The Land: Swarm: A LitRPG Saga (Chaos Seeds Book 5)

by Aleron Kong

  There had to be a way in. The release was most likely at the end of the small hole. The real question was how the undead knight had managed to release the catch when it was too small for fingers… He chuckled to himself. The answer was obvious

  He drew his white dagger and walked back over to the mist worker holding the body. Richter checked both hands, and, sure enough, one of the knight’s fingers was denuded of flesh, showing only bone. Richter braced the finger against the edge of his blade like he was getting ready to cut into an apple. He pressed down, wincing slightly at the sound of cracking bone, but was able to cut the finger free.

  Richter walked back over to the indentation and inserted the skeletal finger. He snaked it around until he felt it align with the small hole. Another slight push sunk the finger another half-inch. The wall began to vibrate. Richter stepped back with a smug grin and looked at the knight’s severed appendage. He chuckled to himself, a skeleton key.

  A portion of the wall swung open. The edge of the door was crenelated to follow the line of the stone blocks the hallway was built of. Behind the wall was another chamber made of the same stone blocks. The light from the two hanging braziers in the main chamber was not enough to fully see, so Richter summoned a mist light. The grey-white light filled the room.

  Two pedestals sat in the center of the circular room, one white, the other black. They were each five feet tall and triangular. Both pillars had runes carved into their faces, the white much smaller than the black. Against the far wall was a sturdy wooden door with a ring. Nothing else was in the chamber.

  Walking up to them he saw that--just as with the large rune he had seen with the dark aberration--there were many little details, but at the core of each were two larger symbols. One of the symbols comprising both runes was the ancient sigil for Death. Richter recognized it from his Lore book. The other symbol on the black pillar was a slight variation on the dark aberration rune for containment. The last sigil he didn’t recognize, but it looked like the opposite of the containment rune. With a flash of insight, Richter realized that the two runes must work in conjunction. The containment rune kept the knight from escaping. The other rune though, must have been there to keep the knight from getting too close to either pedestal and deactivating them. The perfect trap.

  Richter walked up to the white column and after pausing for just a moment placed his hand upon it.

  Welcome, Master of the Mist Village. You have accessed the Rune of Death Repulsion. It serves to keep a specific being of Death magic outside of the range of the spell. You have conquered the antechamber of this dungeon and can now access its functions. Do you wish to deactivate the runic magic? Yes or No?

  Richter thought about it. He hadn’t worked up the nerve to deactivate the Rune of Dark Holding in the aberration cave yet, but if he understood this correctly, the rune on the white column was only meant to keep the knight out of this antechamber. Since the knight was now dead, truly dead, what was the worst that could happen? Promising himself for the umpteenth time that he would stop tempting fate with stupid questions like that, Richter decided to see what would happen when he deactivated the rune. First though, he decided to make a rubbing in case the rune was destroyed.

  He took a piece of paper and some charcoal from his bag. Placing the paper over the rune, he started rubbing the charcoal vigorously over the top. Richter could feel a tingle of power coming through the thin sheet. He had wondered how paper was made in The Land for a while. The sheet was nowhere near as thin or easy to write on as what he could have bought at any Walmart, but it was still better than what he would have thought a medieval society could produce. Richter shrugged, imagining the answer must have something to do with magic. Seeing as how he had two scribes in the village, he should be able to have the answer easily enough.

  Richter finished making a copy of the first rune and inspected it. Except for one area, he had been able to capture all of the little details. He carefully placed the etching back into the same position and ran over the part that was lacking. A minute later, the rubbing was complete. Satisfied, he carefully put the paper into his bag. Checking his inventory, he saw that the paper had taken up a single square of the 20x20 grid. Richter was sure that it would stay safe there. To be completely safe, he took another thin piece of parchment and made a second rubbing of the white rune; then he repeated the process with the rune on the black column. When he was done, and the parchment was resting safely in his inventory, he placed his hand back on the white rune.

