Chapter 249: The Akashic Record [4]
Up close the Akashic Record was on a completely different level.
On the map it had looked large. But looking at it while standing just outside its border was a different story.
The building rose in a perfect pyramid structure, it was white from every surface except for the tip which was made up of a crystal of golden color.
If Leon’s calculation was spot on then it was at least one hundred stories tall. There was no point trying to find the top from down here. No matter how far back Leon tilted his head, it just kept going towards the sky.
Around the entrance, families of different races were moving in and out. A dwarven couple with kids. An elven woman holding her daughter’s hand. A group of beastkin teenagers heading the other way.
But what caught all three of them were the surveillance drones moving in projectile arcs.
Leon activated [Mana Sense] quietly while walking.
What came back felt off.
The huge monument was emitting something. He could see it spreading outward from the structure’s tip in slow waves through the surrounding streets or maybe throughout the whole city. But it was not mana, he was certain of it.
That was raw Astral Matter.
This giant piece of ingenuity was somehow able to channel the life force of Astral Spectrum, the second highest reality among the others, into the human domain.
Leon followed Princess Lillian through the first gate toward the entrance. She pulled a small device from her pocket and held it against a sensor panel beside the inner door.
Beep!
"All done," she said, glancing back at them.
Leon, Ethan and Cyan exchanged a look before following her through.
All she asked was three copper coins.
Now the thing was, Evana had paper currency, so what she really wanted was... Three copper coins from Leon’s birthplace... that was all she had asked for.
Leon had handed them over without comment and she had accepted them with the kind of enthusiasm that had nothing to do with their monetary value.
Maybe she was someone who liked to collect foreign currencies.
They entered through the final gate into a huge white hall.
"This place has no human guards," Ethan muttered, scanning the hall slowly.
The princess might have just heard him.
"Most of the surveillance in the city was automated." Lillian said, walking ahead of them. Her green hair bounced sideways with every step she took. "Although we have a military, they are mostly based near the entrance."
As they walked past several pillars, the inside of the Akashic Record came into view.
It was a straight path from the entrance leading toward a round hall. On the circular wall there were several paintings attached, and a few strange devices and artifacts enclosed inside glass cases on display.
At the centre of the round hall there was a pit. A literal deep pit leading down to the core of the city, from where a long pillar of gold crystal stood tall, touching the very tip of the monument above.
The gold at the top of the building must have come from this pillar. Leon could see with his bare eyes something dense channeling up and down the crystal at an insanely rapid pace.
The elven girl side glanced at Leon and the others. She grinned and said, "the thing you are looking at is the very heart of Evana. A masterpiece created by Dr. Anish Bluemoon."
She looked proud when she said that name.
"Dr. Anish Bluemoon?" Cyan repeated the name.
As an outsider, that name was completely foreign to him.
"Huh? What? Don’t tell me you don’t know about moth—Uhh I mean, Dr. Anish Bluemoon?"
Cyan shrugged his shoulders.
Lillian’s eye twitched at the sight. She glanced at the other two. They had the same reaction.
She sighed and gestured toward the right, toward where the very first painting was displayed on the wall.
She led them toward it.
"Alright, this will be important so you better listen until the end."
Ethan looked at Cyan and smiled, nodding his head.
They followed her as she stopped in front of the large painting. She looked at it from top to bottom, then turned fully toward Leon and the others.
She was smiling when she began.
"Dr. Anish Bluemoon was the one behind the creation of Evana City." She raised her hand toward the portrait in a gesture of honour.
Leon and the others raised their heads to get a proper look.
On the portrait was an elven woman with light green hair and crimson eyes. She was wearing a white coat, a pair of round glasses, and a white rose attached to her hair in a bundle.
This was Anish Bluemoon.
The person behind Evana’s existence. The one whose hands had built the ground they were standing on.
It was not surprising when they thought about it.
Elves were never considered superior because they demanded it. They were considered superior because they had simply been here longer than anyone else. They had watched civilizations rise before the Calamity era and had still been standing when those same civilizations turned to dust after it. Where other species spent their lives chasing power, elves spent theirs asking why power existed in the first place.
The term ’Magic’ excites them.
And occasionally, one of them looked at a blank piece of land and decided to answer that excitement by building a city around it.
Lillian moved on to the next painting.
There were several others standing beside Dr. Anish, all wearing the same white coat. Behind them was something large and mechanical.
"It all began three decades before the era of Calamity." Lillian said, looking proudly at the portrait.
"Every living being at least once in their life has thought about who created them. Right? How everything we see around us came into existence? Who created it? What source of omnipotent power was behind something this complex, this precise? Surely only an idiot would think it all existed due to sheer luck... Hehehe..."
She giggled, then glanced up at the man standing beside Dr. Anish Bluemoon. He had brown hair, a pair of glasses over his green eyes, and was the only human among the group.
"They all decided to find the answer to that question one day." She glanced at the three of them, her eyes stopped at Leon. "Sounds like something a bunch of kids would come up with, right?"
Leon and the others lightly nodded in agreement at the same time.
"Pfttt—...well, they thought the same too. Until..." She walked to the next painting. "They reached a turning point."
Leon followed behind, and his feet stopped as he looked at the portrait.
The number of people around Dr. Anish had tripled since the first painting. The mechanical structure behind them had grown considerably larger, with steam rising from it now, and a huge dome shaped structure had appeared behind it.
Though that was not what caught everyone’s eyes.
What they were all actually looking at was the human man who had been standing beside her in the first portrait.
Ethan and Cyan felt a chill run down their spines. The human man did not appear to have aged a single bit.
Ethan considered several possibilities, but despite reaching a conclusion on his own, he still asked the elven girl.
"How many years apart are these two portraits?"
The elven girl smiled lightly and answered.
"Eighty years."
She did not stop there. She turned toward the portrait and looked at Dr. Anish Bluemoon, then at the man.
Her expression shifted from pleasant to something sour.
"She made the biggest blunder of her life..." She took a breath. "Falling for a human whose sole purpose was to use her."
Leon looked at the man as well. As someone who had known the full lore surrounding her, he already knew the man’s identity.
As the elven girl went quiet, it was Leon who spoke the name of the man out loud.
"Dreamweaver."