Chapter 126 — What on Earth Lies Buried Beneath This Land
Blade of Dawn · Page 3 of 4
Gao Yang sighed inwardly. A rare fine young man, and he turned out to be a passive straight man...
As they drew closer to the bounds of Tansang Town, the chatter gradually died away.
Thanks to that cheat-like memory map and his ability to read terrain in advance, Gao Yang could always roughly judge his current position. He found that this long underground passage was not straight; it had many turns and forks along the way. Ignoring the collapsed and dead-end routes, he realized they had come by a semicircular path around the eastern side of Tansang Town.
This place lay directly beneath the Tansang Mine.
The terrain of Tansang Town had been described before: to its east it leaned against the vast Tansang Mine, to its west ran two tributaries of the Whitewater River, and the whole town was roughly triangular. Viscount Andrew's castle stood in the town's eastern quarter, adjoining the gentle lower slopes at the foot of the Tansang Mine—indeed, the castle's chief building material had been quarried from that very mine. The mine yielded not only iron ore and various crystal ores but fine building stone as well; there was good reason the Leslie family, holding this land, commanded such enviable wealth.
And now, walking through the ancient tunnel directly beneath the mine, the first thought that sprang to Gao Yang's mind was: does Viscount Andrew know these underground ruins exist?
...Most likely not. The iron and crystal ores of the Tansang Mine were not deep-seated veins but lay within the mountain body itself; there was no need to dig deep shafts. With the productive capacity of this age, deep excavation without cause was no joke—no one would take on such thankless labor. And if Viscount Andrew truly had dug up this ancient ruin... word would not have failed to get out.
As the largest population center and trade hub for miles around, Tansang Town was hardly a place where secrets kept. This was no godforsaken Dark Mountains.
Ahead, the ground began to rise.
The air grew damp; a distinct breeze brushed against their skin, and faint sounds drifted from ahead. Every sign said the exit was near.
They had not gone much farther before they emerged from the tunnel and came upon the very spot where Sir Byron had fallen. It was an open, steep-walled cavern, with a pool at its bottom formed by seeping groundwater. The tunnel's mouth opened right at the edge of that pool—though calling it a mouth was generous; it was no more than a cracked fissure in the rock. Clearly this had never been a proper entrance either, but something split open by geological upheaval or the like.
Where the true entrance to the tunnel lay, no one could say, and in all likelihood it had long since collapsed.
Seeing that the fissure by the pool showed no serious signs of water erosion or weathering, Gao Yang could not help turning to Philip. "Have there been any earthquakes in this area in recent years?"
"None," Sir Philip said with a shake of his head, then frowned in thought. "But I've heard from people who've lived long in Tansang Town that now and then they hear a strange wailing from beneath the mines, like something weeping. The locals say it's the ghosts of the slave laborers who died down there making trouble. Viscount Andrew brought in mediums and sorcerers to investigate several times, but they never found the source of the sound."
"Is that so..." Gao Yang said noncommittally, then lifted his head to look up at the roof of the cavern.
Vines ran riot there, and he could see the great roots of trees spreading out from the sides. The opening above must once have been covered over and hidden, and only now had a great hole been smashed through it. Sir Byron's luck was truly extraordinary—he ought to thank the goddess of fortune for his survival.
If this world had such a deity.
"Climb up from here and you'll see the eastern wall of the castle," Byron said. "But this opening is nearly vertical, and it's all soft earth. It won't be easy going up."