The Apprentice of Ouroboros [Monster Evo LitRPG Adventure]

The deeper they went down the warrens of this broken city, the more Neska worried there was a ring of truth to Durim’s words.

Four civilizations built on the ruins of another, marking the Verdant Valley an ancient site of profound historical importance. Rivilat was a day’s ride from the capital of Valos.

Three civilizations vanished. A fourth lay like a gravestone marker above the others. Monsters in places they had no business belonging to lurked below. And that ominous mention of Ouroboros cleaning the souls of the world as if he were on a giant clock.

What did it add up to?

She mulled all of this in relative silence as they worked their way through stony interiors where the city was less rubble and still had structure. It seemed the further they travelled from the lift shaft, the more intact and less vandalized it seemed.

"You know," she started, "you didn't explain just how there's evidence that the world got wiped out three times. How would we remember if we did?"

"All myth has a rooting in fact, somewhere down the line," Durim grunted.

"No, a myth is still a myth," Kalloway countered, clicking his tongue in annoyance.

"Oh, go take a long flight on a short broom or something," Durim shot back, before pointing to the buildings recessed in the cavern walls, each as empty or sealed up as the last. "Well, dead end. Figures. And we're off the map." A faint flicker of the projection gave their immediate surroundings, but the bright point showing their position was obscured by a grey mist. Neska realized the device could only work on places it had physically traversed. "Odd. Must have gotten turned around during the fight or we wandered off into an uncharted tunnel."

They came to a stop by the collapsed passageway, with Juni indicating a large open area existed on the far side. But the stone was too tough for her to cut through, not for the distance required. A broken plaza lay nearby, with the cavern yawning ominously over them.

Neska pointed toward the right, a large structure set with gothic statues of dragons perched on ornate steel trusses. A swinging sign hanging from one chain had faint marks stenciled in, and she could just make out the words:

Hall of Knowledge.

"Let's go that way. There may be another exit to get to the other side." With everyone on board, they traveled across the cracked, upheaved pavement toward a bridge spanning a large chasm splitting the plaza. Metal railings had previously protected the edges from passersby, but the beams had long corroded, and some of the rock around the moorings had crumbled.

The double door was sealed surprisingly tight. Durim pointed to a small metal latch hidden to one side that caused the stout doors to swing open, and he beckoned them in.

The air felt old here. Old, stale, and dry. Even now, she could detect a faint hint of parchment, of chalk dust that she could practically taste on her tongue. Side passages revealed recessed rooms filled with parchment, locked behind dusty glass cases...all surprisingly intact. Faint arcane lanterns lit up in their presence, casting soft blue light on the surroundings.

This place...it smelled of home, just like the great campus library, filled with crisp paper scents. "I know why our witch was attracted to this place," Jurik said, elbowing Hadley.

"Oh, you had to guess? I saw the sign and knew she'd beeline here," Hadley said with a smirk.

"Knowledge is power. Plus, if Markus has been down here for a long time, he's certainly shown his interest in research and academia." Yet here she was, doing the same thing. Except she wasn't searching for weapons. She was trying to find answers.

"Knowledge used for insidious purposes," Kalloway grumbled.

Storage rooms were not the only contents. In one room lay a row of stone benches. In the center of the half-circle room was a podium, the wood trim dry-rotted, but the metal construction still standing. In the back of the room were a few chalkboards embedded in the walls. Thousands of years, and the same simple technology was used, even back then.

"Since we're here..." Neska paused by the tapestries draped on the back wall, covered in dust and their colors faded, yet the fabric remained intact. "Professor Durim, could you explain the connection between the monsters and their recurrence? You seem to think we're on one giant cycle."

He tapped his chin for a moment before nodding. "If no one else minds..."

"I don't. I think this is exactly the kind of knowledge we need," Syra said, stepping forward. Juni scowled as if she'd been about to speak, but Syra patted her head. "Hey, I saw your eyes light up earlier as soon as we walked in."

"We have a bookwurm and a bookmouse. Matching pair," Brent said with a mischievous look in his eye. "But yeah. We're not finding Markus in a day. We should try to understand how the past predicts the future...or something smart that Neska would think of before me."

