Lake of Mana
Lake of Mana
'Found it...'
Had it been ten days since I set foot on Chinese soil? Or maybe not quite that long.
At last, I had found the Lake of Mana I had been searching for all this time.
'Its location... is more conspicuous than I expected.'
I let out a relieved sigh and took in my surroundings.
The dungeon was situated in the middle of a cliff face so sheer it might as well have been a right angle.
A cave-like opening gaped in the cliffside, and inside, a fog so thick rolled in that the naked eye could not distinguish what lay ahead.
I raised a hand and idly stirred it. The dreamlike mist scattered this way and that, following my gesture.
'Oh...'
A cool, clear sensation washed over me. My body gave a faint shiver, as though I had dipped my hand into ice water.
I stepped into the fog.
The mist swallowed me. The feeling that had begun at my arm spread across my whole body.
Breathing grew easier, and my chest felt wide open and clean.
An unbidden smile tugged at my lips, as if the exhaustion of the past several days was being wiped away all at once.
'The mana purity is high.'
This fog was composed of mana.
Not ordinary mana, but mana of exceptionally high purity.
The difference was stark enough that the mixed, impure mana outside felt like water stained with grime by comparison.
The fog was seeping from deeper inside the cave.
As I ventured further in, the fog thickened.
At a certain point, my feet halted.
I reached out and tapped the empty air. A hard, transparent wall met my touch.
It was a dungeon barrier wall, meant to ward off outside intrusion.
'Thank goodness. I found it, at least...'
A sigh of relief escaped me before I knew it.
China's landmass is insanely vast.
Finding a single dungeon entrance within it is a challenge.
If I mobilized the Observation Authority, it would be possible, sure, but within the span of a single vacation? Honestly, I'd been a little uneasy when I asked myself that question.
It wasn't as if I had simply roamed without rest, pinpointing locations the whole time. I had gotten up to quite a few side errands along the way.
Mopping up scum like the Death God Cult, dealing with monsters left unchecked, performing basic relief work here and there...
To juggle all that, I had crisscrossed back and forth between uninhabited zones overrun by monsters and regions where people actually lived.
My travel route had easily multiplied several times over. Frankly, I had worried it would take too long.
What if it turned out to be another fruitless venture, like last time in Sipnaha? The concern had lingered, but luckily, I found it early.
'My luck is good.'
I finally got to say it.
A soft laugh escaped me as I tapped the barrier wall.
It should have gone this way in Sipnaha too...
Frankly, my luck in Sipnaha had been abysmal. Not just unlucky, but a journey packed with sheer misfortune.
Nothing went properly right, and a bizarre catastrophe swept in, sending me across the Sanzu River and back.
It was enough to make me wonder if the world simply hated me.
'No point regretting it now.'
Venting about it now wouldn't change anything. If anything, finding it so easily this time might warrant a bow of thanks to the heavens.
Along with that idle thought, I gave the barrier a few more knocks.
A dungeon is fundamentally a subspace partitioned from Earth, and the line dividing the two is precisely the barrier.
And between barrier and barrier... in other words, there exist openings that serve as dungeon entrances.
Typically, an entrance manifests as a vortex. Identical to the ones at Gate Terminals.
Throw yourself into one, and you travel through a twisting passage, cross the barrier, and emerge on the other side.
What I was knocking on now was the barrier itself, not an entrance.
No swirl was visible, only a transparent wall blocking the way, its far side impossible to see.
But strictly speaking, this was the entrance.
'The Lake of Mana had infamously shitty entrances.'
Dungeons come in many types, and the Lake of Mana belongs to the category with finicky entry conditions.
Somewhere in this Chinese landmass, there are entrances leading into the Lake of Mana.
If it matched the original, there were probably two or so, and even if you found them, most of the time they would be sealed shut.
These entrances open at random, depending on timing.
You might find one after great effort, and it's closed. Or it might be open.
I had dug through the original work quite a bit, but never identified a specific trigger. They simply open and close of their own accord.
You don't need any particular supplies, either.
The condition is luck, plain and simple.
So if you truly want inside, you have to camp out in front of an entrance and wait until it opens, or smash through the barrier.
'But if you break it, all the mana scatters.'
The Lake of Mana's utility value rests on a single point.
It is filled to the brim with mana of such high purity that it's wonderfully effective for raising the Mana stat.
However, if you destroy the dungeon's barrier, which is what holds all that mana in, every bit of the pure mana inside mixes with the dregs outside.
For that reason, entering the Lake of Mana often means killing time until an entrance opens or banking on luck.
Of course...
'I'm different now.'
I focused my mind.
I placed my hand against the barrier and accepted the sensation traveling through my fingertips.
A dungeon belongs to Earth, yet is a subspace partitioned away from it.
The barrier is a wall of space that divides such domains.
'Manifest, Authority of Space.'
If it is space, I can interfere with it.
- Woooong...
