Chapter 668: The Underground Settlement
The sound escaped him before he could stop it. He glanced back at his companions, finding that all of them were staring at the same spot with varying degrees of disbelief.
Mayumi opened her mouth, then closed it again without saying a word.
Elion looked back toward the stone, his curiosity overcoming his momentary hesitation.
After a small shrug, he stepped forward and gave himself a slight push off the ground, following the girl with a short, awkward jump.
For one fleeting instant, he imagined himself embarrassingly striking solid rock and falling backwards in front of everyone.
Instead, the surface gave way.
A cool pressure passed over his face, followed by a momentary distortion that stretched the surrounding walls into indistinct bands of colour.
He felt his boot find solid ground almost immediately, and the strange resistance vanished as abruptly as it had appeared.
Sound rushed over him.
Voices, footsteps, the creaking of metal and the uneven clamour of people calling to one another filled his ears.
Elion straightened, blinking as his vision cleared, and found himself staring into a vast subterranean cavern.
There was a town beneath the ruins.
It spread across the cavern floor and climbed the surrounding walls in crowded tiers, its dwellings wedged between stone foundations far larger than anything built upon them.
Narrow houses leaned over winding streets, their wooden balconies supported by mismatched pillars, while steep stairways and suspended walkways connected one level to the next.
Far overhead, the cavern ceiling disappeared into tenebrous darkness.
Pale clusters of luminous growth clung to the rock, casting a faint, spectral light over the highest rooftops.
Below them, lamps burned beside doorways and beneath patched awnings, their warmer glow gathering over stalls, crowded intersections and open spaces where people moved around one another with the practised impatience of everyday life.
Water ran through a narrow channel beside the street, passing beneath little stone bridges before disappearing between the houses.
Beyond it, cultivated beds occupied several terraces, their dense growth illuminated by rows of hanging lights.
Elion could see workshops, stacked crates, hanging laundry, and cooking smoke drifting toward the cavern’s upper reaches. The sheer abundance of life after the sepulchral silence outside left him standing motionless.
Eva waited beside the entrance, watching him with a pleased expression.
Behind him, the passage shimmered again, and Maya stepped through, followed closely by the others.
Each of them stopped within a few paces, their attention drawn upward and outward as the scale of the hidden settlement revealed itself.
Their arrival had already begun to attract notice.
A woman approaching with a basket stopped when she saw Eva.
Her gaze shifted toward Elion and the others, and her expression distorted into an ugly, disgusted scowl before she crossed hurriedly to the opposite side of the street.
Nearby, a man caught a child by the shoulder and drew him away.
The people closest to the entrance began putting distance between themselves and the newcomers, some staring openly, others averting their eyes with an abruptness that felt deeply unnerving.
A stallholder pulled his wares farther beneath his awning, while two men standing beside a cart fell silent and watched them with undisguised hostility.
Within moments, a small space had opened around the group, even as the restless activity of the town continued beyond it.
"What is this place?" Mayumi asked from behind him.
The disturbance their arrival was causing seemed to be of little consequence to Mayumi for the moment. Her question was reasonable, though, and Elion found himself wondering much the same thing.
’How did I not sense this place?’
Even if it was underground, he should have noticed something, just as he had detected the barrier protecting the underground structure beneath the tower on the mountain. Yet there had been no sign of this place at all.
[The barrier protecting this place is suspected to be of divine rank,] the system chimed in, offering some explanation for his confusion.
[While the host’s eyes might be of a similar rank, they have not fully awakened and therefore cannot display their true divine capabilities.]
’Why, thank you, system. What valuable information,’ Elion replied inwardly. ’What else do you have for me? Any idea what we could be dealing with here? I wouldn’t want to endanger my dear party members simply because of my curiosity.’
They could be dealing with an impossibly powerful entity after all.
[Unfortunately, my guess is as good as yours.]
’Thank you regardless,’ he replied, turning his attention back to the scene before him.
Whatever the case, something was terribly wrong with this place, and Elion didn’t consider himself someone with a hero complex.
There were things far more important in his life than trying to save a group of strangers from the clutches of the being that might have enthralled them.
He had already encountered what could be a divine barrier surrounding this place, so who was to say its ruler, the being Eva called the master, wasn’t of the same rank?
The possibility seemed inconceivable, but he couldn’t dismiss it simply because he found it difficult to believe.
What would a divine being on the goddess’s level be doing in a measly, dying world, maintaining what might very well be a farm of humans raised for food?
He didn’t know, and he wasn’t exactly looking forward to finding out.
As they waited, taking in the view, a figure flew toward them from the distant spire at the far end of the tenebrous cavern. It was an elderly woman dressed in loose, dark robes, with a deep frown marring her face.
Several followers came up behind her, all armed with polearms. Elion narrowed his eyes as he gauged her strength, his expression turning grim.
’A sage,’ he thought. ’A certified powerhouse, basically.’
A pale smile played at his lips as he watched her approach. ’I’m not looking forward to meeting this master anymore.’
He had also noticed something else.
That almost invisible thread connected to Eva was present on almost everyone in sight, and all those threads converged on the distant spire from which the woman had flown.
The most startling part, however, was that she appeared to be the only person in view without a thread connected to her.
’How curious...’ he thought.