The Runic Alchemist

Chapter 760: ManaForge Xylon

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Dungeon: ManaForge Xylon

Location: Brokenfang Valley, The Dragon Empire

Limit: 25

Description: Once a thriving mountain city carved into the cliffs of Brokenfang Valley, ManaForge Xylon now lies silent beneath layers of dust and creeping moss. Stone streets wind between empty homes and fractured towers, their walls scarred by claw marks and fire. Narrow mine entrances dot the valley’s slopes, leading into tunnels lined with steady veins of iron and copper. The air carries the scent of rust and damp stone, while the distant sound of movement echoes faintly through the hollowed streets. In the deeper reaches, the mines merge into natural caverns where the rock is stained red from centuries of ore extraction.

User ID: Damian Sunblade

Nearby: 1

Form a team | Join a team | Enter

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The ruling branch family of the old house of Xel’Tharien did not try to stop him at all. When Damian landed at the palace and revealed his intentions for visiting, the lord Xel’Tharien welcomed him like he was the guy’s long-lost cousin or something. But then again, having a relation to a country’s authority figure was of greater priority than protecting their small, level-25 dungeon.

The Xel’Tharien family sure was surprised that he was interested in their dungeon, though. Damian simply mentioned the Emperor knew about his visit but gave no documents or anything. The lord just accepted his words without showing any doubt. They proposed to enter with him to show him all the important places for getting ores and relics, but Damian refused them and entered inside alone.

The creatures that roamed the lost mountain city were rugged and fiercely territorial, shaped by generations of surviving in the cold, unyielding stone. Broad-shouldered cave beasts with hides the color of weathered rock prowled the empty streets, slipping like shadows between crumbled walls and toppled towers.

Down in the mines, lean predators with pale, sightless eyes hunted by sound alone, their claws worn to points from scraping through veins of iron and copper alike. They moved in tight packs, driving targets toward the open while smaller scavengers picked the bones clean. Even in the quietest caverns, burrowing insect swarms chewed through the ore seams, leaving the ground riddled with sudden, dangerous voids.

Damian cleared it perfectly in less than 20 minutes. The three boss monsters on level 10, 20, and 25 were barely emperor rank. The level-10 one was only King rank, a large insectoid. The level-20 one was a towering rock golem—Damian analyzed the thing from all angles and found nothing new. The runes on the rock body worked the same as his own body runes, giving him power. There was no recognizable operating or controlling system inside the stone monster. How it worked, Damian had no idea.

Damian was rewarded with the small pure white sphere at the end after killing the boss of the whole dungeon—an armored giant crab.

Damian entered it again—this time trying to check the various details of this lost civilization—but other than the typical story of good vs. evil, nothing of worth was decipherable. He had earned two dungeon relics too, but neither showed any promise of being connected to one the Highswords had shown him.

In that, the technology and everything available in this dungeon had no connection at all. Damian returned to the first floor, the gate of the mountain city. This had the most murals drawn on it and revealed half the story of this civilization. A race of wide, small-statured, powerful species—very similar to dwarfs of the legends. They had learned to make advanced weapons and powerful runic tools that no monster of their world was able to touch them at all, situated high atop the mountain region.

But then they built a machine that would give the dwarves the power of the sun itself. But the giant machine was more than what the civilization had thought it to be. There were no murals of what happened, but seeing the blackened walls and broken buildings, Damian could put together the story—they started something they could not stop. The whole city burned to ashes and probably kept burning for a long time.

The caves had murals of another hidden cavemen civilization who saw the dwarves as evil masters—their story was similar, but some of them survived the fire, which the murals depicted as a giant red demon, and then never dared to go out of their caves, eventually dying in the caves they thought were their home and mother.

Damian had checked and rechecked the epicenter of this great fire but had found nothing other than charred remains of stone. No epic machine had remained. This gate of the city was the only thing left relatively unharmed. It was also cracked and blackened in places, but not as much as the city inside.

The reason Damian had returned here and was staring at the murals for over half an hour was the weird symbols the pseudo-dwarven species had left behind. It was not the language—after half an hour, that was the thing he was sure of. It was too symmetrical and weirdly interconnected for it to be any decipherable language. The glyphs looked like parts of circuits or his very own runic circles.

They weren’t the same though—otherwise he would have recognized them the very first time. There were a lot of differences. However, it was the first civilization Damian had come across that had two separate languages for their everyday use and their magic spells. A very important thing that showed just how advanced this species’ intelligence was. Still, there was nothing that Damian could use in it.

If it was a runic language that made sense only to the drawers—it was kind of useless to him.

This was indeed the same dungeon the relic had come from—there was no doubt in that. But just how? He had confirmed from the lord of the town that killing the boss monsters differently did not give any different relics at all. Those were fixed.

Small monsters wouldn’t give dungeon relics at all. So the options were very limited, and he had checked all of them.

Damian was confused as hell and was about to turn around to leave the dungeon to clear his mind when, from the side of his vision, he noticed something that drew his attention.

At the very far edge of the large gate, where it was half burnt, there was a two-meter-big circle. There were many pieces of it placed in it with red material used to write it all. The circle was nothing of worth, but it was empty.

The entire gate and still-surviving walls were full of these shapes and glyphs, and there was not any place bigger than a meter left completely empty.

Damian stepped near the empty red circle and tried to understand what the glyphs around it hinted at. Failing miserably in that, Damian enveloped the circle and its surroundings in hundreds of mana threads, trying to see if there was anything hidden beneath the surface, but again there was nothing.

If he was a proud member of a civilization really advanced in runic knowledge, what would he consider worthy of leaving behind as wall art?

Damian blinked, seeing the four complex glyphs placed at the four points of the red circle.

Wouldn’t the answer be simply.. bragging?

Damian smiled, shaking his head. It couldn’t be that weirdly simple, could it?

Still, hesitatingly, Damian pulled out a Balzur alloy ingot and melted it with fire, shaping it into a powerful light-laser-shooting bracer. Once the runic inscription finished, Damian held the bracer and touched the center of the empty circle—to his disbelief, the bracer became a part of the glyph, the shape of the bracer still maintained but much simplified.

The four complex glyphs, which Damian figured were also runic devices, started blinking bright blue—his own bracer glyph was blinking white. After half a minute of this process, the white of his bracer stopped blinking and was fixed as bright blue, same as the other four.

His runic tool was accepted as a valid entry!

The four bright blue glyphs of the runic tools started spinning in a circle as his own bracer was reaching for the edge of the circle and coming back to the center.

It wanted him to choose one runic tool to replace with his own bracer, Damian realized.

Damian had no idea which one to choose. There was one that was slightly shaped like an old monitor—that had to be the one the Highswords had. But Damian also observed the other three in detail.

One was shaped like a small English letter ’i’ but had a string of circles attached to its tail. Another was like a magic card with weird half-moon symbols drawn on it. And the last was a tower made of dots and thin lines, as if it was representing not the tower itself but its blueprint or something.

Damian wanted to get the monitor, but these other tools had piqued his curiosity. In time, he would eventually figure out a way to replicate the monitor-like relic’s spell, but he might not get the chance to choose from these tools again.

If he associated the start of the blinking sequence with the importance of the tool, then the monitor was the first one that started blinking, then the card, followed by the ’i’, and in the end was the tower.

Damian made the decision and touched the blinking tower glyph.