Durim stepped over to the podium, reaching up to grasp the sides as if he were giving a lecture. It felt like an old, rehearsed maneuver for the dwarf, and he wore a prideful smile, contrasting with his normally stern expression.

"Each of these civilizations was interspersed with long periods of time between their construction. A travelling Nord scholar visited for a time, and was able to approximate the dates using the decay of certain alchemical products known to degrade at a fairly steady rate. Every few thousand years, like a clock, poof, it's all gone, reduced to ruin."

"Who says 'poof' aloud?" Brent chortled.

"All sorts of people! Monster people, venerable professors, manic shopkeepers even!" Durim huffed.

Neska let out a discontent hiss. "And you think a giant lamia is slithering around, eating everyone, and does this across the entire world every few thousand years. Why? Does he get hungry? Or more likely, it's some nursery story by old waifs to scare children into going to bed on time?"

Neska, seriously, the title is there, you know. It's not something we can ignore. Or this other radiant hot core nestled in your soul that I have zero inference into.

Durim glanced over his shoulder to check everyone's pace. "Well, Ouroboros, specifically. But, usually, it's to prevent worse disaster. That's the reading that most people get wrong," he explained. He walked over to the tapestries, wiping away dust and cobwebs, which created a visible cloud that he coughed on. But the image was clearer now. "Here, take a look at this tapestry. You find this all over the place. What can you see?"

Neska saw nothing but a mottling of threads. She wiped it away with her hand and stretched upward to ward off a spider hanging nearby, where it scurried into a crack in the wall.

Beneath the dust was a mosaic of the seven Divines. "Gaia...Ouroboros...Namimura...Argoli..." She read off their names as if she'd always known them. "Stolvespir, Chalyat, Malowask." Seven divines stared back at her, frozen in time. "Still the same depictions. Only thousands of years earlier."

"It's only part of the story." Jurik and Hadley kept exchanging quiet glances as Durim spoke while waving at the images. "There have always been seven Divine Beasts, and some lesser ones who are sometimes referred to, depending on which history you read. Our world is the combination of their efforts, their dedication to creating life, and free will to live it as they saw fit. For untold generations, this remained true. This was our first known Age: The Age of Creation."

He brushed off the next tapestry, showing the divines fighting, claw against claw, kitsunes fighting phoenixes, giant bears being lassoed by tentacled winged fish, Gaia in the middle, casting her wings as if to disrupt it all. And above her, siphoning in tiny flecks of people and the divines...

Was Ouroboros. Neska felt her tail shiver as she saw this depiction matched the one she'd seen in the cathedral, somewhere far above her head. Durim's expression grew sour when he pointed at the Divines, one at a time, and notably skipping Gaia. "At the transition to the second Age of Might, that sense of shared prosperity faded...and violence ensued."

"But...what caused them to fight?" Neska asked hesitantly

Durim glanced at her, then the tapestry. "I'd argue it was the conflict of men, and the desire for power, or wealth, or glory. The same desires and conflicts in men, reflected in the Divines that soon turned on one another. As below, so above. The first Age transition is still sketchy. But we know that the world population contracted, and there are plenty of exhumed archaeological digs that have mass graves of both men and monsters, fighting against one another. But little survives."

"So, it's a mystery."

"Not quite. I've seen references or suggestions that an eighth Divine Beast existed, born from the desires and ambitions of humanity, made manifest. This collective consciousness of mana and need for belonging became corrupt, driving the other Divines to the brink, as it tried to gather all their power for itself. It's not exactly shown here, but you can see the shadow of it in the background."

He pointed two meaty fingers at the shadows of the tapestry, forming a veiled threat within the image. The roiling clouds...were they showing strings, or waves within the textured image?

Puppets. Dancing to a tune only the Radiant King sings.

"Then, Ouroboros came. She surged forth and cleansed the world of corruption, the only one free of it. She reset the cycle of souls...and vanished, hidden in the bloodlines of her faithful."

"She?" I thought Ouroboros was male," Neska asked, confused.

Kalloway cleared his throat. "That's one of those creative interpretations, assigning gender to associate aspects of the Divines with aspects of physiology or personality. Technically, I think they're genderless."

"So you're saying, men wrote the history, the gods became men."

