Chapter 107: A Castle Beyond The Mountains

Chapter 107: A Castle Beyond The Mountains

Sky stared.

His mouth was slightly open, his eyes squinting against the bright sun. The landscape in front of him didn’t make sense, no matter how long he looked at it.

"Where are we?" he asked quietly. His voice was almost lost in the wind. "This isn’t on any map I’ve ever seen. Not even the old ones."

Chloe shook her head, her visor scanning the horizon and getting nothing but errors and static. She looked just as lost as he felt, which was rare for her.

"I don’t know. My pre-loaded maps don’t match anything here. Not the terrain, not the flora, not even the mountain shapes. The Array’s geography database has no entry for this region."

Vesper looked back at the passage they had emerged from, at the dark hole in the hillside that was already starting to look unnatural in the daylight. It looked like a wound in the hill.

"The labyrinth transported us," she said, her voice certain. "It must have. The dungeon does that sometimes. It spits you out somewhere else to disorient you."

"Or the route beneath it did," Chloe replied, still scanning and trying to force her visor to lock onto something familiar. "The sleeping dungeon wasn’t part of the normal labyrinth. It was older, deeper. It might have its own exit that leads somewhere else entirely."

Sky sighed and did what he always did when he was confused or when his senses weren’t enough. He opened his Array.

The interface appeared in front of him, flickering slightly before stabilizing. The blue light was dimmer out here, as if it was struggling to stay powered so far from the main network.

For a moment, everything looked normal. His health bar was full, his energy was recovering, his skills were all there and ready. His inventory was intact, nothing missing.

Then—

[LOCATION DATA UNAVAILABLE.]

The message appeared in red across his map window, right where their coordinates should have been. It pulsed twice, as if annoyed.

Sky frowned, tapping the window with his finger as if that would fix it. He swiped it away and opened it again.

"Still? We are outside and it’s still broken? How is that possible? We are not under the interference anymore."

Chloe nodded, not surprised at all. She had expected this to happen.

"The Array hasn’t completely recovered from the interference down below. The sleeping entity’s field scrambled its positioning system badly. It might take hours, maybe even a full day, to recalibrate out here."

Sky looked across the landscape again, at the endless blue-green hills and the impossible trees that were taller than anything in the capital. It was beautiful, but it was alien.

"Then we’re somewhere the Array doesn’t recognize. Somewhere even the system hasn’t mapped properly. That hasn’t happened since the early dungeon breaks, when the world was still being rewritten."

A strange feeling settled over him as he looked at the vastness. It wasn’t panic, though a part of him wanted to panic because of how open it was.

Not fear. He had felt enough fear in the last few days to last a lifetime. His body was tired of being afraid.

Something else. Something quieter and deeper, like standing on the edge of a very high cliff.

The sensation of entering a completely unknown world. Of stepping off the edge of the known map and into blank space where the cartographers wrote ’Here be monsters.’

He summoned a Soul Clone and sent it high into the air to get a better view. The dark figure shot up like an arrow, silent and fast.

The clone climbed above the nearby trees, rising quickly above the canopy. The wind up there was strong, but it didn’t affect the clone at all.

Then higher, above the hill they were standing on, until they could see the whole valley.

And higher still, until Sky, Vesper, and Chloe looked like small dots below, three specks on a green hill.

Sky closed his eyes to focus better. He let his consciousness slip partly into the clone, sharing its sight.

The world appeared through the clone’s perspective. It was breathtaking and overwhelming at the same time. The scale was too much.

The landscape stretched for kilometers in every direction, with no end in sight. Hills rolled into valleys, valleys into forests, forests into rivers that glittered like silver.

There were no obvious signs of civilization down there. No smoke from villages, no cut trees, no farmland squares, no walls.

No roads. No cities. No defensive walls or outposts that the Association always built near dungeon entrances.

No other Awakened. No Array beacons flashing in the distance. Nothing that said humans had ever been here.

Then—

Sky froze in place, his eyes still closed. His breath caught in his throat and he stopped channeling for a second.

"Wait," he whispered. "No, wait. Look there."

"What?" Vesper asked immediately, her hand moving to her staff, ready for a fight. "What did you see? Is something coming toward us?"

Sky turned his attention toward the distant horizon, beyond the colossal mountains that held up the sky. He pushed the clone to go even higher, straining its limits.

Something enormous stood beyond the mountains. At first, he thought it was another mountain, a trick of light and shadow on the far side of the range.

Then his Soul Clone moved higher, straining to see over the highest peak, and the shape became clearer. It was too perfect to be natural.

Sky’s eyes widened behind his closed lids. His heart started beating faster, not from fear, but from recognition.

It wasn’t a mountain. Mountains don’t have straight lines and symmetry. Mountains don’t have walls.

It was a castle. A structure so large it could be seen from dozens of kilometers away, even with the mountains in the way.

A gigantic castle stood upon a distant plateau, surrounded by enormous walls that looked like cliffs themselves. It dwarfed everything around it, even the mountains.

Multiple towers pierced the sky, each one taller than any building Sky had ever seen in the capital. Some were broken and crumbling, some were still whole and sharp.

A massive central keep rose above them all, dark against the bright sky. It was so large it cast a shadow over the entire plateau below it, like a second mountain.

And even from this distance, even through the thin air and the clone’s distant sight, Sky could see something strange, something that shouldn’t have been there if the castle was truly abandoned.

Smoke.

It was rising slowly from one of the lower towers, thin and grey against the blue sky.