Sylver lost count of how long they had been walking, and even though Ria kept track, Sylver didn’t want to hear it.
There was a very large, and ridiculously tall, double door, with a stretched-out hexagon carved into it. Sylver cocked his head as he looked at the hexagon, with 6 holes on the angles.
But that wasn’t the part that confused Sylver, the writing inside the hexagon is what confused him.
It was a slightly newer dialect the dragon had spoken, by a couple of hundred years.
He must have been staring too intently at the unfamiliar sigils.
“Can you read this?” purple robe asked, as Sylver scratched his chin.
Even if he didn’t care about this dungeon as a whole, the writing on the wall was very peculiar, in a way that was hard to put into words. It rubbed him the wrong way, even before he finished reading it.
“A perk I unlocked after learning 50 languages is reacting to it, give me a moment,” Sylver said.
The first couple of sentences Sylver had to give up on, it used too many words he didn’t know, but he managed to piece together the meaning of the middle bit.
A beast called “the serpent of the mountain” attacked a land of some sort, and a warrior was sent to deal with it.
Something about bathing in a river? Then the beast was defeated, and made a pact of some sort with the warrior?
“Each head sealed away the senses. Hearing, touch, smell, sight, and taste. At the end of the battle, only 3 remained…” Sylver read to himself.
The next line spoke of a battle that lasted 3 days and 3 nights, and the warrior won because of a “voice” helping him. The word “voice” wasn’t quite underlined, but there was an emphasis on it.
He got the feeling it was a euphemism for something else, but Sylver didn’t have enough context to know what it was referring to.
He struggled to remember that there were 4 cultivators watching him, as he walked over to the door and gently traced his fingers over the carved symbols.
The next part kept referring to a word Sylver was unfamiliar with, it mentioned this word 9 times, but it wasn’t a name, it sounded to be more like a title. The main thing he managed to puzzle out was that there were 3 people who held this title.
“Bog-A-Tyr,” the word had no meaning to him, Sylver wasn’t even certain if he was pronouncing it right.
The next line spoke of a “magic,” but didn’t specify whether it was a spell, ritual, tool, or item, it simply mentioned that “magic” was used.
“Could not wed,” followed by words Sylver didn’t know, and finally another word that felt like a title, as opposed to a name.
Sylver took a couple of steps back from the text and read through it once more.
“It’s a song…” Sylver said as he realized that if he focused hard enough, he could see that someone had made alterations to the text.
But since Sylver didn’t know what it looked like originally, he couldn’t say what had been altered. For all he knew the whole thing was fake, and the part that looked and felt “real” was added for the kinds of people like Sylver, to make them chase a dead end when trying to translate it.
“Can you sing it?” blue robe asked.
“Sing what?” Sylver asked, as he finished memorizing the text and shifted his attention away from it.
“The song. You said it’s a song, can you sing it?” the blue robe heir asked.
Sylver gestured towards the doorway, which under different circumstances, would have been covered in layers upon layers of dust and cobwebs as a sign of how ancient it was.
He decided to lie as he realized that there wasn’t much point in explaining that the way musical lyrics were structured in Eirish was different enough that some people considered it a separate language, and that even if he understood 100% of the words, it would sound terrible, given that he didn’t know what the melody was.
“I can’t. It just says it’s a song,” Sylver said, as he used [Arcane Insight] on the door, just in case one of them could feel someone else using their perks or skills.
[Door – N/A – N/A]
[A giant door, that has been altered by 6th tier magic.]
[The carvings tell the ballad of N/A]
[Indestructible object]
Huh…
Is the alteration 6th tier, or is the magic used to mask the alteration 6th tier?
“So how do we open the door? Or what are we doing?” Sylver asked, in an attempt to shift everyone's attention away from him and the writing on the door.
Before he said anything, they likely assumed it to be random scribbles, the whole thing was written in the ancient Eirish equivalent of cursive, and even to Sylver’s trained eye, looked more decorative than actual text.
“We will need some time to prepare,” blue robe said, as Sylver could do little other than nod at him.
While he waited for the 4 men to take turns drinking from a tiny vial, and then meditating their Ki, he quietly moved Ria away from them.
“Is this what you saw when you looked at the door?” Sylver asked through Spring as he took a page out from his robe, and manipulated a drop of ink to write out the exact symbols he had just memorized.
