Chapter 1532 — Facing the Trial Head-On
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Deep within Violet Island, at the edge of the barren wilderness where Ashfall City was supposed to stand, the two exploration teams of Cecil and Typhon had finally joined forces. After some negotiation, they had pitched their camps on two clearings only a hundred meters apart. Trained Steel Rangers and Vagrant Guards began patrolling the perimeter, checking the traps and alarm runes set nearby—all of it had to be finished before the last gleam of sunset vanished behind the mountains.
Dusk was deepening into night, and every member of both teams, Cecil and Typhon alike, felt their nerves pulled taut—though the gods' power had long since withdrawn from this pocket of reality, hundreds of thousands of years of dream-erosion had permanently reshaped the island's environment, even its natural laws. The shadow power here was dense and violently active; wherever shadows overlapped, strange and unnameable dangers tended to lurk.
Perhaps a rift into the Shadow Realm, perhaps a bizarre play of light that could gnaw at the mind and drive a person briefly insane, perhaps even a passage through which shadow-dwellers might invade the waking world… Here, in the shifting light and shadow, phenomena never encountered in ordinary life were the rule rather than the exception. And as sunlight faded and night fell, the odds of such strangeness peaked—the anomalies that surfaced after dark were enough to make any intruder understand, with painful clarity, why the goddess who held dominion over shadow bore the name Lady Night.
Of course, the Cecil team had a legendary adventurer of Mo Jin Wilder's caliber—powerful and battle-hardened—sitting watch. Even so, the soldiers dared not blindly trust that the old mage alone could fend off every danger the island held, because Mo Jin himself did not believe it either…
While the soldiers in both camps sharpened their vigilance and braced for another night on the island, the leaders of the two expeditions gathered together to discuss how to proceed through this uncanny place—and how the two teams ought to coordinate.
Dai Lan came over to the Cecil camp. Since the two camps stood only a hundred meters apart, she had brought no entourage. She now stood before the temporary partition on the camp's northern side, gazing out with Maggie and Mo Jin at the dark expanse of wilderness beyond—and all around them stood high-output mana-crystal lamps, their charged brilliance scattering the dark and making the whole camp bright as day.
Between the Typhon and Cecil camps, the soldiers had even built a special "light corridor," illuminated so that personnel could move safely through the night. This was one reason the two camps had been pitched so close together: at a hundred meters, each team kept its independence while still allowing safe passage between them, and the cost of lighting the road was saved.
"To spend a night safely on Violet Island, you have to keep the lighting seamless—no gaps," Maggie said, glancing back at the lamps scattered through the camp and shaking her head with a sigh. "When night falls, the shadow power blends with ordinary darkness and erodes body and mind without a sound. During our first explorations we had no experience—one soldier slept in a spot the lamps couldn't reach, and part of his flesh was simply 'erased' by the dark, gone as if it had never been. Two more fell into temporary madness and had to be pulled from the expedition… The gods' residual aura is stranger and harder to guard against than we ever imagined."
"Same on our side," Dai Lan said gravely. "Our advance scouts lingered too long under the tree canopy; one of them nearly 'walked into' the depths of shadow. The few we managed to drag back are still in the rear receiving treatment. Fortunately, the intelligence you generously shared afterward let us avoid a great deal of danger on our way into the deep forest."