My arm vibrated.
As if that had been the trigger, the surrounding space began to tremble.
The ripples spread as though a stone had been dropped with a plonk into a placid lake.
'I don't need to break it. There's no need to forcibly cleave it open.'
This was neither destruction nor severance.
A very minor correction.
I only needed to make the barrier, which normally wards away outside matter, briefly accept it.
The dungeon barrier.
I altered a portion of the barrier right in front of me.
The sensation against my palm changed. The wall, once rigid, gradually grew soft and yielding, like slime.
- Squishhh...
The hand I had placed on the barrier slowly sank in.
'Good.'
Success. My Heart Power hadn't been drained much, either. I crumpled myself up and squeezed my body into the barrier.
And at last, the wall rippled and swallowed me whole.
The distinct sense of vertigo that comes from crossing between spaces crashed over me.
.
.
.
- Shaaaaa...
The dizzy sensation subsided, and the sound of a waterfall filled my ears. The noise alone felt so refreshing, as if my head were being washed clean.
My senses returned.
I calmly unfurled Observation and pulled in the information around me.
'Oh...'
Observation flooded my awareness with details of the vicinity.
My mouth fell open in admiration.
Fitting the dungeon's name, a lake lay right nearby.
A gentle waterfall cascading down one side of the lake like a stream of water.
The lakewater, sparkling as if sprinkled with stardust, and yellow leaves brimming with vitality, floating gently upon its surface.
An expanse of green lawn wrapping around the lake.
Large gray boulders placed here and there between the patches of grass.
Trees whose trunks did not grow straight but twisted and bent this way and that, laden with yellow leaves.
A thick fog that seemed to originate from the waterfall, spreading across the dungeon with the lake at its center...
The word magnificent rose naturally to my mind.
I had seen plenty of dreamlike places before, but never one so blatantly fantastical as this.
The phrase a scene from a painting fit it well.
If you idly trawled the internet, you might just find a picture of a dreamy lake like this.
It was that beautiful.
'Hm...'
As if possessed, I walked toward the lake.
The water lapped softly at the edge, surging up in gentle ripples like waves.
I took off the mask that had been covering my face.
A cool wind rushed against my skin all at once.
- Hoooh...
It was easy to breathe. No comparison to what I had felt at the dungeon's entrance earlier.
The air I inhaled tasted sweet. Not that I actually tasted sweetness, but it was that clean, and the mana purity exceeded my imagination.
'I'm definitely in.'
No room for doubt.
This place was the Lake of Mana.
'No monsters...'
Still, I scoured my surroundings just in case. I had wondered if threats might lurk behind this beauty, but luckily, there were no monsters.
No traps, either. Once I confirmed that, I opened a subspace entrance.
'Come out.'
The space behind me split open with a crack.
From the fissure gaping left and right, spirits scattering five colors popped out one after another.
They were the lower spirits I had contracted. Because I had contracted them evenly across five attributes, their colors were uniform.
Their rank wasn't high enough yet for clear self-awareness, but they seemed to like this space, their little light-bodies shivering as they spread out in all directions.
Spirits love pure mana just the same as anyone.
That said, a few clusters of light lingered near me instead of dispersing far away.
'It's fine. You go play, too.'
- Woooong...
I stroked the wriggling lights clinging to my body a few times, and only then did they seem satisfied and follow after the spirits that had already gone ahead.
For mere clusters of light, they had quite the endearing side.
I let out a quiet laugh and examined the lake for a moment.
As the name Lake of Mana implied, this water was the very reason for the dungeon's existence.
Lakewater suffused with mana of immense purity.
Because its mana was so extraordinarily pure, this lake was an essential environment for someone like me, who faced so many twists and turns just trying to increase mana capacity.
'...It should be fine.'
No matter how much I probed with Observation, there were truly no traps.
No threat of blades suddenly bursting out to skewer my body.
Nodding to myself, I took off the robe I had been wearing.
I stripped off the equipment I wore underneath the dark robe, along with the various subspace pouches hanging from my belt, and laid them on a boulder by the lake.
I also removed the arm sleeve from my right arm. Exposing the burn scar made my skin crawl, but proper absorption made this necessary.
Instead, I kept the Sky Wing Feather on.
The Sky Wing Feather was an artifact that performed better the more pure mana it absorbed. However, it wasn't exactly a superior version of my own mana. Its capacity was greater, though, so feeding it until it was full couldn't hurt.
For some reason, it kept morphing into its winged garment form and winding itself around me, so I left it as it was and moved forward.
Once I was completely undressed, it felt as though the fog was drumming against my skin.
'Thankfully, the air is relatively warm.'
I breathed a sigh of relief and gingerly dipped the tip of my foot into the lake.
A ripple spread across the water, centered on my toes. The yellow leaves floating on the surface bobbed on the disturbance.
Thankfully, the lakewater was lukewarm.
