Chapter 97: The Treasure Hunt Begins
The morning mist hung over every branch at the edge of the Whispering Forest like a drenched spiderweb, heavy and sagging.
When Ryan pulled off the blindfold, the first thing he felt was the cold.
It was the kind of damp chill found only in woodland that never saw the sun, mixed with the sll of rotting leaves and wet earth, creeping over his skin.
The pale white vapor slipped into the collar of his uniform, and he shivered lightly.
Before him stretched a completely unfamiliar redwood forest.
The trees were absurdly tall. Their dark crimson bark was split by deep fissures, like dried blood scabs.
The daylight had been broken apart by layer upon layer of overlapping canopy, scattering swaying pale patches of light across the thick carpet of brown-yellow fallen leaves.
The forest was silent. Only the faint drip of water from far away could be heard, along with the long, mournful wail of the wind passing over the treetops high above.
Ryan dropped to one knee and pressed a hand to the ground.
The layer of fallen leaves was soft enough for his hand to sink into, and beneath it lay cold, slick humus.
He carefully examined all traces within ten paces. Other than the footprints he had just left, there were only the claw marks of small animals and the broken twigs knocked down by the wind.
It seed the judges had deliberately spaced the students apart when they dropped them into the forest.
He stood and checked the items on his person.
The backpack rested heavily against his waist and hips, but the adjusted carrying system distributed the weight well.
His right hand instinctively reached behind him. The longsword wrapped in thick gray cloth was still firmly secured across his back.
His fingers paused for a mont when they touched the strips of cloth, but he did not unwrap it.
Hanging from the belt at his left waist were three Magic Tool components: a Repulsion Bracer, an Elental Foil Pack, and a pair of Conductive Gloves.
They were all things he had hamred together and repeatedly adjusted in the workshop over the past month. They were far from refined, but practical enough.
Finally, he drew out the crimson crystal, no bigger than a fingernail, from inside his clothes.
A “Life-Preserving Rune Stone”—that was what Minister Morris had called it.
Inject a trace of Mana, and it would trigger protection and positioning. Crush it, and it beca a distress signal.
Ryan closed his eyes and sent an extrely fine thread of Mana into the crystal.
Inside the crimson crystal, that drifting scarlet filant trembled faintly. He extended his perception outward along that thread of connection, using the rune stone as a temporary probe for magical sensing.
At first, it was nothing but chaotic static.
The forest itself was saturated with diffuse currents of Mana, like background noise that never ceased.
But gradually, another kind of rhythmic pulse erged from that chaos. It was not that his perception had been infinitely magnified. Rather, the natural resonance between the runes, using the rune stone as a dium, spread outward like ripples across a still lake after a drop of water had fallen into it.
Each ripple marked a clear position in his awareness.
The nearest ripple ca from the northeast, around three hundred paces away. Its fluctuating texture felt gentle and moist. Slightly farther away, two or three other ripples spread outward in tandem. So sank deep underground, while others hung among the branches overhead. Their properties differed, but all followed the sa resonant rhythm.
Ryan opened his eyes. Fractured light from the forest was reflected in his gray-blue pupils.
He did not move imdiately. Instead, he took off his backpack and removed a small brass compass from the side pouch.
There was no needle pointing north or south on its face. In place of that were three independently rotating rings of gradations, each engraved with dense abbreviations of ancient runes.
This was one of his final designs for Magic Tool Application class: a Simple Mana Flow Surveyor.
He once again injected Mana into the Life-Preserving Rune Stone and touched the sensing crystal in the center of the compass with his right index finger.
The first ring slowly turned and ca to a stop in the northeast-by-east quadrant. The second trembled, then pointed to the rune combination for water and damp environnts. The third marked the estimated distance—between three hundred twenty and three hundred fifty paces.
It matched his earlier perception.
Ryan put the compass away.
Caution was never a mistake, especially in a forest the academy had labeled a mid-tier danger zone.
He slung the pack back onto his shoulders, rested his right hand lightly on the activation stud of the Repulsion Bracer at his waist, and set off toward the northeast.
The thick leaf litter made a fine rustling sound beneath his boots.
After about a hundred paces, the appearance of the forest began to change.
The redwoods thinned out, replaced by taller water firs with bluish-gray bark. The dampness in the air grew noticeably heavier, and from his left ca the faint, clear murmur of running water.
The resonance from the Life-Preserving Rune Stone grew stronger.
Another fifty paces later, Ryan stopped before a small clearing in the woods. In the center of it lay an unremarkable puddle, no larger than a washbasin. The water was murky and greenish, with rotting leaves floating on its surface.
The resonance from the rune stone pointed directly to the bottom of the puddle.
He crouched down, keeping his left hand on the rune stone while drawing a retractable probing rod from the tool pouch at his thigh with his right. He dipped the tip into the water and stirred it slightly. It touched sothing hard.
He withdrew the rod. Its tip was sared with dark green sludge and clung with a few scraps of broken moss. There was no sign of a trap or magical disturbance.
Ryan did not rashly reach in. From the foil pack, he pinched out a thin tal foil inscribed with a simple wind rune. After injecting a trace of Mana into it, he tossed it lightly over the puddle.
The foil hovered three inches above the water and slowly rotated.
A faint current of air stirred, pushing aside the leaves floating on the surface and exposing the murky water below. The steady magical fluctuation emitted by the foil probed for any hidden defensive spellwork beneath the surface.
Half a minute later, the foil’s Mana was exhausted, and it dropped quietly into the water. Nothing happened.
Ryan rolled up his sleeve and reached his right hand into the puddle.
The water was freezing. His fingertips quickly touched the object embedded in the soft mud at the bottom. He dug at it a few tis and pulled it free.
It was a flat, round crystal about the size of his palm, entirely water-blue, with flowing ripples of light shimring inside it. It felt cool in his hand, and the muddy water clinging to its surface slid off on its own without leaving even the slightest stain.
Ryan held it in his palm and examined it for two seconds. It had been placed far too obviously—practically buried just beneath the upper layer of silt at the bottom of the puddle.
The first rune was in hand.
Ryan stored the water rune properly, then reactivated his perception through the Life-Preserving Rune Stone.
As more runes ca into his possession, the ripples the forest fed back to him through the rune stone beca more nurous and more distinct.
The academy did not seem to have set the threshold for the search phase especially high. It was more like they were guiding the students to beco familiar with this unique thod of exploration.
Over the next two hours or so, following the guidance of those resonances, he found four more runes in succession: beneath layers of rotting leaves, between the twisted roots of ancient trees, and even beneath a stream stone half-covered in moss.
The process was not particularly difficult. It felt more like a concentrated exercise in search and sensory perception.
One earth-yellow rune was half-buried in the soft forest floor, emitting a heavy, steady pulse. One erald-green rune was hidden in the heart of a thicket wrapped in vines, carrying the fresh scent of grass and wood.
One crimson rune was embedded in a crack in a dry rock wall and felt faintly warm to the touch. And one pale gold rune hung from the end of a slender, flexible branch, swaying in the wind, and had to be hooked down carefully with the probing rod.
Including the first water-blue rune, he now had five runes stored inside the insulated compartnt.
But the pulse frequencies they emitted did not seem to be entirely identical. In particular, the crimson rune and the pale gold one almost overlapped at certain bands of fluctuation. That could an their attributes were similar, or it could an that so runes were fundantally of the sa origin, rely differing in the way they manifested.
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