The Burning Tree
In its original state, it would have been a grail of refined yet unsettling beauty, its surface etched with intricate crimson patterns.
But now it was so thoroughly blackened that I couldn't tell whether fire had scorched it, some curse had corrupted it, or time itself had simply rotted it through. Only the faintest red aura still clung to it.
And inside, a liquid darker still than the cup that held it.
The thought hit me the moment I saw it.
Black mana. The power of an Outer God.
"Treasure…!"
I brushed past Rice, who had sucked in a startled breath, and approached the grail.
Then, carefully, I reached for it.
Just in case some alien force would shove me back the second I tried to touch it.
But there was no resistance at all, all the way through lifting the grail into my hands.
I studied the liquid inside closely.
In a room empty of everything but this altar, where on earth had this liquid come from — and how?
I gave the cup a gentle swirl. The liquid lapped lightly against the sides, sending out delicate ripples. It looked no different from ordinary water clouded with ink.
I wrapped my index finger in Su-ui, dipped it into the liquid as if scooping some up, then withdrew it.
Nothing happened.
…Drinking it would be pushing it.
Curiosity burned hot, but if this really was the Outer God power I suspected, swallowing it would be pure stupidity.
My gaze swung back to Rice.
He flinched hard all of a sudden, as if he'd sensed something on his own.
"Surely you don't mean to use me as a test subject…"
I shook my head at once. Of course not.
"For now, I want this grail left completely alone."
"Y-yes… I'll guard it."
"I heard you came here wanting the ancient treasures that come out of this place. If you so much as touch this…"
"I have no desire to go blind with greed and leave my bones in a dungeon."
Thankfully, he wasn't that foolish. The title of one of the Five Stars wasn't wasted on him.
I nodded in satisfaction and left the room.
I meant to find Ren, who was still searching the other chambers, and bring him back.
Fortunately, Ren turned up quickly.
"Is something the matter? Have you found treasure, by any chance?"
"Yeah, looks like it. But…"
I'd wanted to hold off on Bedeia for the moment, but whether it was the bishop's orders or sheer duty, she was already glued to Ren's side with no intention of peeling away.
When I shot a sidelong glance at her, Ren tilted his head.
Unable to invent a decent excuse, I simply brought them both back to the room with the grail.
"Ah."
The moment Ren saw the grail and the black liquid inside it, his expression shifted in a subtle way.
He took in the situation without a word, flicked a late glance at Bedeia, then schooled his face and stepped closer to the grail.
I stood beside him and spoke.
"Neither the grail nor the liquid reacts to being touched. So I'd like to take it out just as it is."
I wanted to know what this black liquid was for, what effects it had — and how it had come to fill this cup in the first place.
If it was a substance that only formed in the special environment of a dungeon, there was nothing to be done about that.
"In that case, there is a method."
Ren answered briefly, stepped out of the room, and returned shortly with one of his clan members.
At some quiet order, the member produced a blue cube-shaped object from his coat.
When he gripped the top and bottom of the cube with both hands and pulled, it opened with a metallic click. Between the halves, an empty space appeared, sealed by a transparent membrane like glass.
"A device for preserving objects in their original form. What is commonly called an artifact."
Tools that had undergone magical processing to gain special abilities, he explained, were known as artifacts.
"Is there anything else you wish to examine first?"
"Just a moment."
I set the grail in the exact center of the altar, then tilted it ever so slightly to let a single drop of the liquid fall onto the stone. When nothing changed, I handed it over to the clan member.
He carefully lifted the grail and placed it inside the cube. No matter how hard he shook it afterward, the liquid inside the cup didn't so much as quiver — as if it had been completely sealed.
Before we left the room, Ren sent everyone else out ahead of us. Once we were alone, he spoke.
"The black liquid… it seemed connected to the Outer Gods, so you were worried Bedeia might set her sights on it, weren't you?"
"Something like that. Anything belonging to the Black Moon is hard even to touch, so I figured that kind of thing was better left to an investigation. But this isn't the same."
"You needn't worry. Because this was discovered inside a dungeon, even the Luen Order will have difficulty laying hands on it freely. That's probably why Bedeia said nothing. At least not where anyone can see…"
Ren trailed off meaningfully, then let out a short laugh.
"Of course, they could always request a 'conversation' through other means — but with you, Bell, I doubt there's anything to fear."
Whatever that "conversation" meant, it clearly wasn't the ordinary kind — or the pleasant kind.
It was hard to imagine a church that served the Light Goddess, the state religion no less, stooping to anything sordid. But thinking of the modern world, the behavior of a religion with secular power wasn't so hard to understand.
Our talk finished, we left the room and resumed searching the others.
We spent a long time carefully clearing out dozens of chambers.