Sylver didn’t want to risk someone overhearing them and didn’t want to gamble on all 4 of them not knowing Elvish. So they weren’t tapping each other, they both just spoke to Spring, and had the shade tap the message out to the other person.
Ria cocked her head at the door as Sylver handed her the finished page.
“There’s nothing there when I look at it. Just a blank wall,” Ria answered.
So that means I’ve been feeling up a blank wall that seems to be covered in a very potent illusion spell…
6th tier sounds about right in that case…
“What are you going to do?” Ria asked through Spring.
She succeeded in keeping her tone neutral, and almost friendly, but she was too close for Sylver not to feel her soul.
“Current idea is to cover Ulvic in glowing mushrooms and have him kidnap the heir. That way the only connection would be that I have a wolf shade, and I could explain that away as saying that it’s a very common monster,” Sylver said, as Ria managed to maintain a very relaxed air of acceptance.
“And the others?” Ria asked calmly.
“I’ll leave them be. Although I have a bad feeling about them,” Sylver said, as Ria cocked her head.
“The other heir that died due to ingesting poison, as opposed to inhaling it. You think one of them did it,” Ria said, as Sylver shrugged his shoulders.
“It’s none of my business. It could have been an accident, when it comes to potions, sometimes drinking more than a specific quantity can be a death sentence. The tea they drank certainly has that feeling to it, and it wouldn’t be the first time,” Sylver answered, as he turned his head towards the sound of swords being drawn.
The blue bathrobe-wearing heir had two swords, one was his own, while the second belonged to his brother/lookalike relative.
“Are you ready?” purple robe asked, as Sylver stood up from his crouch, and walked over to them.
Now that he got a good look at them, their hilts weren’t normal, they were all hexagonal.
And the exact same size as the holes in the wall.
Fitting, given that purple robe, stuck his sword’s hilt into the bottom left hole.
Orange robe placed his into the bottom right hole.
Red robe jumped up and placed his into the top right.
And the blue robe heir placed his into the middle-left corner and the middle right corner.
The 5 men, Ria, and Mora stood in the quiet and gentle light of the nearby torches and stared at the 5 blades sticking out of the wall.
A literal half minute passed before the door made a sound.
During the half minute, Sylver got to listen to the heir’s heart gradually begin to beat so loudly, that Sylver almost wanted to ask him if he was alright.
Given that he calmed down the second he heard the sound made by the door, he was simply nervous, and not in the process of having a heart attack.
The door did something a bit strange, it skipped the opening portion of going from closed, to open. It was sealed shut one fraction of a second, and wide-open the next, without so much as a puff of air as proof that it had moved.
Assuming you didn’t count the wall that had appeared behind the group, that blocked any chance of retreat, to be proof.
It was empty inside the large torch-lit room.
No enemies, no passages, no symbols, and the two doors that had previously had a tone of carvings on them, were now blank. Sylver walked towards the middle of the room, while the men picked up the swords that had magically appeared on the ground once the door had opened.
“I’m sorry,” one of the men behind Sylver said.
Sylver turned to look at them, but there were only 3 standing there. He felt an odd tickle on his chin and then heard the sound of metal shattering behind him.
As he turned around again, he saw red robe standing in the middle of the room, with a dumbfounded look on his face, and only a sword hilt in his hand. The blade was missing.
There was a slight delay, as all of Sylver’s soul armors burst, and then his [Necrotic Mutilation] helmet split into two and was quickly followed by Sylver’s skull being sliced down the middle. Like a book being opened, Sylver’s face split into two, and his ears nearly touched his shoulders, before he stopped them.
He just remained where he was and quietly willed the two perfectly cut halves to fuse back into one. [Dead Dominion] helped him out a lot here, and the fact that the cut was perfect meant it would only be a matter of minutes to completely heal his head and face.
He didn’t even feel it.
Getting the bits of sword bits stuck inside the top part of his chest would be a bit annoying, but he could deal with it later, it wasn’t a major issue.
Sylver leaned down towards Mora, to help her out, but discovered that she was offering to stitch him up since she was already done stitching herself into shape.
Ria was the only one that made a sound, as her golem creation broke apart, and Sylver got to see the inside of her golem body, for about half a second, as the various tightly wound springs and mechanisms exploded out of her and splattered small chunks of her gold/black liquid body all over the place.
“You alright there Ria?” Sylver slurred, as the woman slid out of the broken-down golem, and worked on gathering up all of her pieces.