  Richter selected ‘Yes’ to deactivate the rune and it started vibrating under his hand. He snatched his palm away from the column and watched as the center of the rune changed. First it grew transparent, and then ghostly in appearance. A soul stone floated out from the rune and hovered in the air a foot from the column’s surface. Richter looked at it, surprised, but then the rune returned to normal, and the stone dropped. It was because of his high Dexterity that was he able to catch it before it hit the ground.

  Know This! The soul contained within this stone has been expended. To reactivate this rune, you will need another luminous level soul.

  You have found: Soul Stone. Level: Luminous. Status: Empty

  Richter smiled. The soul stones were retrievable! True, it seemed the souls contained within were lost, but empty soul stones were still valuable. Wasting no time, he deactivated the other rune. This time, two stones fell out, one luminous and one common. Two-fer! Richter quickly pocketed the empty soul repositories. He immediately started thinking of the much larger rune in the dark aberration cave. There was probably an even stronger stone waiting for him back at the village!

  Each rune looked the same as before, but they no longer gave the tingle that they had when they were active. Richter looked around but didn’t see anything else except for the wooden door. He walked up and examined it, but found nothing notable, not even a lock. Confirming with Futen that there were no magical traps, he pulled the door open. What he saw took his breath away.

  It was an archway of black crystal.

  Upright in the archway was what looked like a pool of oil. Richter ran forward, not even taking the time to scan the room and laid his hand on the arch.

  You have found: Novice Portal.

  This was a smaller version of the portal that had brought him to The Land! It matched in almost every detail. It also matched the image in his mind of what a portal should look like, at least according to the knowledge he had gained from the Tefonim queen. It was a major ‘Duh!’ moment for Richter. He could have examined his last memory of Earth and compared it to what he had learned from the queen at any time, but it didn’t click until he was confronted with an actual portal!

  Coming back to himself, Richter took stock of his surroundings. There was nothing else in the room. Alma had already examined their new surroundings and told him there was no danger. Her mental tone made it clear that she disapproved of his lack of awareness. Richter waved her disapproval away and continued examining the portal.

  He knew that many materials went into the creation of a portal, not least of which were several POUNDS of gold. From the knowledge he had gained, he knew that they ultimately all combined to make the impossibly-hard, black crystal of a portal’s frame. Unfortunately, he also knew that he couldn’t salvage parts from this portal to make his own. The process was irreversible. As he continued to explore the black arch and compare it to his own knowledge, he discovered there were options on what could be done with the remains of a destroyed portal. Very interesting options…

  “My lord. Do you wish to cross through the portal?” queried Futen’s deadpan voice. The question interrupted his musings.

  Richter thought about it, “Are we sure that we’ll be able to get back?”

  Futen floated closer to the gate, “The activation and destination keys are present on this side, my lord, otherwise the portal would not be able to activate. It also means the activation key must be present on the far side. There is no guarantee that the destination
key is present on the other side, my lord. If it is not, then you could be stranded.”

  Richter nodded. What Futen said was consistent with what he understood about the portals. Each portal had a specific activation key that only worked with that one portal. It enabled the possibility of incoming and outgoing travel. To travel from the portal you were at to another location required a second key though, the destination key. For a novice portal like the one in front of him, it could only travel to one place and so only had one destination key, though Richter knew it was possible to make copies of the same key.

  “How do you know so much about gates, Futen?”

  “My memory is still fragmented, my lord, but I believe my knowledge stems from the fact that there is a portal in the village.”

  Richter’s mind split in half. A portion wanted to say ‘What the deuce?’ and the other part wanted to go with ‘Say whhaaaat?’. He settled for spluttering for a few seconds, then saying, “Where the fuck is the portal?”

  Futen pulsed silently in the air for a moment before replying, “The doorway to the catacombs, my lord. You have been through it.”

  “That’s a portal?” Richter asked loudly. “But it doesn’t look all weird and shimmery, and the doorway isn’t made of black crystal!”