At first I'd worried the spaces would all be empty, but that fear proved unfounded. There were rooms heaped with gold coins and jewels buried under thick layers of dust, as if sealed away for ages. Beyond the grail, we also found two more objects carrying the same alien aura unique to this dungeon.
One was a codex bound in blackened, scorched leather. Strange drawings — whether language or pattern, I couldn't tell — twisted across its surface.
No one present could make sense of them. Even Pria, who had studied ancient tongues and claimed partial knowledge of them, couldn't decipher a thing.
The other was a metal seal. Small and shaped to fit comfortably in the hand, it bore red patterns on its surface with no sign of scorching.
When held, an unidentifiable warmth seeped into the palm — a gentle heat even an ordinary person could grip without harm.
What it was for, no one knew. Pria said she would research it and report back.
The treasures found here, three alien objects of unknown nature, and the mana stones harvested from the beasts we'd felled along the way — taken together, it was a haul worthy of a calamity-class dungeon.
Granted, I'd pulverized several of the powerful beasts guarding each gate so thoroughly that some mana stones hadn't survived. Even accounting for that, the yield was more than enough. We'd found reward chambers that rarely appeared in dungeons to begin with.
And aside from the three objects charged with alien power, the bulk of the remaining treasure would go to the Deep Night Clan.
That, perhaps, was why the mixed feelings among the raid party were so plainly visible.
Normally, someone would have needed to settle the mood before facing a boss floor. I didn't need to bother.
I stood before the last remaining great door.
It was built to open to one side. The moment my hand touched it, the surface flared scorching hot, heating like molten lava.
A searing heat that felt ready to melt flesh spread through my fingertips from nothing more than contact.
I hadn't expected a trap like that — but that was all it was.
I ignored it and shoved the door sideways with force.
A heavy grind.
The door scraped across the ground as it moved.
And through the slowly widening gap, a sight completely unlike the darkness-choked floors we'd come through unfolded before us.
The entire space was already brilliantly lit, every detail of the interior sharp and clear.
The cause was obvious.
The presence standing tall at the very center of the chamber.
…A tree?
It was a tree, blazing with fire.
A colossal giant of a tree, so vast it defied belief — the sight the entire raid party faced after the great door opened.
Where green leaves should have grown, orange flames burned fiercely. Only there, precisely at those points.
That such a massive tree could have grown from the middle of this hard floor was hard enough to accept. A tree whose branch tips alone were on fire?
And nowhere was there any beast that might have served as a boss.
Then, in that moment, I felt something hot burrow into my body.
It was an ember. No — a seed of heat.
A seed of unknown origin, planted by means I couldn't begin to guess.
It ignited inside me at once, and the heat flooded through my entire body.
My whole frame began to warm, slowly and steadily.
I wasn't the only one reacting.
Everyone facing the tree.
Rice, Ren, Pria, even the members of the other clans — their eyes were all wavering.
The same seed of heat, planted in each of us.
The heat rose without pause, without mercy.
"W-what is this…"
"Everyone, take your cooling pills — now!"
Ren's shout cracked through the air.
At his words, everyone frantically dug through their coats, pulled out round pills, and tossed them into their mouths.
The slight steadiness returning to Ren's eyes told me the medicine was working.
Instead of taking a pill, I wrapped my whole body in Cheong-ui. It worked just as well.
As the heat that had been sizzling against my skin like cooking flesh began to subside, I focused Cheong-ui hard against the seed of heat that had burrowed inside me.
It resisted, shoving back against the Cheong-ui as if it possessed a will of its own.
But when I finally layered Cheong-ui over it with everything I had, the heat dwindled bit by bit, and the defiant seed lost its strength the way a flame goes out.
That was when it came.
"You are not yet qualified…"
A voice that rang from deep within my mind, as if someone were whispering directly into my thoughts.
It faded gradually, thinning out like the dying ember in my body, and then was gone.
Not qualified? Not qualified for what?
I was instinctively turning the meaning of the voice over in my head when I stopped short.
That phrase. I was certain of it.
I might not know the voice, but those words — you are not yet qualified.
I had heard them somewhere before.
It was the same thing the voice had said in the Forbidden Zone, the moment I reached the area around the citadel — the words that had suddenly rung through my mind.
You have not yet arrived. You are not qualified. Turn back.
The meaning was the same.
What the qualification was for, and what being judged it, I still didn't know. But those voices were wary of me.
Wary of whatever it was I was trying to reach.
No… the voice at the citadel almost seemed to be waiting for me. Was that just my imagination?
Complicated thoughts tangled through my head as the heat in my body finally died completely.
At the same time, fire began to spread across the entire giant tree, which until then had burned only at its branches. The flames raced up the trunk, and in an instant the whole thing blazed up, crumbled to ash, and vanished.
And just like that, the calamity-class dungeon raid came to an anticlimactic end.