Asumpfre Sunken Ruins (6)

Back at the outpost, I ate breakfast with everyone, then called the whole team together and started posting the morning's assignments.

Choi Soohan and Support Teams 1 and 2 went to processing byproducts. My sister and Team 1 would hold the outpost and stand ready for any aberrants that came raiding. Hwayeon, together with Combat Teams 3 and 5, strapped on underwater combat gear and took the advance survey of the sunken ruins.

Franc and I would wait in the sky and deal with anything of mid-high grade or above that tried to approach.

It was nine in the morning when we split up and set out. Whether thanks to the Space Wall I'd raised out in the deep water, the level had dropped again, and a wide mudflat lay bare from end to end.

Nothing like the cloudless, blazing blue overhead, or the cool wind moving up there. The lakebed was a sheet of black-gray mire, and the raw fish-stink peculiar to a freshwater lake came tearing through it until breathing itself was a misery.

"……Franc. Let's start the watch."

I can't take this. No — it's work, so I can endure it. But this kind of survey isn't my job, is it?

I scrambled up into the sky, and the members of Teams 3 and 5 looked after me with envy all over their faces. It didn't last. They dropped their eyes and slogged on across the mudflat toward the sunken ruins.

I withdrew the Space Wall that had been covering the ruins, raised another in the air above them, and settled onto it — only for the smell of stagnant water to come drifting up, so I started breathing through my mouth instead of my nose.

Teams 3 and 5 were deep in the survey. Hwayeon was out ahead of them, first into the muck, turning it over as she went.

I lolled on the Space Wall and watched her and the two teams pick through the exposed ruins, and little by little I got bored. The aberrants weren't even thinking of coming closer.

"Ugh. Dig up the bottom and the fish-stink goes nuclear. The people actually doing the survey must be suffering."

I looked down with something like pity at the teams of three checking the ruins this way and that, then turned and asked Franc.

"How are the aberrants?"

"Nothing of great note has changed. Even though a third of every aberrant in the lake was slain, grade notwithstanding, the balance does not seem to have worsened."

Franc, who had been turning slowly in the air like a lighthouse, swept her gaze along the lake again and went on.

"The water fell so suddenly that it may have rattled them. A few of the crustacean aberrants have begun fighting among themselves."

"If they've started in on each other, there's nothing to worry about for a while. I'm going down to look around the ruins, so keep a close eye out in case anything comes near."

"The stench pains you, does it not? Will you truly be all right?"

"A mask should do it. I'd rather be moving than loafing around up here. Time'll go faster."

"Yes! Please leave the watch to me!"

I dismissed the Space Wall and dropped — then, picturing shoes, pants, and the rest of me caked the moment I hit that mud, I snapped a fresh Space Wall into place just above the flat and stepped onto it.

Maybe I should check the spots where I sensed Phase Power yesterday.

That morning I'd given Hwayeon a sheet marking the five places I'd felt Phase Power. She looked to be starting with the ones nearest the outpost, so I'd take the far ones.

I turned my head over the blue-black mudflat, thick with the smell of dead water, and saw fish stranded as the lake receded, flopping in the mire.

It struck me that it would be nice to talk to Hwayeon from this far off. If the Certifier had a short-range function, we could use it like a radio out here in the Phase World.

I watched her working near one of the Phase ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Power sites with two teammates, then lifted my eyes to a structure that looked like a colosseum.

The Phase Power was coming from beneath it.

The round arena ran eight hundred meters around the outside, and the inside was just as vast, its center crowded with obstacles and walls. One look at the spectator seats ringing that center and it couldn't be anything but a real colosseum.

Long years underwater had left it crumbling in places, but it must have been built to last — the shape of the whole had hardly fallen in. I started toward it.

What kind of place was the Phase World, that ruins like this were still standing? What had lived here?

I started a video recording and went in through the entrance, and the fish-stink thickened until my head hurt. The water moss, maybe…… I should have wet some tissue and plugged my nose.

I switched on Mana Vision and looked around the pitch-dark interior, sweeping the tangled structure with Spatial Perception.

The inside was less complicated than I'd expected. Entrances stood to the north, south, east, and west, linked by a circular corridor. Here and there, stairs dropped underground, and water lapped all the way up over the steps.

"The Phase Power's coming from in there……."

The First Mermaid's pearl meant I could breathe underwater, but something told me the water in that basement would be filthy, so I raised a Space Wall and wiped out every drop pooled below.

The moment I set a foot on the stairs, now laid bare, I nearly went down on the water moss. I paved them with a Space Wall and walked. The ceiling was a good three meters up, so at least I didn't have to worry about my head brushing the moss overhead.

Descending the Space Wall steps, I reached out and ran my fingers along the wall. No rough stone under my hand — only slick moss. I cleared it away, and the wall that showed through was in better shape than I'd thought.