  “I believe the portal we are looking at and the type that you are describing are one and the same, Lord Richter. Such gateways deal with traveling down a ley line from one physical location to another. The portal that leads away from the Great Seal is an example of traveling to various levels within the same ley line. I have told you before that the Great Seal is the physical representation of the nexus of ley lines that creates your Place of Power. The nexus permeates every level of the catacombs. To access a door in the catacombs, you need simply to physically go through it, my lord. Then you can instantly reach that point again.”

  Richter got a confused look on his face, “I felt a slight tingle when I crossed through the doorway leading down to the first level of the catacombs, but I still had to walk up and down stairs for more than a mile. I had to carry the bodies of those dead kobolds up while they bled and dripped… other stuff all over me. Why didn’t I instantly appear back in the room of the Great Seal when I left level one of the catacombs?”

  “Did you try to teleport back up to the Great Seal, my lord, or did you simply start walking back up the stairs?”

  Richter ground his teeth and closed his eyes. “I simply walked back up,” he admitted.

  Futen just floated there, the light at his center slowly throbbing. To Richter it looked like the damn remnant was blinking at him and letting the silence communicate a simple message, ‘That happened because you’re a dumbass, dude.’

  Richter wanted to yell at Futen for not giving him information before now, but he just decided to take the ‘L’ on this one. The truth was he could have asked. Richter let the matter drop. The question remained, what was he to do with the portal in front of them.

  The adventurer in him wanted to go through the portal and vanquish the bad guy. The smart part of him knew that this was probably beyond his capabilities without help. He needed to move forward in force, but until he was ready, he really didn’t like the idea of leaving a portal to the netherworld or wherever the fuck this thing led unguarded in his lands. Luckily, his knowledge gave him options in that regard. He placed three fingers of his left hand at the top of the archway, then turned them counterclockwise while projecting his desire.

  Greetings Master of the Mist Village. Available keys: Activation and Dark Ley Line Destination. Do you wish to access the keys of this portal? Yes or No?

  Richter went through the interface and deactivated the activation key.

  The activation key is now separated from this portal. To use this portal again, the activation key must be replaced.

  A circular space appeared in the uppermost point of the black crystal arch. Out of this hollow floated a small, circular object. Richter reached up and grasped it. The pool of inky blackness disappeared, leaving only an empty arch of black crystal.

  You have found: Rune of Kirimuratq. Durability 90,000/90,000. Item Class: Rare. Weight: 3.6 kg.

  The disk was cream-colored and was the size of a child’s palm. For its small size, it was remarkably heavy. One side of the disc was blank, but the other had four grooves that started as parallel lines, and halfway across the disc became a snarled mess. The circular space in the arch disappeared leaving only smooth, black crystal again.

  Richter kept looking at the disc. Kirimuratq. He ran the word through his mind, but his Gift of Tongues ability couldn’t translate the word. He supposed that it might be because it was written in a language his ability couldn’t translate. When he had met Xuetrix, the imp had spoken in some type of ‘higher’ language, and he hadn’t been able to understand it. Something about the word tugged at his mind though so he just kept thinking about it.

  “Ki-ri-mu-rat-ka,” he said slowly. His brow furrowed. “Ki-ri-mu-ra-tic.” Richter blinked and then said in a questioning tone, “Kiri-mura?” Neither ‘kiri’ nor ‘mura’ meant anything, but the words sounded remarkably like ‘kirin’ and ‘murat’. Richter wasn’t sure what language he was accessing through his ability, but those words meant ‘home’ and ‘vapor,’ respectively. He blinked a few more times then a slow smile crept across his face. A village was kind of like a home and what was mist if not vapor? Was he holding the ‘the mist village’ rune? He wasn’t sure what the ‘tq’ meant at the end of the word, but the rest of it made sense. Richter felt a thrill of accomplishment at having answered this riddle!

