Author: 年终 / Nian Zhong

Translator: Kinky || https://kinkytranslations.com/

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Chapter 62: An Open Divine Realm

…However, being worthy of the description “magnificent” didn’t equate to being truly grand.

Space underground was limited, so the building had no choice but to yield to the jagged rock walls. Its shape looked like a cream confection squeezed badly out of form. At the foot of the castle clustered many little shacks typical of a slum, or more accurately, human dens. They reminded Myss of the poor district in Rosha City.

Between the dark brown walls, yellow-brown human bones showed here and there. Most were incomplete, scattered in bits and pieces in the corners, and many still bore scorch marks.

Mixed in among those bones were metal magic artifacts with a slight trace of rust. These, at least, stood neatly upright among the earth and stone, and Myss could smell the old blood caked onto them.

At the top of each device was a giant crystal, emitting a hazy pale green glow. Only because of that could they make out the rough outline of the castle. Even so, most of this twisted structure still lay steeped in shadows thick as blood.

“What’s that? The flow of magic around it is really strange.” Tass sucked in a breath through his teeth.

“That’s a Bone-Burning Lamp, one kind of ancient alchemical artifact.” Salaar explained without emotion. “Throw animal bones into it, and it can keep glowing for a very long time. With enough bone fuel, they can shine for over a hundred years.”

Myss: “Sounds pretty convenient.”

Three hundred years later and this thing could still give light. That was already impressive.

Salaar shook his head. “Its main structure is buried underground. What you can see is only the tip of the iceberg.”

“Bone-Burning Lamps are extremely troublesome to build. They can’t be moved, and their light weakens year by year, so they’re hard to use for anything else.”

Myss withdrew his curious gaze.

No wonder Salaar had never bothered with these in the seal and had just used his own magic for light instead.

“Don’t get too close to the Bone-Burning Lamps. There are usually lethal traps set around them. A normal underground city wouldn’t use this kind of thing, so not many people know about them. Outsiders are easily lured in by the ‘glowing crystals.’”

Salaar lifted a hand and pointed into a nearby patch of shadow.

Myss followed that finger with his eyes.

Inside a little hut near one of the Bone-Burning Lamps lay several relatively fresh mummies, huddled together. Their clothing style was similar to that of Professor Gentry’s group, only they had been dead for over a hundred years.

Their limbs were all broken in different ways; not a single corpse remained intact. These humans had followed the light, hoping to find a place to rest and recover, only to step into the cruelest center of all.

There was no wind underground. The old scent of earth mixed with the reek of corpses. The faint green light illuminated the abandoned castle, and everything smelled of death.

“Hmph. Just a bunch of self-important fools.” The rabbit judge sounded disdainful. “We only need one look to tell where the traps are.”

With that, it bumped its head against Salaar’s calf. “Enough nonsense. Just follow us!”

The rabbit swarm surged toward a half-collapsed arched gate.

The arch stood alone, isolated among the castle ruins. It wasn’t large, and over half its bricks had already fallen away. It was undoubtedly some poorly made imitation of a little monument. There was plenty of open ground around it, yet the white rabbits obediently lined up and entered that narrow arch one by one.

The strange thing was that Myss could see the rabbits jump into the arch, but he couldn’t see them come out the other side. The Bone-Burning Lamps flickered with lonely light, and everything remained quiet.

“An entrance to a Divine Realm,” Myss muttered.

Once was a novelty, twice was familiarity. This was the third time. He instantly recognized the subtle aura of a Divine Realm.

“We’re going in. If you’re not comfortable with it, you can stay outside and cover us.”

Salaar immediately turned to Tass. The Dragon Fae had already suffered once in the Red Amber. Maybe he still had some lingering trauma from it. As for Father Kalen, the priest was staring sadly at those rabbits, apparently still wondering why they disliked him.

Tass huffed. “Last time I got affected because Anti’s magic had too much assimilating force. We’re not going to run into the same type of Divine Realm again, are we?”

“Hard to say.” Salaar was brutally honest.

“If I cared that much about staying alive, I wouldn’t be an assassin.” Tass waved a hand. “Don’t be fooled by the way I look. I’m almost forty. I’m older than all of you.”

“Hard to say.” Salaar’s gaze slowly slid away.

