Kae
patreon
Dungeon Diver CH891
🕑 Added 2025-06-06 23:00:07 +0000 UTCAt the edges of my ether senses, the visual of the strongest 1st Class Demons that were on the steps before comes into view.
Some are running across the ground, others are on the backs of their dragons and plummeting down through the air.
After absorbing this Noble’s energy, my senses have expanded past 100 meters wide on every side.
As they begin to make large splashes in the decaying avatar remains of the old guardians, even more 2nd, 3rd, and even commoner demons begin to flood in up the stairs behind them.
I look back at the black orb artifact, and see more and more of the white dots on it getting larger. Not only that, but far more than the few dozen I passed show up.
There are hundreds of these dots closing in on us.
Maria and I summon our soul swords again, and jump up in the air to counterattack the first incoming 1st Class dragon and demon that fly down at us.
While slicing them both in half, I smile, but roll my eyes as well. These monsters were too tired or focused to bother attacking me on the way up, and I spared their lives. Now, they’re wasting their second chance just to get closer to this treasure.
This is all I think about while streaks of red and blue celestial energy burn through and freeze demons as they all come racing in with only a single goal: getting as close as possible to this pedestal.
The corpses pile up, melt to purple goo, then pile up again and again.
I don’t know how long those stairs below lead, but the waves of demons don’t stop for a full 10 minutes straight.
They get weaker and weaker as time goes by, and the rewards of killing so many demons lessen too.
I gain a large amount of Celestial Energy volume, but it needs time to be refined to be of any use. No usable memories are transferred either.
However, over a thousand horns litter the flat ground, and over a hundred soul weapons lay without their wielders once it’s all over.
I let my sword devour all of the soul weapons on the battlefield, and I use the same craftsmanship technique on the horns of the stronger 1st and 2nd Class demons to strengthen our armor that did not get the perks of being strengthened like my chestplate from the high quality Noble Demons’ horns.
The 3rd Class and commoner horns all seem far too weak to do anything useful with now.
Their dim glows and less sturdy material bases would actually weaken the gear we have on if it were added to the crafts. So, with all these, I manually drain the Celestial energy out of them with my palm, and very intricate probing layers of Royal Vibrations to quickly force out all of the white energy from inside these horns.
Nothing remains but sticky dried avatar remains, and broken black horns all across this flat landscape of ancient text.
We return to the pedestal with our ether senses enhanced even further, pushing out over 120 meters, but focusing most of this intensity at the black orb.
Far fewer large white specks are visible on it. The only large ones are the two that register myself and Maria, and the massive one that only points off into the void. The rest look like tiny stars, like we’re looking into the night sky.
We both reach forward and lift the small black orb in the air off the pedestal.
It is no heavier than normal stone.
We walk in circles, and even rotate the orb about, but the large white blotch on it keeps pointing in the same direction.
This brings my attention back to the small arrow on the pedestal’s top.
Around it there are more of the same words that I’ve seen here and in the caves; but a new arrangement of words pops out when I look beneath where this artifact was resting. It reads: “Map to the Temple.”
This does not give me much to work with either. Is this white dot the location of a temple, and that is why it’s staying bright as a constant? Or is this an enemy that just happens to be far stronger than us and standing still…? Maybe there is something extra we need to activate this map.
I send waves of ether senses into the orb, and into our surroundings, but it all just comes back as plain stone. There are no hidden monsters, triggers, or unique energy flows. Even the orb in my hand seems as ordinary as a commoner’s horn.
I know there is something strange about it, my instincts tell me so, but I can’t sense any concrete energy readings to prove it. There is no consciousness present in the device, but somehow it tracks the relative strength and distance of anything that gets close to it.
After circling this cylinder of stone a few more times, I decide there is nothing more to investigate, and we start walking off into the void in the direction opposite the stairs.
We wandered in the darkness for a month to find a vantage point, or some idea of what this place really is… and we’ve definitely found what we set out to discover. Now, we need to make use of it.
Over 500 meters of text goes by as we keep walking on this flat ground.
If not for the fact that there are intricate patterns to follow below us, I would have lost all sense of direction after we left the pillar of stone.