  Richter called Futen over and asked the remnant to confirm his guess. The orb’s monotone voice didn’t seem as excited about his discovery as it should have in Richter’s opinion, “Yes, my lord.”

  He put the rune into his bag and accessed his inventory. Finding what he wanted, he pulled out the Rune of Chuthriom. He had found this disc attached to the armor of a long dead adventurer in a dungeon. At the time, he hadn’t been able to figure out anything more than that it allowed him to use a portal. Now he tried to phonetically break it down, though. It was a bit like trying to guess what the answer was on Wheel of Fortune when you didn’t know the clue, what language the answer would be in, or even what alphabet was being used.

  After a few minutes, Richter got a couple possible matches: the goat’s hairy tongue, foot cloud pin, and cross muddy tree, to name a few. None of it made much sense except for one that he hoped he was wrong about. The words ‘chutit’, ‘hern’ and ‘iobm’ could be translated as Valley of the Forgotten Apostates. He really hoped he was wrong about that one.

  Richter put the rune back into his bag. He could deal with that later. He hadn’t even found the corresponding portal yet. Richter looked around the small room he was in. There was nothing else of interest, except, of course, for the light blue outline on the wall.

  He rushed over to the left side of the room and the blue color deepened, leaving no doubt that a secret panel was present. The hidden compartment was three by three feet, a perfect square. Richter searched for traps or a complex locking mechanism but didn’t see anything. Carefully, he placed his hand on one side and pushed. The small compartment swung open on a swivel, revealing what was hidden inside.

  Bones. Piles of bones. The wall had been hollowed out and used as a storage locker for what looked like the remains of dozens of people. Most of the bones had been thrown in like so much rubbish, but on top of the pile was a large, purple pillow. It shown like velvet in the mist light and had tassels of golden thread falling from each corner. A full set of bones were stacked carefully atop the pillow in perfect symmetry, the skull taking center stage. They were the bones of a child.

  Richter’s sighed deeply, remembering a screaming girl undergoing unimaginable torment. “Hello, Krista. I promise to give you whatever peace that I can.”

  CHAPTER 19 -- Day 112 -- Kuborn 2, 15368 EBG

  Richter gathered all of the bones, placing them inside h
is bag. From Jorgen’s memory, he knew exactly how many people had been sacrificed. He counted the skulls as he worked and found them all to be present. The final tally came to one hundred and seven. Seeing exactly how much space the bones of more than one hundred people took up was horrifying. Even more, than that, he was shocked by how much the bones began to weigh. If not for the weight-reducing properties of his Bag of Holding, he would not have been strong enough to carry it all. When he was done, his bag was one hundred and twenty-four kilograms heavier, which meant he was carrying more than twenty-seven hundred pounds of remains!

  Richter kept reaching into the cubby, pulling out skulls, ribs, and long bones, and trying to keep the horror of what he was doing from reaching him. When he had cleared out the remains from the dark aberration’s cave, the bones were just what was left from victims in a forgotten past. Not so here. He actively resisted trying to think of the people he had seen being tortured. The bones of the children were the worst part. He remembered seeing their young faces reddened from screaming. After only a few minutes, he started silently praying for it to stop. It took more than thirty minutes for him to finish.

  Richter walked back into the chamber with the runes and looked at the two pillars again. He was tempted to summon more mist workers and have them hammer at the columns bases until they broke free so he could bring them back to the village. Two things stopped him, though. One, that it seemed… inelegant somehow, and two, it kinda seemed like a bad idea to hit complicated magical runes with chisels and just hope for the best. He walked on.

  Alma flew up and settled onto his shoulders as he crossed back into the main hall. The ceiling braziers still burned with a blue flame. The adder slid up beside him. It was time to leave this place of death.

  Morning was well underway when he made it out of the collapsed basement. Bird song surrounded him, and the dew had been burned off of the grass beneath his feet. Richter winced when he was confronted with how many hours had passed since leaving the village. He dual cast Weak Haste on himself and then took off at a jog.