Master Of None

Rumbling stone was nerve wracking. The cave seemed to drop more dust on the group than expected. There were some cracks that seemed made intentionally to let the stone door fall in to empty spaces on the sides of the walls. The other cracks were caused by time. That means some of the stone door fell away and blocked the tunnel from easy travel. However, it was nothing for Walker since he was able to use the earth sculpting skill to keep the cracks from forming on the walls around him, especially the ceiling. It kept the tunnel's integrity intact.

What was revealed was not easy to see. The group was unable to look past the small bubble of light they had from Alice holding the light elemental crystal high. The light orb only penetrated the darkness so much before they realized that the entire space before them was too large. "Let me make more light orbs. We will see what is here." Walker started to throw out light orbs as he also pulled out the light elemental crystals to attach to them. He wanted the entire area lit without having to control the mana so much. He also wanted to be able to explore for a long time.

Slowly the space was revealed. Many stone shelves and a large open center were revealed. "Don't tell me this was a massive underground storage area…" Remey felt that she was in some large vault that people would pass through to trade and store goods. From the stone shelf's conditions, she could see the petrified wood that had once made up small barrels or crates. There were stone cups and containers that had cracked as they aged.

On top of all this, they could see some elemental crystals that had managed to weather time or shattered in to crystal shards. These must have been very valuable at the time because there was only one set of broken stone shelves with them on it.

"If this was a travel area between their underground homes like the desert or even before it, then I would say this was a place many of them stopped." Walker wanted to move to investigate things more, yet he was stopped in his tracks.

'Abyssal serpent skeleton

This abyssal serpent had perished many years ago. Due to the unique elemental affinity, the skeleton is still left behind. The skeleton is slowly losing the stored mana within the bones to degrade further. It is a unique characteristic that a parent abyssal serpent or similar serpent monster possesses to assist their eggs to absorb the mana and lay dormant for a longer time.'

Walker whispered this to the group. He was a little awestruck by the size of the abyssal serpent skeleton that snaked around many shelves. If the party wanted they could easily walk through the entire skeleton as if it was a tunnel. "I could grow bigger than this…It's amazing." The entire group was equally amazed.

Since they all felt that the area was full of amazing things, they started to explore in pairs. Gil was looking through some of the stone shelves near the center. "I think all this dust used to be books. But there are also these slabs of stone with carving, hmm. Walker, Midnight and I found some stone slabs with writing on them!" This brought Walker and Alice over to them to get a closer look.

'Transport record slab

This is a slab used to record the goods brought through the checkpoint. It has specific information on it regarding trade between groups and dwellings. The runes can be directly matched with the ancient language used at the time'

"I can't read it but I can appraise it. These are all records. I doubt we will get much out of them until we can get people to study how they used runes to match their language. We also need to find more of their written language." Having some of the older written language would help those studying it back in Genesis to find out a better way to translate things. It was a very useful discovery.

"You are going to want to see this over here!" Su and Remey both called out to them. Their voices were shaking with energy so Gil. Midnight, Onyx, Walker, and Midnight rushed over. Onyx had been looking at the large skeleton still but was now ready to see what would cause Remey and Su to be so animated.

They all stopped when they got toward the skill of the abyssal serpent skeleton. It had stopped right in front of some much more reinforced stone shelves. They had runes carved along them with small parts of rusted metals attached. The runes seemed to be directing all mana in the air toward the shelves. But this wasn't what they were amazed about. What they were looking at was one of the light orbs that was growing dimmer and dimmer by the second.

Small worm shaped shadows were moving around the light elemental crystal on the floor providing the light orb with mana. They moved very quickly and had obviously come from the shattered eggshells on the shelf. "We moved around the side to find that the next tunnel is collapsed from the earthquake we assume. Then turned around to find this. Onyx, we found them."

Words could not be spoken. None of them even knew what to say. The seven to ten little worms of shadows were clearly abyssal serpents that had just hatched. The light elemental mana that had started to slowly seep into the caves from the ravine being opened were enough to help them get closer to hatching. As soon as the light crystals were added, they had hatched and started to feast on them. Even more, the shelves had additional eggs that might be other monsters or perished monsters. Walker could only understand that the ancient race had once raised these monsters and transported them around.

…..

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