Vin gasped as he landed on the seafloor, which was a rather strange sensation with his lungs currently drawing air from Replenishing Breath. Taking in his surroundings, his eyes went wide despite the fact that he couldn’t physically see anything. Tremorsight was an interesting spell in that, just like how one could stare at a specific thing so intently they missed everything else going on in their peripheral vision, he’d been so focused on detecting any potential fast-moving monsters swimming toward him that he hadn’t even noticed the motionless corpses scattered all across the ground at first.
Though he certainly saw them now.
Slowly, Vin pushed himself through the sea of sli, letting his mana sweep out over everything and take it all in. What he was able to see painted a picture for him, and not a particularly pleasant one.
There were a good two dozen corpses all in similar states of decay drifting about the sea floor. Unlike a regular sea filled with water, the sea of sli didn’t seem to have any sort of natural currents, so the bodies hadn’t gone anywhere in all this ti. On top of which, in stark contrast to what little Vin knew about the ocean floor back on Earth, the very bottom of the sea of sli appeared to be all but devoid of life, which ant there weren’t any signs of the corpses being snacked upon either by the natural critters of this world. All the different creatures he’d seen lived closer to the mid-point of the sea, among the drifting chunks of rock and coral and thicker streams of sli.
The two dozen corpses were all humanoid, and even more startling, of a race he’d encountered once before. The long, six fingers on each hand and rather frail bodies with too-large heads made that much easy to pick out.
Neilans… he thought, stopping in the dead center of what seed to be their settlent. The only neilans he’d encountered thus far were the group of them stuck within their own self-imposed barrier, though those guys had been terrified of their own shadows and refused to even leave their houses.
These neilans looked like the exact opposite.
Vin took a look at one of the small, almost temporary shelters that had been constructed down here, noting how it had partially collapsed in on itself and filled with sli. Based on the regular bed positioned inside, sitting beside a desk and a good handful of what looked like journals that had been long destroyed due to exposure to the wet sli, he was starting to piece together what he thought had happened here.
Swimming over to the edge of the small settlent, Vin’s suspicions were confird when he found the ring of runes running around the entire camp. The neilans they knew had all been Ritualists, and even if these guys were from an entirely different world, it seed that was their forte as well. The runes themselves were a bit too complicated for him to make out in full, but he was able to get the gist of their intended spell, and he even spotted the portion that had been added to let people pour their own mana into the ritual.
Now almost a hundred percent certain of what had befallen the small team of neilans, Vin swam over to the dungeon entrance, noting the large crack in the ground in the center of camp. It looked like this dungeon was a cave-style one as was the most common, though seeing a crack descending into the sea floor was a tad unusual.
Making sure the rope connecting him up to Shia didn’t get snagged, Vin eased himself through the crack in the ground, popping out in the equally sli-filled dungeon. He hadn’t been planning to poke his head in, but when he saw the unique layout, he wasn’t able to help himself.
New dungeon discovered! 5,000 exp gained.
Dungeon Type: Cistern
Primary Monster Type: Crab
Strengths: N/A
Movent: Fast
Grouping: Swarm
The dungeon was unlike any he’d seen. It was one massive cavern stretching down into the sea bed, with no form of offshoot tunnels or thods of getting lost. While Tremorsight didn’t quite reach down into the center, his Dungeoneering skill inford him that the entrance to the Underside was right there in the center, no doubt surrounded by monster crabs.
Because the dungeon was just one giant room, there wasn’t really anything for him to explore, so he didn’t have to worry about his class. Deciding against swimming face-first through a cavern of sli into a swarm of fast-moving crab monsters just for fun, Vin extracted himself from the cave, giving the field of corpses one last look before tugging twice on his rope. The discovery of what had almost certainly happened down here with the neilans had shaken him a tad, and he wanted to get back up to the surface. Swimming with Shia’s pull, he quickly made his way back up, popping out of the thick top layer of sli with a gasp of true air.
“Are you alright?” Shia asked, untying the rope and coiling it back up as she frowned at him. “I thought that would be a quick in and out to confirm the dungeon’s existence. You were down there a good while.”
“Yeah…” Vin muttered, hosing himself off again with another cast of Create Water as he tried to figure out where to start. “I found the people who lived here.”
“Oh, that’s good,” Shia said, pausing as she saw his face. “Lived, as in past tense?”
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“Yep. They’re definitely not living any more. From the looks of things, they died months ago. And I’m pretty certain I know exactly what happened.”
As soon as his shoulder was free of sli, Reginald hopped back over onto it, squeaking so encouragent for him to go on as the rat rubbed against his face.
“There were roughly twenty neilans down there,” Vin said, nodding at Shia’s look of surprise. “Yeah, I wasn’t expecting to see neilans either. They looked pretty much the sa as the ones we t before, though with the state of decay their bodies were in, there could have been all sorts of tiny differences that I just couldn’t make out.”
“If there were neilans… not to stereotype, but did they have a ritual down there as well?”
