Chapter 285: Unearth (5)

"There’s no reason to stop at making her the Lord of Erast?"

"Of course. The scenario tells you to raise Rubia to a lord, but in this situation, a mere lord could never develop her domain." Isaac lifted his beak and went on. "Think. You said war is coming soon. Could a petty lord of Erast calmly build up her lands in that storm?"

I knew what he meant.

"If she opposes the war, another, surer road to assassination opens before that human."

I already knew Rubia’s nature, but I asked anyway, "And if she supports it?"

"That’s worse, hell itself. Erast is practically a coalition. They’ll be swept aside early. How would a single lord escape that tide?"

He was right. Kirk Ray, once Lord of Erast, lost his lands and was butchered on the Red Fox Plains.

"Then what should we do? Do you have a good alternative?"

"

Keke...

After dying this many times, widen your view. You need

real

influence, enough to halt the war or profit from it. For now, let me show you one entertaining possibility."

Instead of going underground, Isaac shot higher than anyone into the sky.

***

We turned south along the highway due to Isaac’s lead. Two days later, we arrived in Grassmere, the city of arms.

I slipped through the gate with Isaac and entered the inner keep to greet the lord. "I came to confirm something."

"By all means! Look anywhere you wish! Do whatever you like with the underground where that damned sorcerer tinkered, O’ Emissary!"

"..."

"Then I shall."

He wasn’t bluffing. The lord handed me the key to the great hall and flung wide the path to the underground tomb. "Good. Go straight in."

We reached the innermost chamber, where Isaac’s coffin lay.

[The lone red flower laid bare, the peeling veil of reenactment, all begins with Isaac’s gaze...]

Kugugugugugu...!

Behind the rounded egg, a secret passage appeared, just like the one I’d seen before. However, instead of being just a meter wide, the corridor opened three times broader. I compared it to how I’d barely squeezed through before by stamping Malphas’s sigils everywhere.

"I have a question. Where do your incantations come from?"

Whenever Isaac cast sorcery, he recited long chants in a dozen tongues. At first, I thought they followed some fixed rules. Doubt crept in when he tossed his own name into them, however he pleased.

"Where else? I composed them, obviously."

"

Umm...

Is it really fine to just... make them up?"

"Don’t pick a fight with my hobbies. When I was young, I always dreamed of being a poet."

"Hard to believe."

"Why, because I still sound like one?

Huh

?" Pouting, he swept past the threshold, as if done talking. "You said you’d been here before, didn’t you?"

I nodded and moved on. The crow effigies that glowed of their own accord were beautiful even now, shimmering in the pitch-black dark. After a long walk, the end of the passage brightened.

Sseu-sseu-sseu...

White-hot liquid danced in the dark.

"Do we go in there?"

A colossal door. The demonic gate the young duchess had battered countless times without leaving a scratch.

Isaac shook his head. "We can’t open this yet. Wait."

Flap!

He spread his left wing. No talismans, no written spells. A wavering shadow trailed from his wingtip. It was the shadow of fire, a long chain, and a mirror. Then he unfurled his right wing. A wind rose from it, sweeping the black shadows born from the left, and draping them over the surroundings.

A door opened in empty space. It felt as if Isaac had imposed the concept of a door upon the real wall with nothing but his will.

Isaac flew below first. "I can’t hold it long. Hurry."

Flap!

As I stepped through, a vast shaft opened before me. I was gripping a ladder before I knew it.

As if reading my thoughts, Isaac called up to me, "Even if I told you, you wouldn’t grasp it. It’s multi-layered barriers. An immaterial rampart of imagery. After I discovered the hidden passage, I overlaid my own ward so no one else could ever find it."

"That, I won’t be able to copy."

"You call that a revelation? Planning to come alone? If you want back in, you’ll have to ask me to let you through."

I climbed down quickly. The deeper we went, the broader the tunnel became.

Thud.

After about thirty meters, my boots hit the floor. I followed his lead, scanning the surroundings. The style felt strangely familiar.

It resembled the capital’s secret passage that Naneow Tropin had shown me—the Path of Freedom.

Her words came back to me.

"A thousand years ago, humans dug this out to escape the apostles. I found it while tracking scattered Lurium across the land."

"This is one of the ancients’ secret routes? In the south, too..."

Isaac pecked my calf for fun and chuckled. "

Heh-heh

. You said you’d seen it in the capital? The network here is actually broader."

His next words stunned me.

"Yublam, Erast, Grassmere, Erendale, Davenhall, Colchester. This passage links six cities."

"It connects six cities? But Davenhall, Colchester... what are those?"

Erast, Yublam, Grassmere, those I knew. Erendale lay in the south-central region, near Isaac’s old cult. However, the other two names were entirely new.

"They used to be flourishing cities. Yemera burned them, reducing them into desolate dunes."

I remembered our earlier talk, how the goddess of revelry had forced a glittering civilization to repent. He said he’d read it in old, forbidden texts. The secret passages that reached the desert were a scale fit for a hidden underground civilization.

I kept exploring as Isaac explained. Even at a glance, these tunnels held space where thousands could have lived. Lodgings, fields, armories, tombs... Less a secret route than an underground city. A thousand years had passed, yet traces of distant lives still lingered everywhere.

