The cave path stretched before them like the throat of so ancient beast, swallowing the dim light whole.
Noah walked ahead, his footsteps unhurried, his blade resting at his waist still faintly stained despite his ti in the pond.
Yuan Ming followed close behind, the color having returned to his face after their ti in the healing waters.
"What kind of sword is that?" Yuan Ming asked when he noticed that Noah’s sword looked different from the one he had seen long before he t him at the cult.
"Just a normal sword I found on my way here." Noah replied casually without looking back.
’No wonder the sword felt so plain to . But despite having that plain sword, he could fight and overwhelm my divine weapon with ease...’ The more he thought about it, the deeper his admiration and curiosity toward Noah grew.
Yuan Ming did not say anything anymore and focused on the path ahead of him.
The path was narrow in places, forcing them to turn sideways and press through.
Stalactites hung above like broken teeth. The ground beneath their feet was uneven and wet, slick with a film of moisture that had never seen daylight.
But there was nowhere else but to go forward.
Five minutes. Ten. Twenty.
Ti was difficult to asure in a place where nothing changed. The dark looked the sa in every direction, and the sound of their own footsteps was the only proof they were moving at all.
Then it hit them.
A blinding light that ca and appeared at the end of the road.
One mont there was only darkness, and the next the world tore itself open into blinding brilliance.
The flas of countless torches erupted across their vision all at once. But even that was not enough to faze Noah; he seed fine.
But Yuan Ming was different; he needed ti to adjust to the light, so he shielded his eyes with his arms.
A dull, throbbing pain blood behind Yuan Ming’s eyes, and his vision swam with white and orange blurs for several seconds before the world slowly began to take shape again.
What revealed itself when it did was nothing short of breathtaking.
The cave path had opened into sothing that defied the very logic of what should exist underground. It was massive.
A hollow palace carved into the belly of the earth, enormous beyond what any natural formation could explain. The ceiling soared high overhead, lost in flickering shadow where the torchlight could not reach. Every wall was lined with burning sconces, dozens of them, maybe hundreds, yet despite their numbers, they only managed to illuminate the middle of the space and leave the far edges wrapped in a haze of orange and black.
And in every direction, cave openings dotted the walls.
So were high. So were low. So were barely large enough to crawl through and others wide enough to drive a cart. They scattered across the curved walls like the burrows of so enormous creature, each one a mouth leading sowhere unknown.
Noah’s gaze swept across all of them.
There was no way of knowing what waited inside any of them. No markings. No signs.
’We could be walking into danger if we select one of them. Or maybe I might end up getting lost in so maze.’ Yuan Ming clicked his tongue in annoyance, still standing on the edge of their opening.
The opening from which the two of them had erged was just one among many.
At the center of the underground space sat a platform.
It was not attached to the floor. There was no floor. The edges of the space dropped away into a depth so complete that no light reached the bottom and no sound ca from below. Whatever existed beneath the platform was beyond knowing, and the platform itself was connected to the surrounding walls only by narrow bridges of stone, jagged and uneven, stretching across the void like the legs of so massive petrified spider.
They were standing on a stone ledge that jutted from the wall far above the platform below. The drop was significant.
Noah did not waste ti asuring it. He stepped off the edge.
Seeing him, Yuan Ming only blinked once in surprise before following along.
Boom!
Even though they had gotten accustod to it, the tal weights were still attached to their bodies. The mont they jumped, affected by the gravity, the two of them fell with such speed that the mont they landed on the edge of the bridge below, a gust of dust rose up and the ground cracked a little.
Noah straightened up and rolled his shoulders like nothing had happened while Yuan Ming landed beside him with a grunt, steadying himself with one hand against the ground before rising.
He looked around and noticed sothing.
They were traces... traces of blood.
Dark stains spread across the stone platform widely. Deep gouges had been cut into the surface of the platform. Chunks of rocks had been blown away from the edges of the platform or the protruding shapes.
Burn marks could be found here and there among other elental traces.
’The blood is both old and new. The latest being around a few days old.’ Noah instantly took note of the details he saw.
’Yet...’ There was sothing that made Noah pause, sothing he found very odd.
Where were the bodies?!
This question ran in his head like the grunts of a deadbeat man.
The platform was empty; the bridges were loneso. On the entire space, it was just him and Yuan Ming.
Noah walked across the stone bridge. It was only a bridge in na. If he had to describe it, the whole floor was like a trampoline.
The wide base in the middle, which seed to be welcoming everyone to gather, and the arms like stone extensions moving from the said base to the surrounding walls, acting like a grip holding on to its life.
If Noah could describe it in one word, it would be...
"This looks like a cobweb."
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