"Gaia is often depicted as female," Hadley added, surprisingly.

"Eh, bunch of lizard lovers among men," Durim grumbled, drawing laughter.

Something he said earlier registered for her just then. "Go back a second. You said they faded, and were hidden in the bloodline of the faithful. Do you mean actual heirs, or is this a more symbolic sort of thing?

"No one descends from a Divine," Syra scoffed, looking unamused. Then she turned to Neska, arms folded and still regarding these lessons not as art or myth, but history.

And her tail still wouldn't stop twitching. "I don't know about that one anymore, Syra," Neska said softly, tipping her hat toward the mural.

Jurik cleared his throat. "It's still only myth, Neska. It's never been proven. If you're Ouroboros, then our fire bird is as likely to be Stolvespir, himself," he added with a gruff laugh.

"Wouldn't that be an unusual yet fitting pairing?" Juni proposed, wearing an amused smirk.

"Nah. Kasfew is already flying solo with Nori," Neska pushed back. She wished that phrase wasn't so literal, in this instance. "But, hold on a minute...you're saying the Divines hid themselves? Are they not immaterial?"

"That's where the myth breaks down. No one's sure that the physical manifestations exist. And this giant siphon of souls, as Ouroboros is shown, here? Instead of her consuming the world, perhaps this depicts a natural disaster, a breach of the shoal, siphoning energy back from where it was stolen. That's how the Eighth Divine, if it exists, formed. If you believe the allegory, it was the Envy of humanity that caused the first Age to end. They tried to control something they shouldn't and could never handle by themselves, minus the Divines themselves," Durim said darkly.

"So what Age are we on?" Neska asked cautiously. "The fourth, right?"

"Aye. The Second and Third have proof of similar evidence of a great, global conflict. Surges of monsters, and lots of humanity dead or withdrawn to smaller sections of Galwein that were less wild. I know of reports of a wasteland north of Arivol, where some great cataclysm erupted, but getting there these days? Next to impossible."

Durim interrupted the silence with a grunt. "Anyway, sometimes I catch myself wondering if these conflicts aren't self-inflicted: the fallibility of mankind and our natural attraction to self-destruction. But enough about that. What I've described is high level, and hardly does the true history justice. Let's try to keep going. Juni, elevation check?"

"One point four kilofeet," she responded, after twitching her whiskers for a few seconds. "Any hand notes?"

Durim glanced at Kalloway, who shrugged. "Nah. Let's keep going down the hall. Bound to be more exits."

A short time later, they emerged on the other side of the collapsed tunnel, much to Neska's relief. Before them lay a large stone building dwarfed by the twisting cavern above, the glow of mana filtering through cracks tracing along the sides. Most of the plaza had been damaged by cave-ins, and some of the buildings had been crushed by debris. Neska felt involuntarily herded toward the large structure.

Even Durim looked amazed at the scale. "Would you look at that. That looks like a fortress. Most of these buildings are usually locked up tight, rune locks engaged. That's a change of pace," he added as he pointed toward the double door entryway up a short flight of stairs. It looked like an alchemical explosive had blown apart the double doors, leaving jagged, twisted metal in place of the entryway. "If we cut through this building, we should get back on the map. I'm copying it as we move. One of the nicer elements of this little device."

They entered the building and found wreckage--ancient machines of unknown designs smashed, and bones littering the area. A stairwell had entryways to at least four floors, with debris littering the area, yet some of the structure looked untouched. A fight of some kind had broken out here.

"This is a large place," Neska pointed out. "Why don't we split into two teams and cover more ground?"

"Can we keep the teams even?" Trevor sighed.

Jurik took a moment, then had his plan. "Syra, Hadley, myself, and Kalloway will form the smaller team, since we have an odd number. Brent, Juni, Trevor, Durim, and Neska go on the other team. That should balance us out strength-wise."

Neska peered down at the stairwell, which also descended into the depths of the earth, and looked to form another two or three floors. A chill wind emanated from below, ruffling her feather mane. "We'll take the lower floors. You take upstairs. We'll reconvene here, on the main floor. Keep on the relays, yeah?"

Neska picked down for one reason: that ill wind blowing in from below felt like danger she couldn't pinpoint. Where there must be danger, there must be something important.