Chapter 126 — What on Earth Lies Buried Beneath This Land

"This is the entrance."

After a brief rest, Sir Byron, having recovered a few measures of his strength, led Gao Cen and the others into the woods near Gorin's Mill, where they found the tunnel mouth beneath a raised earthen bank. The opening was not large, tucked away between stones and tree roots at the base of the slope and covered over with wild vines and fallen leaves. Had Sir Byron not pointed it out, anyone passing by would surely have overlooked it without a second thought.

When Byron had left through the tunnel, he had damaged some of the plants covering the opening; though he had made a half-hearted attempt at concealing it afterward, traces of comings and goings were still visible. Pi Yun crouched before the hole, studied the interior for a moment, and pronounced: "This was never originally an exit. Most likely an earthquake or the roots of a giant tree split the earth open and connected this hollow to the tunnel below."

As he spoke, the old man added with a chuckle, offhandedly: "The south really does have no end of things buried under its soil."

Gao Yang immediately sensed a barb in the old fellow's words. "You're including me in that, aren't you!"

Pi Yun gave a dry laugh, then fished a small magic crystal from his breast. He channeled a little mana into it until it glowed with a bright, steady light, tossed it into the hole, and gestured to Gao Yang: "This is where you take the stage."

Gao Yang shrugged, blocked Sir Philip, who had meant to go down first, and jumped in himself.

He landed on a soft, damp layer of rotting leaves and broken branches, surrounded by a cramped space of earth and stone. The magic crystal on the ground cast its light around him, revealing what lay deeper: ahead stretched a winding ramp sloping downward, bearing no trace of human working—more, as the old druid had said, a natural formation that had come to connect with the artificial tunnel farther below.

He picked up the crystal, shook it twice to signal that the way below was safe, and strode forward.

A moment later Amber's presence caught up with him. The half-elf thief was plainly in her element once inside an underground space; twirling her precious dagger in high spirits, she peered about curiously. "It just keeps going down and down."

"If these really are the 'battle tunnels' dug back in the day, they'd have to be deep," Gao Yang said. "After all, mana tides leak through the surface here all the time. Without digging deep enough, the people sheltering in the tunnels would be easy prey."

The downward-sloping passage continued for a stretch, then the surroundings began to widen and dry out. Gao Yang noticed that the earth and natural rubble along the walls were gradually giving way to worked support beams, stone bricks, and sturdy walls treated with earth-element spells; farther on, the floor evened out and ceased to descend.

Yet as he took in the surroundings, Gao Yang's brow slowly furrowed.

Amber noticed the anomaly as well. She stopped fidgeting with her dagger, ran to a nearby wall to study its material and the patterns traced across it, then hurried back to Gao Yang's side, visibly unsettled. "Something's off... the style here is nothing like those tunnels we passed through when we came out of your tomb..."

"No, it isn't. These aren't the southern underground works I oversaw in my day," Gao Yang said, lifting the magic crystal to light the surrounding walls and floor. "No wonder... I thought it strange when Sir Byron mentioned tunnels beneath Tansang Town. Back then this region had no development plans whatsoever—and for a long while after my death, I'd wager, no one developed it either... Who would build tunnels here?"

Amber frowned. "If you look closely, it's actually a bit like that ruin in the Dark Mountains?"

Enlightenment struck Gao Yang at last, and he realized where that vague sense of familiarity in his memory had come from.

The architectural style and materials of this underground passage were very close to that colossal ruin in the Dark Mountains!

Sir Byron was astonished as well. He examined his surroundings carefully, his voice uncertain: "It really does... it really does look similar. The curse had my head in such a fog back then that I never noticed at all!"

"Underground works left from the Spark Era, and they exist here too..." Gao Yang's heart surged. "So the ruin in the Dark Mountains is only part of some larger complex of ruins? Or else..."

A bolder notion surfaced in his mind: could the fortress buried in the Dark Mountains and the tunnels here be one continuous whole?!

Could these ancient passages span the vast lands north of the mountains, cross the Whitewater River and the forested country north of the range, forming an unbroken network?!

The bold conjecture did not last long, however. Gao Yang soon shook his head and judged the idea unlikely: even if the Gondor Empire of old had been supremely powerful, its productive capacity was still finite. From the Dark Mountains to here was a great distance, with tangled terrain—mountains, rivers, and more—in between. How could anyone build an underground complex of such scale with any ease?

To be sure, if the Gondor Empire had truly set its mind to bludgeoning its way through this land, pouring the whole nation's strength into raising an "underground city-state" beneath the earth near the Dark Mountains was not strictly impossible. But Gao Yang simply could not fathom what here could have been worth such frantic investment—and investment in a secret project besides, one of which the Gondor populace and all later generations knew nothing at all...

Could it be... connected to those human experiments Nicholas mentioned, to the so-called "godspawn"?

"Hey, hey, hey, what are you thinking about?" Gao Yang's deliberations were cut short by a voice at his ear. Coming back to himself, he found Amber waving her clawed hand vigorously before his eyes, the half-elf's face thrust close. "You pick a time like this to space out?"

"No, it's nothing," Gao Yang said, quickly reining in his thoughts and setting the conjectures aside for now. This was truly no time to dwell on them. "Judging by our position, we should be directly beneath the bed of the Whitewater River by now."

"Really?" Amber looked up in disbelief. The "stone" vault overhead was dry and solid, not a drop seeping through, nor the faintest sound of flowing water to be heard. "My God... then this place really is deep. How did anyone manage to drive a tunnel under a riverbed..."

"What I'd like to know is how he still judges our position so accurately in a situation like this," Pi Yun muttered, stealing a glance at Gao Cen.

Amber's ears twitched, and the words came out before she could stop them: "Isn't it obvious? The man's been buried underground for over seven hundred years—he's a professional... Ouch, ow, ow!"

Gao Yang gave Amber's ear a twist by way of punctuation, then ignored her and signaled Sir Byron to keep leading the way.

At the same time, looking over the composition of the party he was leading, he felt a sudden chill in his heart.

An elf thief, the shame of all creation; a druid skilled at brewing soup, peddling wares, and selling fake medicine; a wily old knight who could make running away sound downright righteous. Of the five in the party, three had their styles badly out of joint. By that reckoning, aside from himself, whose square-jawed face could steady morale, Sir Philip—plodding along beside him, grave and silent, clearing the way—was probably the only conscience left in the entire Cecil operations team...

As he mused on this, Sir Philip suddenly turned his head and asked Byron with the utmost seriousness: "By the way, Byron, that 'righteous retreat' you mentioned before—is that a knight skill I don't know about?"

Everyone: "..."

Gao Yang sighed inwardly. A rare fine young man, and he turned out to be a passive straight man...