Chapter 211 : Chapter 211
Chapter 211: A Friend
The ashen light still seeped down through unseen cracks in the vault above, spreading itself evenly over everything in sight.
The stone walls were a congealed gray-black, the ground a deep brown swollen with dampness. The rough stone pillars rose like the silent ribs of some slumbering beast, stabbing upward into the void, or else like the petrified spine of whatever force still held this oppressive place aloft.
The light slid over the pillars and dragged out long, twisted shadows, which crawled and overlapped across the floor, weaving a blurred net. Every footstep made it feel as though something lying in wait within those shadows might be disturbed.
About the time it took a stick of incense to burn passed in silence.
Then Ryan, walking at the very front, stopped without warning.
Lillian, right behind him, barely managed to stop herself in time. Her nose almost brushed his back.
“What?”
Ryan did not answer.
He bent one knee and crouched, his gaze fixed on a spot in the corner of the wall.
There was a mark there.
It was so shallow it looked almost like a natural crack in the grain of the stone itself.
And yet it was too straight, too deliberate. It could not have formed on its own.
It looked as though someone, a long time ago, had crouched in that cold corner and patiently scratched it into the wall with the tip of a blade, one stroke at a time.
Rex leaned over and asked in a rough voice, “What is that? Did the stone crack?”
Ryan ignored him and reached out with his fingertips, lightly tracing across it.
The sensation was unmistakable.
It was a fresh gouge. Fine stone dust still clung to the edges of the groove.
The mark was a slanted X, two strokes crossing casually, almost like a child’s careless doodle, or the sort of mark someone might scratch out while killing time waiting for another person.
But the angle of that X was strange.
It was not a proper cross. It leaned upward to the left by about thirty degrees.
Ryan stared at that angle, and his pupils contracted.
An image suddenly stabbed into his mind.
Following the direction of that slant, he slowly lifted his eyes.
Ahead stood an unnaturally smooth stone wall.
Gray-black. Flat. Under the feeble light, it looked like a giant mirror coated in dust, reflecting nothing at all.
It simply stood there in silence, as though it had waited in this place for endless ages, waiting only for the one meant to arrive.
Ryan stood up and walked toward it.
Rex and Lillian exchanged confused looks.
Vera had been leaning lazily against a pillar, but now she straightened slightly as well. Her gray-green eyes followed Ryan’s movements, and something knowing flickered in their depths, as though she were watching a play whose next act she had already guessed.
Ryan stopped before the wall and raised a hand, pressing his palm against the surface.
It was cold. Slick. Empty.
That chill wound up his arm like a snake and burrowed straight into his chest.
He drew his hand back and took out the black Energy Bar from inside his coat.
It was nearly weightless. Only the tiny crystal set at its tip cast off a faint glimmer, like a single star in the gloom.
Mana flowed into it without a sound.
A little point of light flickered to life at its tip.
Weak. Trembling. As though it might go out at any moment.
He pressed that speck of light against the stone wall and traced it gently across the surface, following a certain rhythm.
The streak of light sank into the stone like ink bleeding into dry sand.
Then—
Writing emerged from inside the wall.
One line, then another.
Crooked. Clumsy. As though someone had carved it laboriously with the tip of a knife, then hidden it carefully under magic.
Now it woke from its sleep.
Stroke by stroke, line by line, it lit up, as though someone deep inside the darkness were slowly opening eyes that had been shut for far too long, quietly gazing at the people outside the wall.
Lillian froze.
Rex’s mouth fell open, and he forgot to close it again.
Vera had already drifted soundlessly to Ryan’s rear flank, her steps as light as a ghost’s. Her gaze settled on those words.
There were not many of them.
Only a few short lines.
“There is an illusion ahead.
Find the thing controlling the illusion, and you can clear it.
As long as you remember what is real, you can get through.
—Your friend.”
At the end, there was even a smiley face.
Crooked and awkward, hideously ugly, but drawn with complete sincerity.
