Chapter 851 — Meghor III's Intelligence

"...I am very interested," Gao Yang said, then looked the floating aggregate of starlight up and down. "Shall I have a chair brought for you? Talking with you like this, I keep feeling as though I'm making a guest stand."

"No need, I am accustomed to this state," Meghor III replied. "Of course, if it makes you uncomfortable, you may give me a chair—I can drift over and pretend to be sitting in it."

"...Let's forget it," Gao Yang pictured the scene and shook his head. "Begin your account."

"First, we must start from the era of Orendel, Typhon's old imperial capital," Meghor said. "You are surely aware that the headquarters of the Long Twilight Order lies deep beneath the ruins of Orendel, and that the curse of the Typhon imperial house appeared only after the Great Collapse of Orendel... In fact, long before the Great Collapse, the Ever-Sleepers were already active beneath that ground."

Part of what Meghor said was intelligence Gao Yang had long possessed, and he had long harbored questions about that region. Hearing Meghor's final sentence now, he immediately furrowed his brow: "So the key to everything is Orendel—what exactly is in that place?"

"...A fragment of the God of Dreams, Your Majesty. Beneath the ground of Orendel."

Gao Yang's breath caught for half a beat, yet after this brief and slight reaction, his expression was far calmer than Meghor had imagined.

"You do not seem very surprised?"

"I had my suspicions," Gao Yang said with a shake of his head. "The Dreamer in Eternal Slumber is a dream-priest who fell into darkness, and for centuries you hid deep beneath Olandel studying forbidden knowledge. Beyond the simple fact that it was a good place to hide, there had to be something there that drew you. Add to that the Augustus family's curse, which is peculiar—it clearly bears the marks of the dream and mental domains. I've suspected for a long time that all of this points to some god, and for me, the 'suspects' are only a handful."

To call a deity a "suspect"—that was plainly the sort of ease only an Outlander drifter could afford.

A note of awe entered Megor's voice: "All is as you have judged."

Gao Yang waved a hand, and his expression turned stern as he looked at Megor. "In other words, the so-called 'curse' of the Augustus family is in essence divine contamination wrought by the God of Dreams. Then what of the Great Collapse of Olandel two hundred years ago? How did the contamination spread to the Augustus family? You had already made Olandel your stronghold before that. All of this... was it your doing?"

"It was not," Megor denied at once, then his tone slowed somewhat, as though he were marshaling his thoughts as he spoke. "Where should I begin for you... In truth, all of this is the result of coincidences and errors piling up. The cause of the Great Collapse of Olandel was the underground ruins going out of control—a fragment of the God of Dreams suddenly stirred to life—and that was more an accident than anything. On the other hand, you should know that the Typhon royal house of the time 'foresaw' that disaster in time before the Great Collapse occurred and evacuated the whole city's population in advance, miraculously averting tens of thousands of casualties. And the reason they could 'foresee' the Great Collapse in advance was precisely because they had received warning from the Dreamer in Eternal Slumber..."

"Then begin at the beginning," Gao Yang said, tapping the table lightly. "Begin from when the Dream Church fell into darkness and took Olandel as its stronghold, from when the Typhon people founded their capital at Olandel."

"Yes," Megor replied. "First, the Dreamer in Eternal Slumber taking root beneath Olandel and the Typhon people founding their capital at Olandel happened at roughly the same time, but the two were unconnected—mere coincidence.

"In the early years of Typhon's founding, the Augustus family chose Olandel—then possessed of rather fertile land and well suited to raising a city—as the site of their capital. And scarcely had they gained a foothold when the Dream Church, having barely recovered some of its strength, arrived at what was still a camp of Olandel. We went into hiding there, sheltering in the nearby hills and forests and among the villages and towns whose order was still quite chaotic at the time, keeping a low profile for a long stretch and living alongside the people of Olandel as they then were.

"Later Olandel grew into a city of rudimentary shape, and the Dream Church recovered further. In the back alleys of Olandel we reorganized into the Order of the Long Slumber and operated locally in the form of a hidden church—what we thought of most in those days was still survival and recuperation. And then, quite by accident, while searching for a new hiding place, we found in a certain area outside the city a cave leading underground... At first we took it for a cave, but soon we discovered it in fact led to something almost as vast as Olandel itself at the time... an ancient ruin.

"It utterly stunned us, the people we were then."

Gao Yang cut into Megor's account: "Was it a facility left behind by the Gondor Empire? You are Gondorian yourself—you should recognize the technology and architectural style of the ancient empire."

Though he had entered the core of Illusory Pivot City many times, he had never with his own eyes seen what the Dreamer in Eternal Slumber's headquarters in the real world looked like, and from the fragments of memory he had glimpsed in Daniel and the others he could see only the state of that subterranean palace after seven hundred years of reconstruction—he could not imagine what it had looked like when the Dreamer in Eternal Slumber first discovered it. At this moment he merely associated it by instinct with the Gondor Empire's Defiance Project, and suspected that what the Dreamer in Eternal Slumber had found was in fact another "Defiance Fortress" built to store divine samples—like the fortress in the Dark Mountains.

After all, the combination of ancient ruins plus divine samples gave a very strong sense of déjà vu.

Yet Megor gave a negative answer: "I can say with certainty that it was not—that was absolutely not something built by the Gondor Empire. First, that place lies outside the territory of the ancient empire, on land newly opened up by humans. Second, and more importantly—that facility was full of things we did not recognize: a style of construction never seen before, some walls still bearing writing no one could read, and in certain sealed chambers the wreckage of devices employing techniques unheard of..."