The orb we carry points its white dot forward to confirm that we’re moving in a straight line.
However, we have to stop in our tracks.
The text on the floor ceases, and with it, the flat stone slab does too.
All of a sudden, everything stops.
There is a flat dead end, with nothing but a cliff down into the depths of the void beyond it.
We stop a few meters from the edge, and I push my ether senses down, but even at the far edges, there is nothing but a flat cliffside; dropping off far into the darkness where we came from below.
The white dot points into the abyss.
I retract my ether senses from pointing down, and focus far more on the text below me, scanning every symbol, carving, and letter to try to find more clues; but it all looks the same.
This far from the pedestal, there are many more small depictions of the long-armed and long-legged creatures all walking in single-file lines through rifts in space. There is even an abnormally large carving, almost the same size as the demon and dragon being pulled apart by dark hands I saw before.
This one is of about half a dozen Void Creepers looking down at a sideways spiral. It is carved much deeper than all of the other writings around it, and the closer we step toward this, the more the spiral looks to be made up of countless dots.
As Maria and I stare down at it, the image almost comes to life.
I get the faint feeling of strange Vibrations coming off of it, but every time I try to read their energy, or focus on what the feeling is, they go away. It’s like a recurring illusion that only shows up when I do not actively think about it.
The faceless beings all stare down at a slowly spiraling galaxy below them.
In the center of it all, the largest dot rests, a deep wide hole in the stone.
Yet, as I let my mind wander, it appears to glow white, then sparkle silver, and give off reflections of rainbow light—kind of like Maria’s soul energy.
There are a few lines of text in the Originators’ language above it I can read: “Watchers of the Great Cycle.”
We’re lost in thought for a few minutes, admiring this carving; but I’m distracted again as the outer edges of my ether senses pick up another oddity near the ledge of the abyss, far from where we have searched so far.
It catches my attention because the carving isn’t deep, it’s a similar depth to the small arrow we saw on the pedestal; and the handwriting is a perfect match to the additions to that other carving of the demon and dragon we saw before.
My disrupted attention breaks Maria out of her daze as well, and we walk over to the cliff’s edge again.
The same wording of “Map to the Temple” is written out in the Originators’ text, but in the thin handwriting that matches an incredibly intricate drawing is made in the stone above it.
Right at our feet above the writing, the small etching of a stairway up to a flat platform, and an orb on top of it, are clearly carved.
Then, beyond it, there is dark plain stone.
Half a meter above, another stairway is drawn, but this one in a zigzag pattern to its top; another orb rests on the flat platform there as well.
My eyes track up another half a meter, and another stairway, this one in a winding pattern to the top; but with the same reward at the end, an orb is shown.
Both my eyes and Maria’s track back and forth as dozens of these depictions are drawn in an intricate, massive map.
There are carvings that look like massive cliffsides to both sides of the winding path of pedestal checkpoints. There are small curved holes at the base of some of these cliffs that look like caves. Some of the caves are marked with miniature carvings as well.
I see a small marking nearby where the identical pedestal we’ve found lies, and near its base, there is a cave with the marking of a tiny angel; making me remember the cave we left from before coming here.
It’s only a few centimeters away from the stairway… widening my eyes to the enormous scale. Some of the other pedestals are over ten meters away. If what I’m seeing is true, we’re deep within an unfathomably massive ravine.
My eyes track all the way to the end of this carving, yet, it does not end with this so-called temple in all its glory. Instead, there is only an arrow pointing out into the abyss. It’s incomplete.
My heartbeat has been rising this whole time, and I’ve been searing the details of this map into my mind to not forget every intricate point.
I look to my right, and meet Maria’s gaze looking right back at me.
We stare at each other for a few seconds, then look down at the orb in our hands pointing off the edge of the cliff, and finally at the arrow pointing off the edge.
We nod in unison, then run forward, jumping off the edge into the abyss.
Comments
IdolTrust
Is it because of the 1000 year realm wave that he doesn’t have access to the system because there is a major delay for him. So that a 1000 years has to pass for them which would be one second for the lower floors.
Tim Scripter
TFTC Kae!
