, although it lacked any power currently, but even with her growing enchanting expertise, Sofia understood nothing of the circuits she felt inside.

Mr.Scribe was also completely lost, giving her only question marks when she tried their custom [Identify]. She could only use the system’s regular [Identify], and watch her mana suddenly start to melt.

[???]: Advanced decode necessary. Please do not sever the connection.

Using my mana without even asking now. I used to at least get a choice. Well… Let’s see…

It took the system over thirty minutes of draining all of her mana down to whatever she was regenerating to probe the object before spell fully resolved and a new system window appeared.

[Great adamant idol sheltering the heavens]:

Channeled spellcasting medium.

Channel for five seconds to deploy the great adamant shelter.

The great adamant shelter protects a large area from all attacks under the Ascended level, and hides it from the eyes of the world, making it impossible to detect through the planes and spaces.

Deployment: 10 000 000 Mana per second

Sustained channeling: 50 000 000 Mana per second, doubling every ten seconds

(Costs cannot be reduced)

“Woah. That is an insane defensive item if I have ever seen one. A barrier that only an ascended can break through. And the area… If I am to assume it was covering the entire sun temple, that’s already huge! That is like the entire city center. The channeling cost though…”

Sofia played around with the item in her hand.

“Did it work, I wonder. For a few agonising seconds or minutes until that cat man ran out of mana, did it protect them? Did he even deploy the barrier in time? Hide them from the cataclysm?”

I’ll keep this around.

Safely storing the item in her eye, Sofia stood up, shook off some sand, and flew back to her city.

Leveling time.

The leveling cube was ready, the biggest ‘building’ around the city, standing at two hundred meters tall, it was already taller than some of the neighboring Spirit forest’s giant Black Primus trees. After warning Saria and Pareth that she was going in, Sofia let the Nymphs carry her inside of the sealed bone cube.

The inner chamber in the center was relatively small but unlike the previous time, the walls were not fully solid, instead being full of holes through which mana had an easier path to reach the outer parts.

The first step was to give the entire structure the [Blessing of permanent frame] to make it sturdier, an actual skeleton and let it profit from her passive healing, or it would never survive the things Mr.Scribe was about to put it and Sofia through.

After that, Sofia had to start filling it up with her mana.

Since she had to stay enclosed, there was a small shaft of mana-retaining glass above her, to let in some sunlight that would help her regeneration. Even with her regeneration at its top speed of two million a second, during the day, it took her more than a week to fill the cube to a sufficient level.

Finally ready, almost suffocating in her own mana, she grabbed the book the demons had procured her to read it through one last time. Just to make sure she had fully mastered all the contents.

Scarring unto reality.

More like scaring sanity straight out of me. Seriously, what was that Grey Sunset Immortal Venerable guy on when he thought this up?

Even the most basic stage of the circulation technique was already about converting the mana into a self-destructing curse strand, making the entire technique a constant battle of push and pull between one’s health and mana regeneration and the curse obliterating itself, damaging the body and soul around it.

This is going to take a while.