Music for today:
Autumn Moon
https://youtu.be/mKocy3TYfJg
Chapter 495: The Inexplicable
Early Afternoon - Late Summer : Year 39 : Poseidon, Draconic Continent
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Continuing to have Hera step back away from the water, carefully monitoring every little twitch in her eyes, I stood with the fur on my neck raised.
Something about that place.. something other than the mana or the otherworldly ecosystem.. it felt off.. but I couldn't even begin to guess how...
Eventually getting Hera to start snapping out of it on her own—watching her begin to grip her head like a migraine was suddenly splitting through her—I turned back toward the water, walking up to dip my claw into it again. *Flash*
It wasn't any different from when I was shrunken, just faster and more violent of a reaction.
*blub* But upon lifting my claw out, taking a breath to look closer without immediately cutting it off—I watched as the bright glow spread through my blackened claw like a wash of bleach before dissolving the bone into hydrogen and mana. -For my claw to be turning white before it dissolves... Is the space mana reinforcing my body, eating it like the mana in the void?-
Looking through the mana flowing out of my dissolving bone, not a single particle of space mana could be found.. just a mess of shifting, flowing attributes...
-How troubling...- It wasn't even the metals that seemed to be a problem for me. -The mana in this pool is somehow feeding itself to the space mana in my body...- And when my space mana ate it, and rose energy levels to change attributes, the particles expanded, and the crystallized structures they formed, crumbled.
-That can't be from the density of the mana...- In the past, I had practically swum in pools of pure liquid mana—even enriched—and never had any trouble. -So what the hell is causing it to react so violently..?-
It was like the mana in the water was barely even holding itself together... Something so energetic it put enriched mana to shame...
However, there was one thing it reminded me of.
-It's almost acting like.. an overweight isotope...- Like an unstable.. or radioactive particle...
But understanding that only explained so much.
Looking back at Hera, still gripping her head like it was splitting, I looked into the water as deeply as I could.. searching for whatever gripped her—standing like a wall between her and whatever could have lurked, trying to taunt it to try again.
Though, I never heard a thing.. and after gathering herself for some time, Hera finally started easing. "W..What the hell.. is this place..?" She spoke with labored breaths. "Did you not hear that..?!"
Looking back, I shook my head. "What were you hearing?"
The question only made her expression scrunch though. "I.. don't actually know... It was like music that.. massaged my body near the water, but got.. really loud when I back away... Like some kind of resonance."
"In what, your mana?"
She nodded with a hesitant shudder. "In the mana-strengthening lattices..." She paused before trying to lift her head with a grimace. "It felt like my body was a wine glass shattering from someone's voice.. my head mostly, actually..."
Reon jolted.
But likely only because he didn't understand our minds had already made the shift to divinity. "Did it get louder or quieter after it broke down?"
"Q..Quieter... Clearer.. I think..."
-Clearer..?- Looking back into the water, I sharpened my senses as much as I could, practically having my ears blown out by the noises of the wildlife in the cavern trying to hear something through it.. anything...
But there was no hope.
Whatever resonance she was feeling.. hearing.. was on a different wavelength from me.
"R..Reon..." Forcing herself to lift her head again, Hera looked at the somewhat panicked boy between us.
But before she could ask if he was hearing the same thing, he shook his head in a fervor.
"Shit..." It was puzzling beyond words. "T..Then.. the texts you've read.. did they say anything about it? About the call into the water? Or a music? Or voice?"
"I-I'm not sure!" His panic finally broke through his professional shell in that breath. "I haven't deciphered enough of the language yet to read most of what I've found. I only know what I do thanks to a few of the texts resembling artifacts from the Golden Age and comparing them!"
Hera forced a nod through the grit of her teeth. "Their language was the predecessor to what we call Old Draconic." Predicting the question I was already preparing, she promptly turned to me and shook her head. "It completely predates me. I've never had a chance to see it, even as a kid. I doubt I could recognize it, let alone be able to read it."
My expression weighed. -I see...- Thinking I'd have to take a shot at it, I tried pushing my aura through the mana around, trying to shove it through the moss and plants covering the walls to look for carvings.
But to no avail. -I'll have to take a closer look some other time...-
Taking the moment of silence to try and tend to Hera, I left the edge of the aquifer to try and look through her body again, thoroughly treating the parts of her body that were crumbling like sand without their mana strengthening before trying to probe with questions from different angles.
But there wasn't much else I could figure out besides what Hera already had. -A resonance...-
The explanation wasn't terribly inadequate, truthfully. -Seeing how the mana strengthening only really fractured in the denser parts of her body...- Largely her brain, heart, and around her mana core, -It would make sense...-
However, resonance in mana wasn't something I had ever even known to be possible... -And with Reon not hearing or feeling it at all...-
It was hard to reason...
All that I could know for certain was... "This place is off limits from now on... Especially for you, Hera."
She was quick to nod in agreement.
"Reon, are there any other paths that come up to this aquifer like that one?" I pointed to the huge opening we entered through with my wing as I tried to continue nudging them through it.
"Y..Yes, but.. most of them have caved in." According to him, there were four other caverns like the one we were in, all bubbled over the same caldera-shaped aquifer.
But only this one was accessible by anyone other than him. "Then for the time being, unless I'm here, no one is allowed near the water. That includes you."
Reon was quick to give a troubled but understanding nod.
Like any passionate explorer would, he seemed averse to being blocked from access but, just the same, understood it was for his safety.
Safety he likely didn't even know was so deeply jeopardized...
