Kae
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Dungeon Diver CH949
🕑 Added 2025-08-03 23:00:09 +0000 UTCThe warm pressure flooding through us feels just like the burst of understanding I received moments ago peering into the Mammoths' Imprints. It makes the feeling of being stimulated by the elven artifact return again, and the perfect perception of the arrays and patterns in front of me returns just like the first barrier we opened up.
What Ulgar said was right; this one is much thicker, filled with far more glyphs and complex layers.
However, it feels like a warm invisible consciousness is watching us decipher all of this code in front of us. When we pour our Celestial Energy into the wall and exert pressure from our Vibrations and Primordial Aura into the structure, it’s even easier than last time.
We both have to sacrifice roughly a quarter of our Celestial Energy pools each. It’s a lot more than what we had to give for the Black Ogre’s domain, but we’ve already witnessed the barrier give our Celestial energy back in an even more refined state. There is no doubt in my mind this will work perfectly.
The blue and red energy flows through countless arrays, being squeezed and compacted into pseudo glyphs. White bursts of light start creating chain reactions all throughout the barrier in front of us, and in a matter of seconds, a beautiful archway opens up and reveals actual reality.
At first, it’s only about 100 thousand kilometers high, large enough to fit us through in our greater forms. However, countless more spinning white layered arrays start to expand its edges. The archway grows like it is being pulled back by an invisible pair of hands. It grows in size thousands of times larger, big enough to even fit Ulgar in his Black Astral Form.
There is not actually a dense forest behind it… it appears to be a desolate flatland as far as I can see. The barrier just created an illusion that completely fooled my eyes.
Ulgar smiles, and I can tell by the fluctuations in his aura he's even more impressed than last time at the speed and efficiency we managed to achieve in breaking through this barrier.
Oddly, it doesn’t feel like we’re even breaking into anything. It’s more like we’re just waving hello and the artifact is reacting to our will.
Maria and I walk through, and Ulgar follows.
His entire mood shifts once he walks through. His curiosity and playful smugness leave his aura, and the Black Ogre grabs both of his machetes.
“Close the archway, and follow close behind me. We may not be on the Imperial’s radar yet, but this is all unclaimed land, either areas of pure forest or warzones left behind after domains were completely destroyed. It’s not only the Demons we have to look out for.”
I allow the moment of enlightenment to pass, and get serious too.
Maria nods, and we retract our consciousness from the barrier. A massive amount of raw white Celestial Energy is pushed back out after it’s torn apart and decompressed from the High Quality Ether state it was just used in.
As the archway shrinks, and closes to become a tiny hole, then returns to a flat wall; I even feel parts of fractured glyphs pour in with the aura. The majority of them all just flow right through me, however fragments of them make prickling areas on my soul become stimulated for a moment.
As Maria and I cycle this refined Celestial Energy, small amounts of her sparkling source resin creep out from her soul energy core to test the atmosphere. For some reason, it is still scared of being perceived by the Primordial Trees… but these fractured glyphs are all devoured once they flow through her.
This is in part because when I look back to where the barrier closed, everything we saw a moment ago is gone. There are no more trees or any evidence of the forest filled with craters we just left. It looks as desolate as the open flatlands in front of us. The aura of being watched by the trees is completely gone.
Though… the air does smell like metal, and the hum of stray Royal Vibrations and recent battles does fill the air.
Ulgar doesn’t stop moving forward. “Come on. The faster we get across the flatlands, the better.”
We start moving after him, but Maria raises a question back, “What about Vardon… or Axel? Are they not coming with us?”
Ulgar looks far off to our left, where the invisible barrier leads off further than I can see. “Vardon agreed to be our backup once we actually make it to the domain, and Axel will probably only watch from the sky and pick off the injured. That Griffin isn’t much of a fighter… but he’d put his life on the line if I really needed it.”
The Black Ogre stares forward again. “They’re using their own entrance keys to get into this neutral ground in territory entry points they know well and trust.”
He puts his head down and floats forward faster. Both of us speed up our pace to match his, and the ground below flies by. Trillions of kilometers pass every minute, and everything around us looks the same, but so does Ulgar’s determined stare.
There’s no extra stimulus all around us now, so we don’t have to use up a large amount of our energy to block ourselves from harmful glyphs and primordial aura. That also means my comprehension of High Quality Ether has stalled.
The only thing running through my mind right now is cycling Celestial energy with Maria, and the fading images of Glyph imprints I’ve seen over the last hour. Without constant stimulation, my understandings of them have started to fade slightly…
It’s odd, like the warm fuzzy feeling on the outside of my soul is fading back to its base cold state. Even the jolt of awareness from my blade when it felt the Mammoth's aura is gone, it’s totally back in its sleeping dormant state without any sign of those golden glyphs.
This only makes the thought of whatever is on the other side of these flatlands so desirable. I’ll be able to feel that stimulation again, and possibly it will be permanent.
Seeing the consistent spinning glyphs all over this Black Ogre’s body in front of me is the only semi-intricate pattern left I can see. After a few minutes pass, I start to see them activating with more speed, and an urgency and anxiety fills the Vibrations pouring out of Ulgar.
I hear him yell, “Stay back and get down! A group of ascended spotted us!”
I don’t hesitate at all and do what he says. Just the act of stopping our forward path makes Ulgar quickly shrink in my vision. However, my eyes are still glued to him once we both touch down on the flat ground.
Reflexively we both use Celestial Grade Stealth, and pull our Primordial Aura and Vibrations inward to cloak our exact location. I have no idea what a group of ascended is, but if they can scare Ulgar, it’s better I don’t find out up close.
An incredibly bright burst of white light fills the sky.
It’s filled with black aura crescents from Ulgar’s blades, and the outline of monstrous figures that I’m positive can only be demons. There’s no Vibrations or even fluctuations in the divine thread count in the air. Yet, the flashes of explosions go off over and over.
I take the risk of being spotted and activate my Celestial Grade All Seeing Eye to enhance my vision and see further away into the battlefield, and instantly feel a rush of information hit my mind.
Ulgar is fighting off over a dozen bright white Demons right now. Each one of them is a few hundred million kilometers tall and has the face and horns of a confident Royal, but they have no vibrations to show for it nor any divine cores or even dragons to ride on.
It’s a bizarre sight.
The Black Ogre hacks away at them as they writhe in pain and attack him. His black machete is able to slice through and shatter them to pieces. There is a bit of resistance, but every hit he lands is a kill shot.
Another few seconds go by, and I begin to mentally absorb the visuals of trillions of glyphs and spinning arrays bursting out from these Demons. He kills them all, and they fracture to mist just like every swarm of insects and lizards we encountered in the forest before.
Every cloud of mist they fill the air gets absorbed back into his body, restoring the High Quality Ether lost from his longer range attacks.
It’s so far away I don’t get to fully appreciate and see the fine detail of many of these complex patterns, but I can tell they were on a completely different level than anything else I’ve seen before.
Maria is wide-eyed too, as she’s siphoned some of her Source Resin into her eyes in the final moments of this battle to get a closer look from her own perspective. We’re about to share the visuals and bounce the images off each other's minds, but the ground starts to shake, and a loud bang and horrific wave of Vibrations fills my psyche.
The Divine threads in the air all start bending and acting strange.
Ulgar turns around to look in our direction with a serious look, but he fails to pinpoint our exact location. Instead, he waves his blades in the air and points them away from us, motioning for us to run.
“From what?” I start to mouth to myself under my breath, but it hits me before I can even turn to try and run.
The shockwave from the fight ripples through the air, lagging behind the battle a few seconds, and it’s filled with extremely high potency ether residue.