He brought his hand up to his throat and worked on realigning the organ he used to speak. He locked eyes with the mute red robe, who was just staring at Sylver, with a look of utter disbelief on his face.
Sylver reached the man unimpeded and stopped when the relatively small man was within arm’s reach.
“Where I’m from we call these sorts of things a “sacrifice room.” Someone has to die for the next stage to open,” Sylver explained calmly, as a very thin droplet of unnaturally thick and dark blood formed on his forehead.
Red robe wasn’t even stuttering, his whole body was frozen in fear. These people lived in a bubble, the very concept of undead was foreign to them.
“Now, if you stupid children were curious, sacrifice rooms always have a way out that doesn’t involve someone getting killed,” Sylver explained, as he placed his hand on red robe’s shoulder.
[Human (Claw Of The Blue Tiger) Defeated!]
[Due to defeating an enemy 70 levels above you, additional experience will be awarded!]
[Swamp Lord] has reached level 57!
+5AP
If he had to compare it to something, it was like crushing an ant between his thumb and forefinger. Red robe was so devoid of defense and Ki, that Sylver spent more mana stuffing him into his [Bound Bones] storage than he did killing him.
As with everything, the kind of speed and power required to catch Sylver completely off guard came at a great cost.
Sylver used his thumb to wipe the tiny beads of blood that had formed on his lips and did the same to the droplets that had appeared on the back of his spine and had been partially absorbed into his robe.
Regretfully, the man’s sword had destroyed 4 daggers, before it reached the top of Sylver’s ribcage. His cut had been perfectly down the middle, but he had cut Sylver from the back, so the blade reached only the top part of his chest at the front and was shattered before it had finished cutting through Sylver’s spine in his back.
The small head inside Sylver’s chest had been nicked, but the brain had remained intact, and aside from the sharp metal shrapnel surrounding it, everything was fine.
Sylver turned around to face the remaining 3 cultivators and smiled to himself as he saw that Mora was standing between them, and growling.
Everyone, including the incredibly pissed off and completely liquid Ria, turned towards the sound of a loud click, and looked at the open passageway that hadn’t been there a moment earlier.
Sylver didn’t even get a chance to say something witty, as all 3 men disappeared in a burst of speed and ran down the passageway as if their very lives depended on it.
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Sylver lost count of how long they had been walking, and even though Ria kept track, Sylver didn’t want to hear it.
There was a very large, and ridiculously tall, double door, with a stretched-out hexagon carved into it. Sylver cocked his head as he looked at the hexagon, with 6 holes on the angles.
But that wasn’t the part that confused Sylver, the writing inside the hexagon is what confused him.
It was a slightly newer dialect the dragon had spoken, by a couple of hundred years.
He must have been staring too intently at the unfamiliar sigils.
“Can you read this?” purple robe asked, as Sylver scratched his chin.
Even if he didn’t care about this dungeon as a whole, the writing on the wall was very peculiar, in a way that was hard to put into words. It rubbed him the wrong way, even before he finished reading it.
“A perk I unlocked after learning 50 languages is reacting to it, give me a moment,” Sylver said.
The first couple of sentences Sylver had to give up on, it used too many words he didn’t know, but he managed to piece together the meaning of the middle bit.
A beast called “the serpent of the mountain” attacked a land of some sort, and a warrior was sent to deal with it.
Something about bathing in a river? Then the beast was defeated, and made a pact of some sort with the warrior?
“Each head sealed away the senses. Hearing, touch, smell, sight, and taste. At the end of the battle, only 3 remained…” Sylver read to himself.
The next line spoke of a battle that lasted 3 days and 3 nights, and the warrior won because of a “voice” helping him. The word “voice” wasn’t quite underlined, but there was an emphasis on it.
He got the feeling it was a euphemism for something else, but Sylver didn’t have enough context to know what it was referring to.
He struggled to remember that there were 4 cultivators watching him, as he walked over to the door and gently traced his fingers over the carved symbols.
The next part kept referring to a word Sylver was unfamiliar with, it mentioned this word 9 times, but it wasn’t a name, it sounded to be more like a title. The main thing he managed to puzzle out was that there were 3 people who held this title.
“Bog-A-Tyr,” the word had no meaning to him, Sylver wasn’t even certain if he was pronouncing it right.
The next line spoke of a “magic,” but didn’t specify whether it was a spell, ritual, tool, or item, it simply mentioned that “magic” was used.
“Could not wed,” followed by words Sylver didn’t know, and finally another word that felt like a title, as opposed to a name.