And then, pure mana began seeping in through my skin.
'Whoa...'
A sudden shiver ran through my body.
It felt as though a warm yet cool energy was soaking into my body through my skin.
Trembling from the strange sensation, I kept moving and submerged myself in the lake.
It was quite deep. The depth let me plop down right there and have only my head poking out above the water.
The sight of my body immersed in the lakewater and my head seemingly swallowed by the fog looked rather comical.
- Pwooh...
I exhaled deeply in that state and then inhaled. Crisp air and dense, pure mana filled my lungs.
Mana was also being drawn in steadily through the lakewater enveloping my body.
'Mana Affinity.'
I pulled it in even harder.
I wasn't in a position to be leisurely.
Not content to rely on natural absorption alone, I drew in and absorbed even more mana, powered by my Unique Ability.
The absorbed mana traveled through my circuits and reached my core.
My core beat with a thud-thud. A smile rose to my face unbidden at the sensation of the core, which had heaved several times, suddenly beginning to expand.
The core that had barely grown in capacity recently was finally showing signs of growth.
'I'll have to stay a few days and bulk it up.'
I planned to visit again later, but now that I'd come all this way, I intended to milk it for all it was worth.
'The Proof of Protection... that won't emerge for a few days, I guess. For now, I'll stay until then.'
Thinking that, I sharpened my focus once more and drew in mana.
A fresh ripple spread outward, centered on me.
My body tingled faintly.
* * *
'...The plan must be postponed.'
The head of the Death God Cult, Gyeol-won, checked the relentless stream of reports detailing lost contact and ground his teeth.
Branch after branch, embedded across China to supply sacrifices, was being obliterated at lightning speed.
How many branches had crumbled in the past week alone? Easily close to a hundred.
The flow of sacrifices had hit a snag. At this rate, the ritual could not be properly carried out.
The culprit was clear.
Forces from Taesan, who had abruptly pushed into this land, were smashing apart criminal organizations of every stripe.
In the process, the Death God Cult's branches were being crushed along with them.
To be precise, they were being crushed on several separate fronts.
In one direction, especially, branches were being annihilated at an utterly insane pace.
The branches obliterated by that one bastard alone accounted for half of all those destroyed so far.
'Our positions have been exposed. What kind of vermin...!'
There was still the question of how. Even among his inner circle, no single person knew the locations of that many branches.
But such concerns were secondary now.
The reason Gyeol-won ground his teeth was because the plan he had spent the last ten-odd years preparing was at risk of being pushed back.
With the supply of sacrifices compromised, the Undead Two-Headed Poison Dragon ritual could not proceed.
Should he mobilize the remaining branches and aggressively secure more sacrifices?
No. If he did that, the Association would catch him by the tail again.
Last time, he had barely managed to slip away. If he was caught again, the Association's hounds would never let him go, not with the information from last time.
'Damn it...'
Gyeol-won gritted his teeth. Again. Last time it was the Association pressing in, and now the lunatics from Taesan had pushed in to disrupt his plans.
It was a shitty reality. His fury surged, but the reality was cold.
What Gyeol-won could do now was yield what must be yielded, cling to what must not be given up, and hunker down.
'...Very well. I have already waited more than ten years.'
What were a few years more? If he kept his head down for a few more years, they would tire themselves out and leave, just as before.
Then he could carry out the plan once more.
Gyeol-won steeled his heart with that resolve.
─Carry it out (擧行). Do it.
"......!"
Just then, a will struck down into his very soul, and Gyeol-won's eyes flew wide open. Then, without a shred of hesitation, he threw himself to his knees and slammed his head against the floor.
- Thud!
"O, O God...!"
His voice quaked with rapture and awe. He shut his eyes and pressed his head into the ground.
Even so, Gyeol-won could feel the gaze fixed upon him.
Eyes vast and expansive, as if blotting out the sky.
Yellow eyes with vertically slit pupils.
From them emanated a hierarchical gap beyond any attempt to describe.
"I shall carry out the ritual...!"
To hold the ritual now was to court danger. The Association would seize his tail, and Taesan, which was actively tearing into him, would be given not just flesh to gnaw, but vital bone.
It didn't matter. This was the command of the god he worshipped. Even if it meant giving up flesh, it did not matter in the slightest. Moreover, the god would surely have designs that a wretch like himself could never begin to foresee.
With his head still pressed to the floor, Gyeol-won felt the god's supreme stature sink into him anew, and hot tears streamed down his face.
- .......
The great eyeball watched its devotee's display with utter detachment.
The gaze held no worth for the display.
Presently, the eyeball idly shifted its gaze to meet other stares piercing toward it from the same lofty plane.
Glares thick with open hostility.
No action came from them.
It was like watching caged beasts baring their fangs, unable to lunge.
But the same was true for this side.
The restrictions had not yet loosened.
That moment was imminent, but it had not yet arrived.
The eye closed.