-I don't know at what point he will hear the Cradle's Call...- Especially considering it only seemed to affect stronger dragons and had yet to affect him. -But I can't take the risk...-
In the blink of an eye, he had gone from a moderately useful subject to a being I owed more than I knew.
"Thanks for keeping me from tunneling straight through the mountain." Giving Reon a thankful look with a nod of my snout, I tried to thank him, even if the stress made it come out a bit hollow. "That would have been bad if I did things my way..."
Having mentally mapped our path through the caves, it was highly likely a straight path from the outside would have led us just past this cavern, below its water table. -There's no telling what Hera would have done if I had merely walled the water off...-
Especially considering I would've had no reason to think something was amiss, and would've been so distracted with actually carving the path through the stupidly dense mana...
Though, thankfully, Reon seemed to recognize I was genuine despite the hollow, focused chill in my tone. "P-Please don't thank me, sir." He understood, after all. "I wouldn't dare try to be an advisor on something I wasn't absolutely certain of.. though.. I never could have predicted this..."
Without him, things would have turned out very different...
Not that that reality made me any less troubled.
-Seeing that the water table here is above the bottom of the main cavern...- "Is the main cavern submerged at all?"
Reon was quick to try and regain his professional air. "Y-Yes, sir. This aquifer feeds into it through a shallow river. B-But it's worth noting the water isn't nearly as poisonous!"
My excitement to see the cavern instantly quenched like a glowing iron bar being dunked into water. -Shit...- "I thought you said there weren't any other accessible routes?"
"There aren't." He stiffened with a very blunt weight. "The connector is completely flooded, and forms a sort of 'U' shape. The water is the same, yes, but comes from the shallows of the burial aquifer, and is filtered through nearly a kilometer of sand before reaching the main cavern."
"Hooh..." My breath came out like a gust of stress.
"It's more directly connected than most of the other aquifers in the mountain, but.. t-the water is, at least as far as the metals go, drinkable.. and in no discovered texts have I seen mentions of the 'call' being heard there."
"Got it." -Thank goodness he knows his shit...- Eventually getting back out onto the highway passing the cavern, I sat and tended to Hera for quite some time—helping her regain some semblance of comfort and ease before killing some time with stagnant conversation and eventually getting a move on again.
Though, the air was forever changed after that.
Continuing behind Reon as we had been, the stretches of silence lingered longer, and with every step, there was a growing breath of hesitation brewed from caution.
But thankfully, everything from the mana density to the heavy metal content in the old cavern walls settled before we reached another hallway, turned, and made the final stretch to the main cavern.
"Had we gone left at that turn, we would have gone to the nearest 'satellite cavern', one of many that surround the central city." By then, Reon had resumed his almost lecture-like explanations, helping keep the silence from settling too deep, but with me having never shrunken back down out of caution, it wasn't an easy feat. "The satellite caverns had a variety of uses, but the one back there was the forge."
"Right," Recalling some of his earlier conversation, most of the city's mining was done in the vicinity of the lake, as the metal content in the surrounding rock was on the verge of rivalling solid ore. "I wonder what the forges looked like. Are any still intact?"
He was quick to nod. "A few, but not many. Though I haven't been able to figure out why, the larger mines have all collapsed, and well over half the forge is buried."
-That's odd...- For how thick the metal and mana was there, the walls were comparable to mythril. -And with how old the city was, it wasn't like they would've lacked experience with earthquakes or natural disasters.- "Do you know about when everything collapsed?"
"From what I can tell, it was largely simultaneous, and happened in the earliest days of Bahamut's era."
It was well after I had my scuffle with Jormungandr. "Do you have any idea what caused it?"
But just as I was thinking, he shook his head. "It's hard to tell, especially in places like the mines where collapse was common. However, seeing how many of these highways held up," He motioned to the walls of the hall we were walking, "It doesn't feel like some natural cause."
I was quick to nod with my eyes drifting over the walls and ceiling.
Even after eons of abandonment, there wasn't even a crack. "Thanks to the way the metals and rock types are distributed, the roads could flex and shift quite significantly without actually breaking."
-Right...- In other words, everything was quite malleable. -An earthquake would have to be immense to shear and collapse anything.-
But, considering this place was an active volcanic site at the time, the odds weren't terrible. "Do you think it could have been volcanic activity?"
Reon struggled to agree, though. "It's.. not impossible, but highly unlikely." Giving his map one more look, he finally returned it to his bag. "Since the early days of the city, the volcanic activity in the area settled significantly. By the time Bahamut rolled around, there should have been little, if any."
-Then what could it have been..?- "Sabotage? A war, maybe?" -It couldn't have been Bahamut's doing though... Maybe the thunderbirds?-
Hera was the one to disagree there, though. "I doubt it... You saw the dragons in that aquifer..." They were practically gods.
And Reon agreed. "Everything I've ever investigated went to show this as a nest of titans... Not having young until they were thousands of years old, they selectively bred to the point that they were akin to a different species." His eyes drifted back to Hera as if she were a live specimen. "Multiple wings, double finned tails, curled horns, and even multiple sets of eyes... They were most certainly at the top of the food chain..."
"But higher heights weren't uncommon before Bahamut's era." Thinking back to Typhon, the air stiffened.
And hearing me speak of it as if by first hand experience, Reon tensed.. but... "I still.. find it highly unlikely... More so than even natural causes."
"What makes you so confident?"
He paused, questioning how to word it, or whether to mention it at all, before... "It's more of a hunch than anything, but..."
The air hung as he paused to draw a breath.
"I think.. it could have been caused by a dragon sleep."
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IN OTHER NEWS!
I GOT A BIG ANNOUNCEMENT
A Krystallo Plushie is in the works ;)
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