Sylver took a couple of steps back from the text and read through it once more.
“It’s a song…” Sylver said as he realized that if he focused hard enough, he could see that someone had made alterations to the text.
But since Sylver didn’t know what it looked like originally, he couldn’t say what had been altered. For all he knew the whole thing was fake, and the part that looked and felt “real” was added for the kinds of people like Sylver, to make them chase a dead end when trying to translate it.
“Can you sing it?” blue robe asked.
“Sing what?” Sylver asked, as he finished memorizing the text and shifted his attention away from it.
“The song. You said it’s a song, can you sing it?” the blue robe heir asked.
Sylver gestured towards the doorway, which under different circumstances, would have been covered in layers upon layers of dust and cobwebs as a sign of how ancient it was.
He decided to lie as he realized that there wasn’t much point in explaining that the way musical lyrics were structured in Eirish was different enough that some people considered it a separate language, and that even if he understood 100% of the words, it would sound terrible, given that he didn’t know what the melody was.
“I can’t. It just says it’s a song,” Sylver said, as he used [Arcane Insight] on the door, just in case one of them could feel someone else using their perks or skills.
[Door – N/A – N/A]
[A giant door, that has been altered by 6th tier magic.]
[The carvings tell the ballad of N/A]
[Indestructible object]
Huh…
Is the alteration 6th tier, or is the magic used to mask the alteration 6th tier?
“So how do we open the door? Or what are we doing?” Sylver asked, in an attempt to shift everyone's attention away from him and the writing on the door.
Before he said anything, they likely assumed it to be random scribbles, the whole thing was written in the ancient Eirish equivalent of cursive, and even to Sylver’s trained eye, looked more decorative than actual text.
“We will need some time to prepare,” blue robe said, as Sylver could do little other than nod at him.
While he waited for the 4 men to take turns drinking from a tiny vial, and then meditating their Ki, he quietly moved Ria away from them.
“Is this what you saw when you looked at the door?” Sylver asked through Spring as he took a page out from his robe, and manipulated a drop of ink to write out the exact symbols he had just memorized.
Sylver didn’t want to risk someone overhearing them and didn’t want to gamble on all 4 of them not knowing Elvish. So they weren’t tapping each other, they both just spoke to Spring, and had the shade tap the message out to the other person.
Ria cocked her head at the door as Sylver handed her the finished page.
“There’s nothing there when I look at it. Just a blank wall,” Ria answered.
So that means I’ve been feeling up a blank wall that seems to be covered in a very potent illusion spell…
6th tier sounds about right in that case…
“What are you going to do?” Ria asked through Spring.
She succeeded in keeping her tone neutral, and almost friendly, but she was too close for Sylver not to feel her soul.
“Current idea is to cover Ulvic in glowing mushrooms and have him kidnap the heir. That way the only connection would be that I have a wolf shade, and I could explain that away as saying that it’s a very common monster,” Sylver said, as Ria managed to maintain a very relaxed air of acceptance.
“And the others?” Ria asked calmly.
“I’ll leave them be. Although I have a bad feeling about them,” Sylver said, as Ria cocked her head.
“The other heir that died due to ingesting poison, as opposed to inhaling it. You think one of them did it,” Ria said, as Sylver shrugged his shoulders.
“It’s none of my business. It could have been an accident, when it comes to potions, sometimes drinking more than a specific quantity can be a death sentence. The tea they drank certainly has that feeling to it, and it wouldn’t be the first time,” Sylver answered, as he turned his head towards the sound of swords being drawn.
The blue bathrobe-wearing heir had two swords, one was his own, while the second belonged to his brother/lookalike relative.
“Are you ready?” purple robe asked, as Sylver stood up from his crouch, and walked over to them.
Now that he got a good look at them, their hilts weren’t normal, they were all hexagonal.
And the exact same size as the holes in the wall.
Fitting, given that purple robe, stuck his sword’s hilt into the bottom left hole.
Orange robe placed his into the bottom right hole.
Red robe jumped up and placed his into the top right.
And the blue robe heir placed his into the middle-left corner and the middle right corner.
The 5 men, Ria, and Mora stood in the quiet and gentle light of the nearby torches and stared at the 5 blades sticking out of the wall.
A literal half minute passed before the door made a sound.
During the half minute, Sylver got to listen to the heir’s heart gradually begin to beat so loudly, that Sylver almost wanted to ask him if he was alright.