I knocked on it the way you'd knock on a door. It didn't so much as tremble. Solid.

"Hmm……."

At the bottom of the stairs a long corridor opened. Not a thread of light reached this far down, but Mana Vision made it easy enough to confirm things with my own eyes. Checking the world through Spatial Perception alone always left me uneasy.

Drip…… drip…….

Water falling from the ceiling put a chill up my back, so I shook the creepiness off by stealing a look at bare skin — Franc, diligently keeping watch overhead, and Hwayeon, hard at the survey.

The passage was about four meters high and three wide. It didn't feel like a building made for people to walk. Judging by the seats, the city's residents had been close to human in size, and this corridor was far larger than that.

It slanted a little. The ground must have gone soft, and the colosseum itself had tipped.

Past the long, straight run, an underground plaza opened out. Bone-white fragments I couldn't identify lay scattered across the floor, and fish that had met the disaster of vanishing water thrashed where they lay, making a racket.

The surrounding structure looked like a prison. Spatial Perception of the interior said the passage over there would let you out into the arena itself, so this was probably where they'd kept things like gladiator slaves.

Monsters, criminals — locked in here and hauled out whenever a match began? I looked over what was left of the bars, nothing but their roots now. They'd been more than fifty centimeters thick.

An aberrant wasn't something you held with bars that heavy…… Maybe it had been people. Or animals.

I moved on, toward the passage that led deeper. The Phase Power was coming from inside it.

At the end of the corridor was a room bigger than a decent office for twenty, its floor a litter of wood scraps rotted soft and pulped by the water.

The Phase Power lay under a heap of that rotten, collapsed wood, dead center in the room.

The pile looked like the sort of thing that would give you a disease if you touched it, so I erased the lot with a Space Wall, took hold of the Heavenly Cloud Sword at my waist, and carefully brushed aside what little wreckage remained. An iron plate came clear, thick with rust and choked with water moss.

Clang. Clang.

I rapped the plate with the sword, and a sharp ring of metal filled the room. I didn't have the knowledge to learn anything from the sound of steel, so I reached out to put my hand on it…….

Wooooooong—

……and a vibration rose out of the plate, and with it a droning hum.

At the sudden shudder, clumps of rust and moss broke off, and the instant something like the ridiculous magic circles I'd obsessed over in my chuunibyou days lay exposed, the circle blazed purple and belched pitch-black smoke with a hiss.

"What the—!?"

I scrambled back from the circle spewing ominous violet and black smoke, ripped the Heavenly Cloud Sword from its sheath, and glared at the smoke pouring into the air and drawing together.

Is that poison? The look of it is a lot like my sister's darkness-attribute barrier.

I concentrated the Mana Sieve through my body, ready to erase the whole thing with a Space Wall if I had to. The black smoke kept condensing until it began to take the faint shape of a person.

A fierce blue light poured from two points I took for eyes. Something about it turned my stomach. Just clear it away with a Space Wall?

While I was weighing that, the air in the narrow room trembled, and with a wind-sound like scraping metal a voice began to come into my head.

Huh? What is this, a video plate? An idle thought, and I listened to the voice spilling out with the scrape of metal.

"Ghk—! That is disgusting!"

I'd been listening properly, and this was no better than a jumpscare……. The voice stretched, warped, and turned into something that crawled up my spine, and I grimaced down at the plate.

The violet pouring off it began to thin, and the black fog gathered into a person's shape thinned with it. Before long the fog was gone entirely.

The violet light spilling from the magic circle drawn in red vanished as well. I was a little curious about the rest of the story, but the fog was gone, and I had no desire to sit through another skin-crawling scare just to hear it.

Wary, I crept closer, lifted the Heavenly Cloud Sword, and rapped the plate — and yelped.

"Agh—?!"

Fssssht!

Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang!

Irritated, I hammered the plate again, and the smoke drew together once more. A clear voice spilled out. Don't tell me this thing plays back when it takes in TP or Phase Power?

The figure of the fog-person, black mist drawn together, slowly came apart, and the violet pouring from the magic circle slowly died with it.

"Hmm. So they pulled every filthy stunt there is in the colosseum, earned the wrath of this Earth Lord, went under, and the place turned into a lake? Then everything that's submerged used to be a city?"

I called up the size of the lake for a moment. ……A city more than four times the landmass of Korea.

The Phase Power was coming off this plate, so maybe I'd just take the plate. I swept the area around it with Spatial Perception for anything like a device, then carefully took hold of it…….

"Enough."

A magic circle with a recording in it, just as I thought. I keep Mana Mode or the Mana Sieve running all the time, so touching it must have tripped the playback.

I ignored the black-fog figure launching into the same speech as before and carefully pried the iron plate — about the size of my torso — up off the floor. And once it came free, there underneath it was a treasure chest, rusted to hell.

