Chapter 65 — The Ancient Facility
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
Another hour passed, and the group was still advancing through corridors and passageways that seemed to stretch on without end.
The scale of this thousand-year-old facility had already surpassed anything Gao Song had imagined.
Even in the "Starlight Era" of Gondor's full glory, the Empire had rarely built facilities of such magnitude—even if it served simultaneously as a military fortress and a research installation, its size far exceeded Gao Song's expectations. It seemed it truly had been built by hollowing out an entire mountain, and as the downward ramps and stairs grew more numerous, Gao Yang even suspected they had hollowed out more than just one.
The magical signature was still coming through steadily, and still quite faint. Because they had encountered too many forks and side corridors, Hetty's guidance had grown unreliable—she could only determine a general direction, and had to rely on divination spells like spirit-calling to judge which branch to take. Even so, the group had taken several wrong turns and discovered no small number of dead ends.
Although Knight Byron had been marking the way as they went, and Hetty had used magical marks to sketch out guideposts, advancing for so long inside an ancient ruin still made the soldiers uneasy. Noticing this unease, Knight Byron came over to Gao Yang's side: "My lord, venturing deeper, we may well get lost in here. Everyone's sense of direction is completely thrown off."
Gao Qi frowned. He had in fact considered the problem of getting lost—it was just that he had more confidence than anyone else. The satellite spirit's extraordinary memory was at work; he had memorized practically every detail of every fork along the way, and a rough map was even taking shape in his mind. But these abilities were hard to explain, and even if he explained them, they would not exactly put everyone at ease.
After all, this place was simply too vast.
If Amber were here, things would be fine... at least she could be sent out to scout the path, and she could roam freely through the Shadow Realm besides, and she was skilled at picking locks—she certainly would not be trapped in a ruin as easily as ordinary people. She had already proven that in the Cecil family tombs.
This time Gao Yang was considering the matter quite seriously.
Unfortunately, Amber was not here. Gao Yang could only shake his head. "Your concern is reasonable. Then let us go a little further, set a few more marks, and then, whether we find anything or not, we turn back first and come again next time."
Though the lord had not ordered an immediate return, Gao Yang's ambiguous words still let the soldiers breathe a sigh of relief, as though they had received some kind of guarantee. The group once more mustered its courage and pressed on.
After a stretch of downward stairs, another great hall opened ahead. This hall held more than the previous ones: a row of enormous obsidian rectangular blocks was arranged neatly around its perimeter, like stone steles set against the walls, and from beneath the blocks extended many metal conduits or "tracks," all converging at the center of the hall, where there stood a strange hemispherical device.
Gao Qi frowned, walked over to the hemispherical device, and rubbed it a few times with his gauntleted hand. Some of the black ash and oxidation on its surface was scraped away, revealing the silvery-white metal beneath.
"What is this thing?" Hetty leaned in curiously. The installations in this room were clearly "fixed furnishings" that could not be carried away, a rarity in this ruin. Those obsidian blocks and metal connectors gave her a strange intuition related to magic.