Chapter 65: BENEATH THE SURFACE
The descent had lasted for what felt like days.
Reed’s shoulders ached from the constant hunching as the ancient tunnel narrowed once more, forcing his party to crawl through a passage barely wide enough for his transformed goblin frame. Behind him, Grimclaw’s labored breathing echoed against the stone walls, accompanied by the rhythmic scraping of Shivblade’s daggers as she used them for purchase against the slick surface. The golden glow from their evolved eyes provided the only illumination in the crushing darkness, casting eerie shadows that danced across walls inscribed with symbols no living scholar could translate.
"We should have reached something by now," Grimclaw muttered, his once-primitive voice now articulating complex thoughts with unsettling ease. "The calculations based on the artifact network’s resonance patterns indicated a major nexus point within this range."
Reed said nothing. The black veins beneath his skin pulsed with unwelcome awareness, spreading further up his neck with each passing hour. The foreign presence in his mind had grown stronger as they descended, whispering knowledge he should not possess—secrets of the deep earth, of pathways long forgotten, of chambers where ancient powers lay dormant. He had not shared with the others how the corruption was guiding him, how he instinctively knew which tunnels to choose at each intersection.
They are leading me home, a voice that was not his own whispered from within.
"There," Shivblade suddenly hissed, her reptilian pupils dilating as she pointed ahead. "A breach in the stonework."
The tunnel opened abruptly into a vast chasm, so enormous that even their enhanced vision could not penetrate its boundaries. Reed held up his hand, signaling the party of twelve evolved goblins to halt. With practiced precision, Thorngrasp—once a simple forager, now their artifact specialist—produced a crystalline shard harvested from the rubble of Elysandra’s attack. As he activated it with a drop of his black blood, a cold blue light erupted outward, illuminating what lay before them.
Collective gasps of astonishment broke the silence.
"By the ancient ones," breathed Steelripper, the tactical commander who had once been incapable of speech beyond primitive grunts. "A city."
The word was insufficient. Sprawled beneath them lay the remains of a civilization so vast it defied comprehension. Massive structures of obsidian and silver metal rose like the skeletal fingers of buried titans, connected by arcing bridges that spanned impossible distances. Geometric patterns of luminescent material still pulsed with weak energy along the streets, creating a web-like network that mirrored the connections between the surface artifacts they had studied. At the center of it all stood a structure that dwarfed even the grandest human temples—a perfect pyramid of black glass, its apex emitting a faint crimson glow that seemed to beat like a heart.
"The Progenitor city," Reed said, the words emerging unbidden from his throat in a voice not entirely his own. "Ahn’Karesh."