Chapter 41 — The Vault
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
The ancient vault lay hidden among the mountains. Vines crawled over ruins no one knew of, and the walls built of massive stone and metal were covered in scar after scar—each mark a character written by time, and the only word man could read in them was "vicissitude."
The history of these ruins could be traced back to the distant days of the Empire of Gondor. Their heavy, imposing style was utterly alien to the men of Anseth today. In Gaosong's memory, when the northern expeditionary army had first found this place it had already been a ruin—and even then it had not looked much "younger" than it did now.
Gao Yang, Rebecca, Amber, and Sir Byron entered the mountain through the largest archway. The flickering torchlight left the corridors to either side in shifting light and shadow, like the legendary "Corridor of Souls" that led to the realm of the dead. Amber complained sourly: "I should've had your Aunt Hedy come along. What good are you? You can't even cast a Light spell—and you call yourself a mage?"
Rebecca flushed crimson. "Fireball... a Fireball can light things up too..."
Unfortunately her tone carried not a shred of conviction.
Sir Byron walked a short way behind and to the side of Gao Yang. Looking at the ancient stone walls and the depressions in them whose purpose could no longer be discerned, he could not help recalling how it had felt to be a mercenary years ago. "How old are these ruins?"
"No idea," Gao Yang shook his head. "It was already a ruin the first time we found it. The better-read men in the company said it was a relic of the 'Years of Starlight'—the great flowering of magical technology in the middle and late Gondor Empire. Back then the great mana well, the 'Well of Deep Blue,' had been successfully activated, and the Empire was seized by a fever of expansion. It began building fortresses and research facilities all along its frontiers, hoping to find elsewhere on the continent another super-giant mana focus like Deep Blue. But in the end those facilities were abandoned one after another."
Rebecca found it hard to believe. "You mean they never found a single mana focus?"
"No—they never found one like Deep Blue," Gao Yang said, drawing on the history in his mind. "You can't imagine the power of the Well of Deep Blue. It was a super-giant wellspring of mana at the center of the continent; the energy it put out in a single day could have kept every mage tower in all of Anseth running for a month. So some later scholars argued that the explosion of the Well of Deep Blue in Gondor Year 179 was in fact what triggered the mana tide. That explosion didn't blow up the whole Empire on the spot, but it tore a great hole in the elemental plane, and the imbalance of elemental power piled up until the following year, when it set off that mana tide. But the theory can't be proven—the whole Well of Deep Blue, and the mana focus 'Deep Blue' itself, have been utterly annihilated. No one can investigate anymore."
"That's amazing..." As a mage, Rebecca could of course appreciate what an astonishing thing that ancient mana well had been. What shocked her more was that humans had once been able to command power of that magnitude. "The Gondor Empire back then was incredible..."
"Anyway, in the eyes of the Gondorians of that day, almost none of the mana foci scattered across the continent were worth a glance. So after barely discovering a few medium-sized ones, Gondor stopped exploring the more distant regions, and a whole batch of fortresses and research facilities were decommissioned. This place was probably one of the facilities abandoned in that same period—and very likely a comprehensive one."
Amber suddenly tensed. "Then... then there wouldn't happen to be some out-of-control ancient magic monster in here, or a magic trap or something?!"