A rectangular box, fifty centimeters long, thirty wide, thirty tall.

Moss-crusted, platinum in color, with what looked like gems studded all over it — finely worked, that much was obvious at a glance. A treasure chest. It had to be.

I lifted it and opened the lid. Sure enough: tarnished things like coins, stones of one sort and another with Phase Power in them, what looked like gems. Treasure, packed to the brim.

Only six stones. What are these? Not Phase Stones…… Phase Power in them, and stored with gems and gold coins, so they have to be worth something.

I poured out the water standing in the chest and shut the lid. Coins and gems alike were furred with water moss, but restoration was a job for a specialist, and that would be the end of it.

The outside was a little rusted, but it didn't look ready to crumble if I handled it. I tucked the chest under my arm, gathered up the plate, and made my way back out of the colosseum.

What was this mass of desire that had wiped out a vast city supposed to be? The tremor had sounded like a tsunami rolling in. Maybe they'd just had rotten luck and been swept under.

I pictured, briefly, a wave scouring an enormous land, and a chill shot up my spine.

Seen through Spatial Perception, the sunken ruins looked somehow severed. So had there been a city on the submarine plain beneath those continental dunes? But yesterday, while I was clearing aberrants, Spatial Perception hadn't shown a single building.

Hmm. A shift in the crust must have turned the whole thing over.

Out of the colosseum, I felt Franc's eyes on me from where she hung in the air. She wanted to know what the chest under my arm was, and the plate in my hand.

I met her look and gave the plate a little shake. She smiled and waved back. Then I headed for Hwayeon, who had found something and was carefully raking the ground, digging it out.

She was excavating with two women, one water-attribute and one earth-attribute, clearing mudflat and talking with them as she went. The black box tee she wore over her tights-armor was caked with mud all the way up to her chest, and a certain imagination of mine stirred whether I wanted it to or not.

Anyway, this was one of the five places I'd marked — a building of stone and timber, the sort of thing you'd have seen in medieval Europe, sunk in the mire.

The timber that made up the house had rotted to mush, though. This wasn't a job for the careful brushwork of a dig. They were going to have to scoop the whole thing out.

The water-attribute member noticed me coming, tapped Hwayeon's shoulder, and pointed. Hwayeon turned, came toward me, and fixed on the plate and the chest in my hands.

"What's that?"

"The Phase Power that was at ten o'clock in the sunken ruins. This is what it was."

She was more interested in the plate than in the chest. The two women, just as caked in mud as she was, seemed to find the jewel box under my arm a good deal more interesting.

I turned the plate so the magic circle came into their view, and they startled.

"A relic!"

"It's a relic!"

"A relic. Did you check what it is?"

"Yeah. Watch. Pour Phase Power in here, and—"

"—it plays back. Like that."

"A historical relic!"

Hwayeon startled and came at me with her hands out, then saw the mud packed on them and asked the water-attribute woman hurrying up behind her to spray some water.

The woman — short hair, black shot through here and there with a watery sheen — made water and washed Hwayeon's hands, and Hwayeon took the plate from me.

Hwayeon watched the black-fog figure rising off the plate with a grave face and began listening, hard, to every word it spoke. The two members had far more curiosity to spare for the chest under my arm than for the plate.

"Master? That — is that, maybe, a treasure… chest?"

"Treasure! Treasure!"

"It is a treasure chest. Gold coins, silver coins, and a lot of gems."

"Kyaa! Treasure! Actual treasure!"

"Jackpot! A Phase World historical relic, and a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠treasure chest on top of it! Total jackpot!"

The two of them were making a fuss and clearly wanted a look inside, so I shook my head — too heavy to open up out here — and turned to Hwayeon.

"You planning to dig that buried building out?"

"Mm. This seems to be the place you said you felt Phase Power, so I'm marking it."

"Aren't you a little too covered in mud?"

Hwayeon and the two ability users looked down at their mud-plastered selves, sheepish, and then looked at me — clean, standing on a Space Wall — with a distinctly prim displeasure.

"Can't be helped. It's nothing but mudflat. Walk a little and you're caked."

She handed the plate back and looked up at Franc, high in the sky.

"You left the watch to Franc."

"Yeah. I'll drop the chest and the plate off at the outpost."

"No. I'll go with you. It'll be lunch soon. We need to head back."

"So this afternoon we're going all-in on the dig?"

"Yes. With you watching over us, Seoha, I'm thinking of bringing in every supporter and excavating quickly."

Fair enough. Survey and excavation had been the point to begin with. Better to knock it out fast and get home early, if we could. At Hwayeon's signal, the eleven teams of three scattered across the ruins came in toward us.

At the outpost, lunch was already well underway.

My sister took one look at the two finds and lit up. She called in the team leaders and squad leaders and played the plate again inside the meeting tent.