“They did,” Vin chuckled. “A ring of runes running around their camp, which looked pretty simple in terms of what the neilans we knew were capable of. From what I could gather, I think it was designed to keep the sli out of their camp. Based on the temporary setup of the camp and the sheer number of destroyed journals drifting down there, I think these guys were basically the equivalent of a deep-sea diving team of researchers. That they were down there to study the unique properties of the sea of sli.”
“Talk about a rough choice from the Gods if that was the case,” Shia muttered. “So what did them in? Their ritual should have kept functioning even after the Great Reset, right? Did they starve to death?”
“Don’t forget, this looks like it was a temporary camp,” Vin repeated. “The ritual was still incredibly complex by your or my standards, but I don’t think it was designed to support itself. I saw so runes that looked like they’d been added to allow the neilans to personally supply the ritual with their own mana. Only when the Great Reset hit…”
“The neilans all got reset back to level 1, losing all their mana,” Shia gasped, putting a hand over her mouth. “Oh, man…”
Reginald gave a startled, sorrowful squeak as well, and Vin nodded.
“My thoughts exactly. I don’t know how much mana they’d already put into the ritual, or how long they lasted with their pitiful new mana pools, but one way or another, they ran out of mana and the sli ca flowing in. Without their magic to support them, there wasn’t a whole lot they could do.”
“Well that’s a terrible way to go,” Shia muttered, glaring up at the sky. “Seems like a pretty nasty move on the Gods’ part, all but sentencing these people to their deaths.”
“Not to give them any sort of excuse, but the Gods needed untainted chunks of worlds in order to build Edregon. The people were more of a secondary asure,” he reminded her. “How many fragnts have we co across that were entirely devoid of people? The Gods obviously wanted to bring people over, seeing as all their fragnts selected were chosen when they had people on them at the ti. But if saving people was their primary concern, I think they would have tried harder not to bring over so many different abandoned fragnts.”
“So wait, the dungeon was down there as well?” Shia asked, only just rembering why they’d stopped here in particular rather than anywhere else in the sea of sli. “Is this another Crater situation where the Gods threw the dungeon on the edge of town?”
“They were even more direct this ti, actually,” Vin admitted. “I don’t know if it was the Gods’ attempt at saving these people, but they put a crack in the sea floor leading straight into the dungeon. We have no way to know if it was free of sli when they first created it, but either way, it didn’t do the neilans any good, and no wonder. Dungeons are an entirely new thing to Edregon. If they were running around within their do, freaking out about being reset back to level 1 without warning, I highly doubt any of them would have taken the ti to investigate the large crack that had suddenly opened up in the center of their camp.”
“At least the Gods tried to give them so sort of assistance,” Shia muttered. “Broken branches, this is one depressing fragnt. Not to sound like Scule, but seeing as he’s not here, did they have anything worth taking?”
“Not that I saw. I didn’t feel any artifacts, and all of their journals were pretty thoroughly destroyed. Maybe I’ll do a more thorough sweep later and try to actually record what runes remain of their ritual, but I think we should leave them be for now.”
“No artifacts on an expedition like this?” Shia said, tapping her chin as she thought. “Seems needlessly risky. Maybe they were trying to avoid drawing the attention of the monsters within the sea of sli. You said you ran into an elite one?”
“Oh yeah, a pretty massive eel that swam fast and hit hard,” Vin nodded. “If these guys were researchers, it might not have been just because they were trying to avoid drawing the monsters’ attention. They may have wanted to try to study everything going on with the least amount of outside influence possible. Including the magic signatures given by artifacts, as small as they may be.”
“So it really just boils down to being in the wrong place at the wrong ti,” Shia surmised, grunting as she put the rope back into her pack. “Man… I’m trying to find a silver lining to this whole situation, but I can’t really think of one. Stuck down there, trapped within their own ritual with no way out, forced to wait for it to run out of mana and the sli to co pouring in… What a way to go.”
“Because they were already dead, at least they didn’t have to deal with the Red Dawn on the adjacent fragnt?” Vin offered weakly, shaking his own head before his companions could even respond. “It is what it is. At the very least, we don’t have to wonder about what happened to the people of this fragnt any longer. Let’s carry on to the next one.”
“You don’t want to take a break?” Shia asked, giving him a concerned look as she swung a leg over Blossom. “You just stumbled upon basically two dozen dead explorers. Nothing wrong with calling it there for the day and coming back tomorrow.”
“I think I’d rather we push through for now,” Vin sighed, almost more upset by the fact that he wasn’t all that shaken up about what he’d just witnessed. After everything he’d seen and experienced on Edregon thus far, twenty corpses drifting around in a sea of sli wasn’t nearly enough to freak him out like it would have once upon a ti. He and his team had stumbled upon far more bloody scenes of carnage on more than one occasion. They’d dug and filled a mass grave to hold the hundreds of bodies of the Blue Fur clan over in the crystalline fragnt. He’d run back to Terra after missing the battle for wave three, forced to wander through the field of dead and dying, wondering how things would have been different if he’d only been there.
A small scattering of dead researchers was depressing, but he was pretty numb to this sort of discovery by now.
“Next fragnt,” he repeated, taking off at a slightly too-fast run as he put the neilans behind him and took off.
“Next fragnt…” Shia muttered, giving him a concerned look as she and Blossom took off after him.
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