Chapter 66 — The Sphere

Hetty had finally sensed that magical signature directly ahead—perhaps only one more junction remained. After roughly estimating how far the group had advanced and how the Dark Mountains' terrain lay in this region, Gao You concluded that they were now at the very heart of the mountain.

The Gondorian expedition of that age had likely hollowed out an entire section of the mountain to build their impossibly vast facility.

What could possibly be here, worth constructing a monstrosity of a facility like this to study or to guard?

But whatever was here, in the end they had abandoned the place.

Hetty replenished the energy of the light sphere from her illumination spell, and the orb, which had begun to dim, once again lit up a large surrounding area. Gao Yang saw ahead a neat corridor built of grayish-white "stone slabs," its walls inset with magic-crystal lamps that no longer functioned, along with a number of tightly closed doors; at the far end directly ahead stood a copper-forged door carved with the emblem of an eye and a triangle.

The copper door was not fully shut—it stood open with a wide gap. Gao Yang activated his danger-sense ability and detected no traps or poisonous gases or similar latent threats behind it.

But that was still no reason to let down their guard. Before pushing the door open, Hetty first summoned a faintly glowing rune shaped like an eye. The rune drifted slowly through the gap, and at the same time a subtle light stirred in Hetty's eyes.

"Inside is a round, empty room—very large, with many broken long tables and shelves... I can see pipes all over the walls, and in the center of the room is a sunken pit... In the pit there's a strange spherical object, and from the exact center of the ceiling I can see a good number of iron chains and tools hanging down."

Frowning, Hetty described what she saw—but suddenly she let out a low gasp, and the magic broke off.

"What happened?!" Gao Yang looked at Hetty, instantly tense.

Hetty rubbed her eyes, her tone deeply embarrassed: "I hit a wall."

Gao Yang: "...Uh, is there anything that looks dangerous or like a trap?"

Hetty shook her head: "No. It looks like just a laboratory, only many times larger than any I know, and with a great many devices I can't make sense of. Also, I've confirmed the magical signature is coming from that sphere in the center of the room—but it's an energy form I've never encountered before."

With confirmation that there were no traps or runaway ancient magical automatons inside, Gao Yang breathed a quiet sigh of relief. As for the strange energy form Hetty had mentioned, that could only be studied carefully once they were inside.

Two sturdy soldiers stepped forward and, together with Knight Byron, heaved against the ancient, dust-sealed copper door. Under the force, the rusted, weather-eaten hinges gave out a screeching, grating sound; in that silent, enclosed space, the turning of the door's pivots seemed jarringly shrill, carrying far, far down the corridor.

Hetty instinctively tightened her grip on her staff and glanced back at the dark corridor, as though at any moment some indescribable ancient monster might be roused from the shadows by the sound of the copper door opening and come lunging out—but in the end, nothing happened.

The door swung open. Gao Yang stepped inside and soon saw what Hetty had seen: the great circular hall, the damaged long tables and storage racks distributed around it, the magical conduits on the walls, the sunken floor at the center, and, lying in that pit, a large ball that looked like stone.

Gao Yang approached the sphere and roughly judged its diameter at about a meter and a half. Its shape was quite regular—setting aside its rough, uneven surface, it was almost a perfect sphere. Its material resembled stone, yet under the glow of the illumination spell it gave off a faint metallic sheen.

It looked somewhat like a natural stone ball, yet it was a little too round; but to call it some man-made magical device—that clashed entirely with the design style of the Gondorian Empire. Its surface bore no runes and no metal contact points; by any measure, it did not look like an ancient magical device.

"The magical signature really is coming from inside it," Hetty said, frowning. "But it's too strange. I don't even think it's quite magic—it's a... completely different kind of energy fluctuation. Ancestor, was this also made by the ancient Gondorian Empire?"

"No, it doesn't look like it," Gao Qi said, frowning as he reached out and rapped on the "stone ball." The feel was much like real stone—hard and unyielding. "Judging by the setup here, this ball wasn't so much something they built as something they were studying..."

"You mean this entire facility was built to study this ball?" Knight Byron found it hard to believe. "The Gondorian Empire went to all this trouble just to study a ball?"

Gao Yang thought it over and decided that even in the Starlight Era, when magic was free for the taking, the Gondorians surely wouldn't have been so absurdly bored. "No. When this facility was decommissioned, the people here took away nearly everything that could be taken, in good order—they wouldn't have left behind the most important thing of all. This ball was indeed something they were studying, but it was most likely only one item among many, and one of the less important ones, already marked for disposal. Probably they'd studied it for a while, found no progress, and were just about to get rid of it when the evacuation order came from above—so they just left it here."

"So we've gone through all this trouble, and all we found is this thing," Knight Byron said, stroking his chin. "My lord, what do we do with it?"

Gao Yang was a little worried too—how were they supposed to haul a stone ball like this out? He reached out and pushed against the sphere's surface, muttering: "Takes up space and heavy too—no wonder the Gondorians back then just... huh?"

At his push, the stone ball actually wobbled and shifted position.

Gao Yang felt a little awkward. "It's not heavy?"

The "stone ball" was lighter than he could have imagined!

He had assumed a lump like this must weigh at least a ton, yet a light push had moved it. Trying again by hand, he judged the ball weighed perhaps only a dozen-odd kilograms—light enough that even Hetty could easily push it along. That could only mean it wasn't stone at all!

Either that, or it was hollow inside...

Suppressing the urge to smash it open on the spot and see what was inside, Gao Yang judged from the scale of this laboratory and the residual traces around the sphere that this "stone ball" must have been classified as a "Class One Safe Anomaly" in this research facility—that is, a research subject that was "harmless but possessed peculiar properties." So he made his decision: "Let's take this thing out with us and bring it back to camp for proper study... Wait, putting it directly in camp won't do. To be safe, set it down first on that newly leveled ground beside the camp, post two soldiers to guard it, and tomorrow we'll build a dedicated tent for it."

After all, several generations of technological gap lay between the Gondorian Empire and this present age. What counted as a safe, harmless research object back then might not still be harmless today—so a little caution was in order.