They held their breath and listened to the smoke-figure until the playback ended, then marveled one after another, studying the magic circle now that the moss was gone, trading opinions.

"This is incredible, isn't it? Setting aside how anyone even made an iron plate like this, it seems to be the first object that clearly proves intelligent life……."

"Just as Team Leader Woo Soo-hoon says. We've cleared ruins and sites before, and artworks have come out of the ground, but there's never been an object that proves intelligent beings this unambiguously."

So the genial-looking leader of Team 3 is named Woo Soo-hoon.

The leader of Team 5 kept those sharp eyes fixed, unblinking, on the black-fog figure still playing itself out under the Phase Power.

"More than that…… the story coming from that smoke-person…… bothers me……."

The slightly plump leader of Support Team 1 opened her mouth in a hushed voice, the words spaced out. As far as I could tell, it was the first time she'd spoken in yesterday's meeting or today's.

Jung Tae-ryung, leader of Support Team 2, spoke with a troubled face.

"Does 'the Hurling of the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Essence' mean they set it off packed with malice? The city going under — a natural cataclysm summoned by human hands?"

"The siting of the sunken ruins is strange, too. Cities are usually raised on plains, or on high ground, but the ruins were clearly built underground."

"Couldn't that location be something that came later? The ground collapsing, or subsiding."

I listened to the leaders and squad leaders and tilted my head.

The black fog did seem to be explaining how this lake had come to be. I just wasn't sure it mattered. Perhaps she read it on my face. My sister spoke, quiet.

"This is nothing but history, literally. It'll be an important message for historians of the Phase World, but what we need to do right now, I think, is eat lunch and excavate the sunken ruins."

"Understood. Then I'll report the survey results my Team 3 members brought back."

Park Yoon-ho, genial and handsome, rose and spoke while glancing at a few notes.

"First, the sector Team 3 was assigned — from twelve o'clock to four, using the tower at the center of the ruins as our reference……."

From there the leaders of Teams 3 and 5 went on about the geology, the architectural style, how little of it looked like it would turn a profit, only a handful of metal goods.

A gloom had started to settle over the tent after the reports when Jung Tae-ryung, leader of Team 2, opened her mouth in that husky voice.

"They say a famous feast leaves the table bare, and they weren't kidding. Aside from the treasure chest the Master found and the aberrant corpses he brought down, this place is as hollow as a puffed cracker — pitiful enough to make you cry. On the way out to Asumpfre Sunken Lake, I had an asumpre feeling this would happen. A dim one, you might say."

"Heh heh heh."

"A young lady like you, Tae-ryung, and dad jokes of all things……."

"Hehe."

The mood lifted all at once, and Hwayeon clapped her hands to gather them in.

"There's no need to be quite so disappointed. The Master is unmatched not only in combat, but in detection as well. He says Phase Power is being sensed at five locations in the sunken ruins right now. The treasure chest and the iron plate he brought in are one of them."

"Hahh—"

"No way."

"You're saying four more jackpots like that are still out there?"

"That's our Master."

The team leaders and squad leaders couldn't hide their awe.

I said I felt Phase Power. I never said jackpot.

"I understand Squad Leader 1's unease, but this is a situation that survives only as a record. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with us. Everyone, eat lunch, rest for thirty minutes, and then as planned Team 3 will guard the outpost while the rest of you begin excavation at one. Depending on how the dig goes, I'm prepared to work through the night, so I hope you'll all give it everything you have."

"Yes!!"

Hwayeon closed the meeting, and the leaders poured out of the tent with excitement blooming all over their faces.

"Is 'there's a place giving off Phase Power' really something to be that happy about?"

"Items that hold Phase Power are useful, most of them, and expensive. Look at the Heavenly Cloud Sword you're carrying right now. And this plate — I couldn't begin to guess how historians and the phase-studies people would drool over it."

"Hmm."

"Honestly. You're a man, and you haven't got a scrap of greed or ambition in you? You get a power like that, you ought to study the field a little. Add up every byproduct from this hunt and it still won't be worth this one iron plate."

Ambition? What's that even supposed to be? I'm perfectly happy if I can slack off with my lovers.

"You just thought you want to loaf around and have fun, didn't you? Keep dreaming~."

"……Why."

I grumbled it while thinking how satisfying it would be to smack that annoying, running mouth, and my sister giggled and got to her feet.

"Even if you want ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to sit still, the world isn't going to leave you alone."

Franc chuckled and left the tent with her. Hwayeon snorted a laugh, picked up the plate, and stepped out after them.

"Seriously. When Sis talks like that, it actually gives me the chills."

A surge of irritation hit me, and I nearly opened a hole right under her feet and dropped her in…… but the aftermath scared me, so I didn't.

Someday a moment's going to come when I can really, properly get her.