And for some reason, just looking at it loosened something inside the chest, enough to make a person almost want to smile back.
Ryan stared at that smiley face in silence for a long time.
The words burned themselves into his vision.
How had Allen known?
Could it be that he...
Once that thought took root, it would no longer be suppressed.
He had already made it through.
He had not died.
That extinguished communication gem had not been the sign of life ending. It had been the sign that he had already reached the other side.
You thought he was a coward.
You thought he had perished halfway through.
You thought the companionship you had briefly shared had already become a mourning song of yesterday.
And then, in this land of despair, he had scratched a crooked mark into the wall, left behind a clumsy warning, even added an ugly little smiley face, just to tell you—
Hey, do not panic. The road is still here. And I am still ahead of you.
Ryan’s fingers tightened unconsciously around the Energy Bar.
The cold metal edges bit into his palm, giving him a clear, sharp sting.
That pain was so real.
It anchored him to this moment.
It proved this was no dream.
That blue-haired fool, with his hair always in disarray, the one who had trembled like a sieve when Parker dragged him out to scout...
He had survived.
And more than that, he had left a road for the people who came after him.
Ryan closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
The air was cold, carrying the stale age of the walls and the quiet desolation of the secret realm deep into his lungs.
He could feel his heartbeat. It was one beat faster than usual.
That fluctuation remained locked beneath the calm shell of his body, invisible to everyone else.
He could not let even a trace show.
When he opened his eyes again, his face was expressionless. Only a stillness like a deep lake remained.
Lillian looked at his hard, cold profile and suddenly felt that he was a little unfamiliar.
He still wore that distant, detached expression, but something inside those eyes seemed to have sunk deeper, while something else seemed to have risen up from below. She could not see clearly what it was.
“Ryan?” she asked softly, glancing at the wall. “What does it say? You can read it?”
Ryan gave the slightest nod.
Then he turned to face the three of them.
“There is an illusion ahead,” he said in the same steady voice as always, with not the slightest hint of anything unusual. “Something that can create hallucinations. From here on, we may see things that... are not real.”
Lillian’s face changed several times before paling.
She wanted to say something. Her lips moved, but in the end no sound came out.
Rex scratched his head. “An illusion? Like those fake people we ran into before?”
“Possibly worse,” Ryan said. “But as long as we find the source that is creating it, we can break it.”
Rex did not fully understand, but he still nodded in a thick voice. “Fine. We’ll do it your way.”
Lillian frowned. “How can you be sure? Just because of what’s written on the wall? Who left it?”
Ryan looked at her.
“A friend.”
He spoke those two words very softly, and yet they landed with a strange weight. Soft enough to seem afraid of disturbing the dust, heavy enough to feel as though lead hung from them.
Lillian froze. Her searching gaze moved across his face, but in the end she swallowed back all the other questions she wanted to ask.
Vera stood quietly to one side, her gaze moving from the writing on the wall to Ryan’s face, then back to the wall, which had already gone still again. Something thoughtful flickered in her eyes, then faded into silence.
Ryan put the Energy Bar away and turned around.
“Let’s go.”
The three of them followed.
After only a few steps, Lillian could not help turning back again.
The writing and the smiley face had already vanished completely, as though they had never appeared.
Only that gray-black, polished wall remained, silent beneath the dead, dim light, like a riddle that had existed since ancient times.
But she knew the words were still there.
They were sleeping in the stone’s memory, waiting for the next person who could wake them and understand them.
She drew her eyes away, quickened her pace, and followed the back ahead of her, a back that seemed to have wrapped itself once more in some invisible suit of armor.
The four of them disappeared again into deeper darkness.
The towering shadows of the stone pillars still slid past them one after another, as though they would never end.
The nameless light shrouded everything, tinting their shadows, the walls, and the road ahead into a muddled shade caught somewhere between gray and faded blue, like the final trace of daylight before sinking beneath the horizon.