Given that he calmed down the second he heard the sound made by the door, he was simply nervous, and not in the process of having a heart attack.
The door did something a bit strange, it skipped the opening portion of going from closed, to open. It was sealed shut one fraction of a second, and wide-open the next, without so much as a puff of air as proof that it had moved.
Assuming you didn’t count the wall that had appeared behind the group, that blocked any chance of retreat, to be proof.
It was empty inside the large torch-lit room.
No enemies, no passages, no symbols, and the two doors that had previously had a tone of carvings on them, were now blank. Sylver walked towards the middle of the room, while the men picked up the swords that had magically appeared on the ground once the door had opened.
“I’m sorry,” one of the men behind Sylver said.
Sylver turned to look at them, but there were only 3 standing there. He felt an odd tickle on his chin and then heard the sound of metal shattering behind him.
As he turned around again, he saw red robe standing in the middle of the room, with a dumbfounded look on his face, and only a sword hilt in his hand. The blade was missing.
There was a slight delay, as all of Sylver’s soul armors burst, and then his [Necrotic Mutilation] helmet split into two and was quickly followed by Sylver’s skull being sliced down the middle. Like a book being opened, Sylver’s face split into two, and his ears nearly touched his shoulders, before he stopped them.
He just remained where he was and quietly willed the two perfectly cut halves to fuse back into one. [Dead Dominion] helped him out a lot here, and the fact that the cut was perfect meant it would only be a matter of minutes to completely heal his head and face.
He didn’t even feel it.
Getting the bits of sword bits stuck inside the top part of his chest would be a bit annoying, but he could deal with it later, it wasn’t a major issue.
Sylver leaned down towards Mora, to help her out, but discovered that she was offering to stitch him up since she was already done stitching herself into shape.
Ria was the only one that made a sound, as her golem creation broke apart, and Sylver got to see the inside of her golem body, for about half a second, as the various tightly wound springs and mechanisms exploded out of her and splattered small chunks of her gold/black liquid body all over the place.
“You alright there Ria?” Sylver slurred, as the woman slid out of the broken-down golem, and worked on gathering up all of her pieces.
He brought his hand up to his throat and worked on realigning the organ he used to speak. He locked eyes with the mute red robe, who was just staring at Sylver, with a look of utter disbelief on his face.
Sylver reached the man unimpeded and stopped when the relatively small man was within arm’s reach.
“Where I’m from we call these sorts of things a “sacrifice room.” Someone has to die for the next stage to open,” Sylver explained calmly, as a very thin droplet of unnaturally thick and dark blood formed on his forehead.
Red robe wasn’t even stuttering, his whole body was frozen in fear. These people lived in a bubble, the very concept of undead was foreign to them.
“Now, if you stupid children were curious, sacrifice rooms always have a way out that doesn’t involve someone getting killed,” Sylver explained, as he placed his hand on red robe’s shoulder.
[Human (Claw Of The Blue Tiger) Defeated!]
[Due to defeating an enemy 70 levels above you, additional experience will be awarded!]
[Swamp Lord] has reached level 57!
+5AP
If he had to compare it to something, it was like crushing an ant between his thumb and forefinger. Red robe was so devoid of defense and Ki, that Sylver spent more mana stuffing him into his [Bound Bones] storage than he did killing him.
As with everything, the kind of speed and power required to catch Sylver completely off guard came at a great cost.
Sylver used his thumb to wipe the tiny beads of blood that had formed on his lips and did the same to the droplets that had appeared on the back of his spine and had been partially absorbed into his robe.
Regretfully, the man’s sword had destroyed 4 daggers, before it reached the top of Sylver’s ribcage. His cut had been perfectly down the middle, but he had cut Sylver from the back, so the blade reached only the top part of his chest at the front and was shattered before it had finished cutting through Sylver’s spine in his back.
The small head inside Sylver’s chest had been nicked, but the brain had remained intact, and aside from the sharp metal shrapnel surrounding it, everything was fine.
Sylver turned around to face the remaining 3 cultivators and smiled to himself as he saw that Mora was standing between them, and growling.
Everyone, including the incredibly pissed off and completely liquid Ria, turned towards the sound of a loud click, and looked at the open passageway that hadn’t been there a moment earlier.
Sylver didn’t even get a chance to say something witty, as all 3 men disappeared in a burst of speed and ran down the passageway as if their very lives depended on it.
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