Tass was shocked. “Don’t tell me Kalen is over forty too? …No way, right?”

Myss snickered under his breath, while Salaar clapped a hand over his own mouth to stop him from blurting out something else. They followed the rabbit stream and entered the arch one after another.

Before going through, Tass flew away from Myss and waved a hand toward the arch.

The arch rumbled with vibration. Where the stone had crumbled away, large amounts of emerald-like crystal grew out. Under the faint light, the formerly unremarkable arch became striking and impossible to ignore.

Across the lintel, flashing letters inlaid with gemstone appeared—

[Warning: Special Magical Space Ahead]

Salaar smiled and flipped a hand, covering those words with a golden defensive shield.

“Always doing such troublesome things,” Myss said.

“We have to leave Professor Gentry at least a few clues.” Salaar shrugged.

His right hand pressed down on his snake-staff, while his left caught Myss’s hand. The two of them stepped through the arch together.

…Then both of them slammed to a halt.

The scene inside the arch… well, how to put it? It was even more surreal than the rabbit judge.

The castle ruins were still there, exactly the same as they had looked from outside.

Only now, in those gray, dim corners and among the tangled bones, mushrooms had sprung up in every color and absurd shape. Their colors were bright and cheerful, and their caps gave off dreamy, glowing light.

Near the mushrooms grew tender little ferns. Their leaves were shaped like miniature cups, each holding a shimmering liquid that smelled faintly of fresh grass.

At the base of the mushrooms spread soft purple moss, covered in crystal-clear five-petaled flowers whose petals were bright yellow like sunlight.

Between this mushroom forest, plump white rabbits hopped here and there.

Some wore little woven hats made of ferns and carried tiny vine baskets on their backs. Just one or two mushrooms was enough to fill a basket. Others drank leisurely from the liquid in the cup-shaped ferns. Still others simply lay sprawled across the soft mushroom caps, sleeping peacefully.

“Oops!” One rabbit mid-hop got its paw stuck in a skull’s eye socket and nearly tripped on the spot.

“Bad humans! Bad humans!”

It angrily shook off the half-skull, adjusted its little basket, and hopped off toward the castle with its mushrooms.

“This place…” Tass flew up into the air and hesitated. “…is really rich in, uh, childlike whimsy?”

Whether it was the extra plant growth or the rabbits, none of it fit the despairing ruins. It felt more like a fairy tale made for children.

Set against the decay and bones, it was like covering a rotting corpse in bright candy.

Salaar: “Your body?”

“No problem. The magic here is very gentle.” Tass shrugged. “But it still makes me uncomfortable. Let me think… It’s like having a giant magic-devouring tiger sleeping beside my bed.”

“Warm and soft and seemingly harmless, but fully capable of killing me at any time. You get that kind of weird feeling?”

Myss did.

The instant he stepped into the Divine Realm, every hair on his body stood straight up. His instincts were screaming warnings. The world inside the arch was full of childish charm, yet for the first time he felt genuinely threatened.

Myss tightened his grip on the rabbit in his arms until the rabbit, whom he named “Jinx”, squirmed in protest.

Salaar’s hand was being gripped tightly by Myss too, and oddly enough, he relaxed a little. “I see.”

He had initially thought the “god” here might manipulate emotions. But from the look of things, his previous unease had been more like instinct.

Still, that was hardly good news. If even Myss felt that tension, then the master of this place was stronger than both the Sunken Child and the Perfected Creation.

“Wait, don’t tell me all of you feel nervous too?”

Father Kalen tore his gaze away from the rabbits, his voice unusually tense.

“Like instinctive disgust and anxiety? Like constantly imagining the worst possible outcome, wanting to get away from here?”

Myss: “…Yeah.”

Damn that moss-flower potion. He slipped and gave an answer before he could stop himself.

Myss shot Salaar a quick glance and only relaxed when he saw Salaar nod too.

“Do you know what that means?” Salaar asked seriously.

“I’m not sure if it counts.”

Father Kalen fell into thought. “My brother once said that if you suddenly feel baseless anxiety and disgust toward a place, or toward a person, you should get away as fast as possible.”

“Mature divine power makes intelligent life reject it instinctively. There may be a true god here, in the strictest sense.”

