Chapter 41 — The Vault

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?!"

Gao Yang glanced at the half-elf, whose face was all nerves. "You're a woman who'd dig up another family's ancestral grave without blinking, and you're afraid of some ancient facility that's been abandoned for over a thousand years?"

"That's different! Digging up a grave—even if the corpse in the coffin jumps up, it's still just a person! But if something comes crawling out of an ancient facility like this, there's no telling what it might be! I've heard some ancient facilities still have chimeric beasts and mana colossi sealed inside, made by mad mages..."

A vein throbbed at Gao Cen's temple. "So when I jump up out of my grave I'm just a 'person'—sorry to disappoint you. And what's this about the Dark Mountains rumors before, and now ancient-facility ghost stories? Where do you get all this incorrect knowledge in your head?"

Amber thought for a moment, then suddenly put on a mysterious air. "I'll tell you something, actually I really am one of the Night Goddess's chosen. Sometimes when I pray too hard the Goddess gives me revelations—she's the one who taught me all this..."

Rebecca casually rolled a mini fireball no bigger than her thumb and tossed it at Amber. Caught off guard, Amber took it square in the face and came away smeared with black soot, immediately shrieking: "Mother! Are you insane?! Suddenly throwing a fireball—that's dangerous, you know!"

Rebecca shrugged. "...Guess she's not one of the chosen."

Gao Yang could no longer be bothered with these two who could never get along.

For the ancient gate had already appeared before them.

The corridor ended, and a massive door cast from purple-black metal stood before them. It was in the classic Gondor "Years of Starlight" style—heavy, steady, and on its surface abstract reliefs depicted soldiers and city walls.

Amber scrubbed the soot from her face with all her might and stared at the door before her, eyes shining. "This thing... don't tell me it's a single slab of purple steel?!"

"That's right, a single slab. But every fleck you scrape off it, I'll have Rebecca convert into a fireball and paste you in the face with," Gao Yang said, rapping Amber on the head with the pommel of the Pioneer's Sword. "So put away your bold ideas. Waiting patiently for me to pay your wages—that's the path to a long life."

Amber turned her head away and muttered under her breath: "...Old skinflint..."

Gao Yang heard her muttering but ignored it. Instead he took half a step back and drew from his breast the all-important "key."

An inheritance from seven hundred years ago: the platinum disc.

Rebecca was a little worried. "After all these years, can this thing really still work?"

Gao Yang looked at her and gave a faint smile. "This is Gondor Empire technology. As long as the facility's main structure hasn't collapsed, its main gate will never fail."

As if to prove his words no idle boast, the moment he finished speaking the intricate patterns on the platinum disc lit up one after another, and the reliefs on the heavy metal door followed suit, threads of radiance beginning to flow across them.

When the light had filled the entire door, a grinding, grating sound of machinery came from the door and from deep within the rock walls to either side. Everyone felt the ground beneath their feet tremble faintly, and with that trembling the great door slowly began to open.

Gao Yang, Rebecca, and the others had long since prepared. The instant the door opened they covered their mouths and noses and withdrew to either side, and Gao Yang also activated one of the knight's basic skills, "Breath Ward"—a faint, half-visible barrier shielding every person present. This ability worked much like the mage's basic spell "Breeze Shield": though it offered only very, very limited protection, it could effectively maintain a clean-air environment. When delving into places like ancient ruins, this skill let the caster avoid harm from poisonous gases.

There were no poison-gas traps in these ruins, but in a sealed space shut tight for seven hundred years, who knew what gases might have accumulated. An extra layer of protection was always for the best.