"Once a refuge, what is it now? A place to build power out of sight of the surface."

Isaac pointed ahead with his beak. A massive circular dome loomed before us, at least a hundred meters across. It was an enormous, clearly artificial space carved out beneath the earth. The moment I opened the door and stepped inside, I saw countless bones, collapsed in quiet repose. None had fallen in combat. Each skeleton seemed to have claimed its own corner, or clutched another in a final embrace.

"What... is this...?"

Isaac suddenly fluttered to the side and returned with a small journal clenched in his beak. The paper had only faded after a thousand years, still strangely smooth to the touch. He flipped open the first page.

"The future..."

"...cannot be seen. At every moment, we dread the Apostles’ discovery, haunted by torture and death. This can no longer be called life."

"What? You’re reading it fluently? That grammar is extremely obscure."

Though I had absorbed the Ancient Language skill, my own reading was still halting. Yet with this journal, it was as if the meaning leapt directly into my mind.

"I don’t know myself."

[Assimilation Rate has decreased.]

[68.65% → 68.49%...]

A light dizziness passed through me. At the same time, the letters became even clearer.

"We survived wretchedly, unable to take that last step into death. The final underground aquifer is nearly dry. The scouting party that left a year ago has never returned. Here we only cling to breath, already no different from the dead..."

"Pathetic, isn’t it? The aquifers have since been restored."

"Several different hands wrote this."

"Because they committed mass suicide."

The entries continued. Hopelessness at missing scouts. The aquifers running dry. The despair of endless years underground, until at last, they turned to mass suicide.

"Had they waited a little longer, Seiron could’ve saved them."

"Was it a similar period?"

Isaac shrugged his wings. "It’s just a guess. I just know that they gained power from the capital."

I ignored him and kept reading. The log detailed agriculture, the routines of the shelter, and every detail of survival. One particular note caught my eye.

"Where is this secure zone?"

He chuckled faintly and beat his wings. "

Heh...

follow me."

On the far side of the dome lay a vast, uncanny chamber. There, massive cubical cages filled the space, some wrought from black iron. Their bars were nearly ten centimeters thick, and even an Ogre couldn’t bend them without Sword Energy. Inside lay piles of bones of human, beast, Troll, monsters—some I half-recognized and others I didn’t. The gouges in the bars carried the prisoners’ torment across the centuries.

"So this is it."

The journal had described it: a place where monsters were confined and experimented upon. Some skeletal hands were large enough to grasp an entire human torso.

"

Ah...

Even those dignified enough to choose death in the end couldn’t live on bread alone. Entertainment matters."

"..."

Isaac grew animated, his voice rising in the secure zone. "Anything is possible in such a place. Experiments, or the breeding of armies. A thousand years have passed, but farming would still work. You said Gith-Za-Rai, right?"

I nodded.

"Look at these caged friends. Raise even a handful, and they’d be formidable, wouldn’t they?"

I couldn’t disagree on that point. Some bones defied easy imagination, vast and powerful. If Gith-Za-Rai descended, even animating these alone’d make a great host. The secure zone stretched endlessly, fit to house such an army.

"How did you use it?"

"Truthfully, I never researched it fully. When I found it, I was busy."

"You couldn’t order your subordinates to investigate?"

"How could I trust anyone else with a treasure like this? For all I knew, something could burst out at any moment."

"

Hmm..

."

"It’s another world of its own. What I did confirm is that each city’s inner keep connects here."

Hidden tunnels beneath their strongholds. With any decent force, occupying them would be child’s play. Even without conquest, communication and support between cities would be effortless, perfect for rebellion.

I fell silent in thought. Was Isaac trying to steer my judgment? He’d told me before: I was the one who had lived through it all, across countless regressions. I had to think for myself.

If raising Rubia was the goal, Grassmere came first. It was a key city. I already owed its lord a favor, and I knew Baron Chandler’s son would one day become a larva. If not the current lord, then certainly his heir could be swayed.

I know his temperament well enough.

Grassmere stood on the frontline with the Free Confederation. When war came by the emperor’s will, it would be the first to suffer.

Second was Yublam. I recalled how Marquis Leandro had installed one of his subordinates as its lord. If the marquis came south and I exposed the current lord’s crimes, the same thing could happen again.

Draw the marquis in, and the three-city alliance would be complete.

"That’s the idea."

When I laid it out, Isaac bobbed his head with satisfaction.

"But... I know nothing of this Erendale. What about there?" I asked.

"That place is nearly ruined. You haven’t been there, have you?"

I shook my head. I only had a faint memory of meeting a merchant named Marker. Terezia Marker. Perhaps, she hailed from that city.

As I sank into the thought, the crow snapped me back. "Good. Then let’s procure the finest oil for our gears. Call it the glue to bind the cities."

"What do you mean?"

"What else? The Merchants’ Guild.

Keh-heh...

Gaining full membership should be easy for you. Shame you’ve been wasting time." Isaac took wing and perched atop a distant cage. "Seven days remain before Rubia’s trial. Let’s wait until then to act."