Chapter 679 — Amber

"It grows in a room that looks like a laboratory. There are many large tubular vessels fixed to the floor here; all of them are empty, but the outer wall of one vessel, and the nearby walls and floor, are overgrown with these lovely little plants. Like everything else in the Shadow Realm, the moss is a gray-black, so that at first I nearly mistook it for ordinary grime. Thank heaven I lingered a little longer in that room...

"The presence of moss means moisture, and moisture means water.

"The moss tastes somewhat bitter, with a strange, almost gelatinous texture. It is probably not good for my health, but I cannot afford to care. Without this moss, in a few days I would never need to worry about my health again.

"The moss has restored some of my strength, and the moisture in it has lifted my spirits considerably, though it is plainly not enough to sustain long-term survival. I gathered all the moss from a nearby pipe, crushed out the juice, and put it in my waterskin. With this small provision, I will make this room my center and begin exploring the chambers around it.

"Ninth day. I found no water, but I... saw a figure!

"I cannot put into words the shock of that moment. I saw a figure, but it flashed past from the corner of the room... I am not certain it was real.

"Could the moss contain hallucinogenic properties? But I must rely on it to survive..."

"On the tenth day, I found water! In what looked like a place where many people had once eaten, one of the pipes still ran with water! Clean water! I think I can live here a long while yet!

"Does the presence of this clean water mean that some kind of purification apparatus here is still running? And are there more devices still in operation?"

Amber read every line of the record with grave attention, unconsciously biting her lip, as though she were watching with her own eyes her foster father struggling to survive and explore in that isolated ancient fortress. When she saw that Sarilendor had found a water source, she could not help letting out a soft breath: "He may have found a mess hall that still works..."

Gao You nodded slightly beside her, and murmured, "What I'm more curious about is what that figure he saw was."

"He mentions it here—" Amber turned a page, glanced over it, and pointed at the content:

"...I saw the figures again, and more than one this time. I can now confirm that they were not hallucinations, but what happened next left me even more astonished and bewildered.

"Those figures are the 'Shadow Dwellers.'

"They are as the treatises describe them: bodiless as ghosts, wrapped into human shape by some kind of tattered 'shroud.' They move through the Shadow Realm as freely as fish through water, and they had plainly noticed me, the uninvited intruder.

"I prepared for battle, but battle never came. Every scholarly account says the Shadow Dwellers attack all material beings that trespass into the Shadow Realm, yet those Shadow Dwellers only watched me with cold indifference. I am certain they were watching, though within those 'shrouds' there was nothing but hollow darkness...

"After an unbearable standoff, the Shadow Dwellers all departed. There was no exchange between us whatsoever.

"I cannot make any sense of what happened."

Amber frowned. She too felt that the Shadow Dwellers her foster father had encountered were somehow strange, but she could offer no explanation, and so she pressed these questions down in her heart and read on.

On a new page, Sarilendor's writing continued to record his experiences within the Shadow Fortress:

"...On the fourteenth day, I found a room. Certain devices in this room... are still running.

"I find it hard to describe accurately what I saw; those things truly lie beyond the scope of my knowledge. Around a gigantic pillar, I saw a great number of pale yellow, semi-transparent egg-shaped vessels fixed upon individual stands. The vessels were about the size of a full-grown ox...

"Many pipes extended from that great pillar and connected to the surrounding egg-shaped vessels.

"Almost all the vessels were broken—cracked, skewed, fallen to the floor, their contents long since dried up—and within those ruined vessels I saw many tiny skeletons.

"This chilled me to the bone. As a royal shadow guard, I have seen many wretched sights and many scenes of death, but those tiny skeletons in the vessels were more eerie and horrifying than anything I had ever seen. It made me wonder—what exactly were the Gondorians of that age doing here?

"Trembling with shock and tension, I searched the room, and then I found her.

"The only intact vessel. The only individual still alive.

"She was curled within some kind of liquid, floating inside a semi-transparent crystal vessel. The whole of it looked like a piece of amber.

"I cannot describe what I felt in that moment. And what left me even more at a loss was that these crystal vessels matched exactly the target object described in my mission—which meant that the 'thing' inside the vessel was the 'ancient relic' I was to bring back.

"My mission could be completed—but only if I found a way out, and carried this vessel, which gave me no way to even begin, out with me. If I opened it rashly, would the little girl inside simply die? This is a most thorny matter."

Amber stared fixedly at the page before her. Even after she had finished reading its contents, she made no move to turn to the next page, until a minute later Gao Yang gently patted her shoulder.

Amber started awake, then drew a deep breath and turned the page.

"...On the fifteenth day, I still had not worked out what to do, but I suddenly realized that no amount of thinking would help: I am still trapped here.

"For a man who cannot even get out alive to think of completing his mission is to indulge in wishful thinking past all bounds.

"I set aside for now the problems I cannot solve, and turned my attention once more to finding a way out.

"Considering that for a long time to come, perhaps the only company I shall have is this little one in the amber, I have given her a name: Amber.

"But I suspect she must have another name. On the base of every egg-shaped vessel here is carved a line of letters, each vessel's letters slightly different; these are perhaps the true names (though I also doubt whether the Gondorian scholars who worked here would truly have given names to a batch of experimental subjects). But they are in ancient Gondorian script a thousand years old, greatly different from the common alphabet of today, and my knowledge of ancient writing happens to be a weak point.

"I can only copy these letters down. If I ever truly get out alive, perhaps the scholars of the royal capital can resolve my doubts and let me understand this little one's true name—or at least understand what those Gondorians of old called her."

At the end of this page, Sarilendor had left a large blank space, and in that blank he had traced, in bold strokes, a line of letters that few in this age could still read.

Amber stared at that line of letters, and only after a moment did she raise her head and look into Gao Song's eyes: "These letters... what do they mean? What was my original name?"

Gao Yang withdrew his gaze from the letters. He looked at Amber in silence for four or five seconds, and at last let out a soft breath and spoke slowly:

"Artificial Human Number Thirty-Six."