Myss said, “Didn’t the Sunken Child and the Perfected Creation count?”

“Does a chrysalis count as a butterfly?” the priest asked in return. “I think most people would answer no.”

Tass squeezed his face and clapped his hands a few times. “Wow. Great. This is the fastest I’ve ever regretted taking a job!”

Giving in to total despair, he flew over to the archway, intending to strike a dramatic, melancholic pose. Instead, his hand grasped empty air, and he fell right out of the Divine Realm, nearly plunging headfirst into the rabbit crowd.

Tass: “?”

The other three: “???”

The three of them immediately went against the rabbit flow and started jumping in and out at the entrance.

To their astonishment, this Divine Realm was absurdly open. As long as they truly wanted to leave, they could simply turn around and walk right out. It made no effort to keep them.

“I don’t regret it anymore.” Tass raised a tiny fist. “Dragon Faes never admit defeat!”

Catching the complicated looks from the rest of the group, Tass added, “…I didn’t mean to say that out loud. It’s the moss-flower potion’s fault!”

“What are you doing? Are you trying to run away?”

The rabbit judge began stomping the ground again with its hind legs. “Get moving, damn it! I hereby sentence you to ‘no breakfast’!”

The rabbits swarmed up furiously and started ramming their little heads against their calves. Myss let go of Salaar’s hand in annoyance and stepped out of the rabbit crowd.

The instant he took that first step out of the swarm, something went snap underfoot.

The next moment, a grating metallic screech came from overhead. A giant metal axe-blade came crashing down. It was as tall as a man. The edge was sharp enough to carry no magical fluctuation whatsoever, only a gust of bloody wind.

Myss launched himself away at nearly inhuman speed, and the giant axe buried itself into the ground right by his toes.

At the same moment, the nearby rabbits split apart instantly, as if they had rehearsed it countless times. Only one rabbit had its forepaw stepped on by Myss during his evasive leap, and it burst into furious insults on the spot.

Another rough scrape of chain on metal sounded as the giant axe slowly retracted back into the darkness. The gouge in the ground blended perfectly into the ruined landscape, as if nothing had happened.

Everyone fell silent.

Myss slowly stepped back into the rabbit tide. Compared to being split open by that thing, he would rather let the rabbits ram him a few times.

“You, short one! You stepped on a rabbit paw!”

The rabbit judge stood upright, relentless as ever. “I sentence you to ‘no breakfast!’”

“Stepped on a rabbit, no breakfast! Stepped on a rabbit, no breakfast!” the rabbits chanted with righteous fury, stomping their hind feet in perfect rhythm.

“The mushroom bread for breakfast is delicious,” Jinx commented from Myss’s arms, sounding delighted by his misfortune.

Myss gave a dismissive huff. “Then I’ll eat Salaar’s.”

Salaar let out a sigh and tacitly accepted it.

Jinx was dumbfounded. “…Heavens, how can you be so evil!”

“Thanks for the compliment,” Myss replied absentmindedly.

Then Salaar’s hand came for his again. This time, Salaar patiently separated Myss’s fingers and laced them together of his own accord. The Great Hero’s grip was strong, and his palm was slightly damp.

Myss didn’t pull away.

They had only triggered one trap in all this time. His gaze swept once more over the vast rabbit swarm and the ruins steeped in shadow.

Earlier, the rabbits had left them “just enough room to step.” That clearly hadn’t been only to make things difficult for them.

This Divine Realm was getting more and more interesting.

…Not!

The road to the castle was practically a Night Scourge trap exhibition measured out one footstep at a time.

It was hard to tell whether the hope family simply possessed a twisted sense of human or were just excessively frugal. The vast majority of the traps utilized no magic whatsoever. Myss broke out in a cold sweat, every muscle in his body tensing. Those traps could trigger in an instant. Who knew if Salaar would have enough time to erect a protective barrier.

As it turned out, he would.

Not only would he, he was practically at ease.

“Purely mechanical ‘lethal trap’ types,” Salaar commented. “Once you know the city lord’s preferences, the attack patterns here aren’t hard to predict.”

He let go of Myss’s hand, fished up a rock from the rabbit crowd, and hurled it at an entirely unremarkable wall brick. “If I’m guessing right, there should be a poison-arrow mechanism here.”

