Chapter 238 — The Last Survivors
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 4
Gao Yang's gaze roamed the hall, trying to find more clues that might offer him hints, and just then Heddy, who had been using the magic light orb atop her staff to illuminate her surroundings and carefully studying the remains of those ancient archmages, suddenly made a discovery: "Ancestor! Come look at this!"
Gao Yang came to Heddy's side and saw her pointing at the back of the chair behind one of the remains: "There's a line of writing here!"
Gao Yang furrowed his brow and read the line aloud: "Benjamin Hoston, Gondor 1760."
The soldiers around them likewise shifted their attention to the seats, and at once everyone spotted the writing they had previously overlooked: "Here too!" "And here!" "They're on the back of every chair!"
Something clicked in Gao Yang's mind. He looked one by one at the names written on the chair backs and read rapidly on: "Claude Piring, Gondor 1790... Rofel Pardini, Gondor 1782... Melia Hoston, Gondor 1809... Pal Belindi, Gondor 1920..."
"These are..." Heddy's mouth fell open in astonishment. "These people's..."
"Their names, and the years of their deaths—that's the only explanation," Gao Yang said in a heavy voice. "These people did not die here at the same time. They were carried here after death, and whoever carried them also wrote the dead's names and dates of death on their seats. If I'm not mistaken... it was the last to die who completed this work, or the living took turns carrying it on."
He lifted his head and looked around the semicircular hall, which held nearly a thousand seats, imagining what frame of mind the survivors left here had been in as they passed those long years: "These seats... are their graves..."
"Gondor 1760... Gondor 1790..." Heddy looked at the years on those seats and suddenly caught on. "The Gondorian calendar ended in 1740! The Demon Tide erupted that year, and after that..."
"Yes, the earliest year we've seen so far is also after Gondor 1740," Gao Yang nodded heavily. "These people only began dying one after another after the Demon Tide erupted seven hundred years ago, and the latest year I've seen so far is Gondor 2130—that is... three hundred years ago."
Heddy's face fell with sorrow: "So that means at least some of them lived until then... By that time Ansu had already stood as a nation for four hundred years... Yet they had no idea what was happening outside. They were sealed in here, still thinking the world beyond had been utterly destroyed..."
Gao Yang felt the same deep sigh of emotion, but he noticed that Tyr, not far away, was behaving oddly: the siren lady had coiled her tail round and round, bracing herself up into the air like a spring, and was peering this way and that, a look of curiosity and wariness on her face.
He could not help asking out of curiosity: "Tyr, did you find something?"
"Shh!" The siren lady immediately lowered herself and darted swiftly to Gao Yang's side. "I don't know if it was my imagination, but just now I thought I sensed a magic reaction flicker past somewhere nearby."
"A magic reaction?" Heddy frowned. "Why didn't I sense it?"
"As if you could be sharper than an elemental creature at sensing magic?" Tyr shot Heddy a disdainful glance. "Besides, there are plenty of special magic reactions you humans can't sense at all!"
Gao Yang did not take Tyr's words as a joke. He at once prudently activated his own magic perception skill and had the soldiers around him raise their guard; yet within the vision of magic perception, all he saw was a blurry haze—no special magic reaction whatsoever.