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!

Three metal arrows shot out, passing right by Myss’s scalp.

Myss: “…”

“Next should be here—”

Apparently satisfied by the three arrow-holes in the rock wall, Salaar then poked a nearby flagstone with his snake-staff.

The rabbits immediately scattered like flowing water, while Myss felt his collar tighten and his footing vanish.

The slab under his feet slid away instantly, revealing rusted spikes below, already skewering two or three old corpses.

Salaar held Myss up steadily by the back of his shirt. “Of course, of course. A drop trap used in combination with the arrows. Classic design.”

Myss: “…………….”

The instant his feet touched solid ground again, he seized Salaar’s meddlesome hand and held on tight, clearly determined that if they were sharing glory, they would also share disaster.

Salaar smiled faintly and obediently followed the rabbits around the next corner, and then—

“Ah!” he shouted.

The second he did, a burst of flame roared out from around the corner. Salaar yanked Myss along with him, and a few strands of Myss’s hair were singed and curled.

Myss: “…………….”

“These three are a classic trap set, usually used for treasury defense.” Salaar concluded with satisfaction. “As expected, all of them are here. Looks like the traps haven’t gone beyond standard patterns.”

“I’m learning so much.”

As an assassin, Tass was enthusiastically studying on the spot.

Father Kalen’s gaze moved back and forth between Salaar and Myss. He looked as if he wanted to say something, but in the end remained silent.

“Do you have another name, maybe Salaar Hope?” Myss asked with a stiff expression.

“How could that be? I’m just familiar with this type of thing.” Salaar feigned innocence. “The Hope family may have had rotten hearts, but they weren’t master craftsmen. Even murder traps had to be bought ready-made.”

All at once, Myss felt that compared with Salaar, perhaps he himself wasn’t all that evil after all.

At last, the iron gate of the dungeon slammed shut behind them. Myss even felt a sense of relief, like finally I can rest. At least the ground here wouldn’t cave in anymore; that alone was a blessing.

As for the odd-shaped magical torture devices inside the prison, Myss could no longer be bothered to care.

To be fair, the rabbits’ “rabbit tunnel prison” was surprisingly decent. They had piled all the torture devices and human skeletons into a corner. In the empty center of the cell, they had built four beds for them out of ferns.

Myss sat down heavily on one of them. It was actually quite soft.

“This one is called the ‘wall noose.’ Don’t touch it carelessly.”

Salaar pointed at the restraint chains on the wall. “Once it wraps around you, the more you struggle, the tighter it gets. People who can’t use magic have a very hard time escaping.”

Myss: “Really? Then I’m locking you up with it right now.”

He stood and made a show of pouncing at Salaar. Salaar immediately raised both hands. “All right, enough joking.”

“I’m only trying to say that even without the rabbits guiding us, we still have the ability to explore.”

“…Still, to be safe, Myss and I will go out and scout tonight. You two stay here and keep watch,” he added.

“Why aren’t you taking me?” Tass asked in displeasure.

He floated in midair and didn’t have to step on anything. If necessary, he could even slip back into the pocket watch.

“Father Kalen lacks magical offensive power. I can’t leave him here alone. And if too many people go out, I’m afraid I won’t be able to look after everyone.”

Salaar answered smoothly. “Of course, I also have a bit of selfishness.”

He couldn’t lie, so he deliberately made that last line sound as suggestive as possible. The implication was sweet enough to spin sugar from.

Father Kalen tactfully looked away. Tass’s face flashed with disgust. “Fine. I won’t interrupt the two of you.”

“Did you ask me?”

Myss crossed his arms unhappily. He had absolutely no desire to go exploring this godforsaken place. Obviously, Salaar knew all the traps here, and he had healing magic too. In these ruins, he held absolute control. Besides, Myss was exhausted and just wanted to sleep.

Salaar was in a hurry to avoid those two, probably because he was worried the moss-flower potion would reveal their identities… hm? The moss-flower potion?

…According to that rabbit judge, for the next three days, Salaar could only tell the truth.

“Did you ask me?”

Myss strode right up to Salaar, grabbed his collar hard, and his eyes lit up.

“Ask me now. I want to say it myself. I really want to go exploring, just you and me, together.”

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