What the Moonlight Revealed
“...is that correct?”
“We'll handle that ourselves. There comes a time when a site needs resupplying with materials and personnel. As it happens, we depart tomorrow morning, so you can simply wait in your quarters and rest up.”
The next morning, Alan stepped outside the research base and found a carriage waiting. Harnessed to it was an enormous bear—a giant ground sloth of a beast, an Arctotherium so massive it could have swallowed a man's upper body in a single bite.
“You're putting it to good use after we found that artifact for you last time, I see.”
“Tame a creature of the primeval forest and you never have to spend magic stones on it. If I need it, I make it mine; once it's served its purpose—swish.”
Taylor drew a thumb across his throat. Just then, a voice spoke up beside them. Curiously enough, it belonged to a mage wearing glasses.
“Ah, it's you all from before. We've been putting that Oopart you recovered to excellent use.”
“So even primeval forest creatures draw their energy from food?”
“Whether we feed them rations or force nutrient solutions into them, tamed beasts slowly lose their strength regardless. It's a pity, really.”
Though Alan had asked out of nowhere, the mage answered courteously. Taylor's earlier remark came to mind, but there was not the slightest trace of such sentiment now.
The mage gestured toward the bear-drawn carriage.
“I know it's not comfortable, but please bear with it in there for a while. This carriage was prepared especially for you.”
“A carriage pulled by a bear... so a bearriage?”
The mage offered no reply to Taylor's quip and simply opened the carriage door. The moment Alan's party climbed inside, the door shut behind them.
There were no windows, so they couldn't see outside, and mana detection proved useless as well. Even when Alan switched on his mana-wave scanner, the waves only echoed back from within.
“I suppose they really do intend to keep it secret.”
“Still, Brother Lorenzo keeps his promises, at least.”
“If someone lies as easily as breathing, what are their hands and feet going to do? Deception has its place now and then, but this isn't the time for it. And even when it is, it should feel like it's for your subordinates' sake.”
“You're quite right, Brother. If they deceived us now, it would only leave us with the impression that they're petty toward their own people.”
“Glad you understand. It's not as if the magic tower's going to collapse just because we poke around a ruin a bit.”
The carriage moved at a fair clip. Despite the shock-absorption magic, it jolted considerably.
Alan closed his eyes and tried to pin down their location—even as the carriage kept twisting and turning, perhaps deliberately to throw him off.
Taylor asked quietly.
“Staying cooped up in here is boring. Any idea where we are?”
“Looks like the 27th floor.”
The 27th floor, like the 26th with its maggot infestation, unfolded into mountains and rugged terrain. It was so extreme that a saying often made the rounds: if you could smooth out all those wrinkles, the floor would be two or three times larger than any other level of the primeval forest.
In the middle of their conversation, a sensation of floating washed over them, and the carriage door swung open. It was the bespectacled mage who had first shown them in.
“We've arrived.”
The place where the ruin stood looked like a slice of the primeval forest—yet there was a moon in the sky. It was utterly unlike the usual scenery, where the never-setting sun was simply a fact of life.
Magic lanterns had been installed here and there, bathing the surroundings in bright light, and thanks to that, the exterior of the square building that must be the ruin was clearly visible. It was enormously wide and tall.
“Investigate as you please, but do not stray from this area. The return date is in seven days, or thirty days—”
“Thirty days, please.”
Alan answered immediately and headed into the ruin. Taylor and Shiva followed suit.
They wandered about, but the interior of the ruin was immaculately clean. There was a reason Lorenzo had so brazenly declared that anything he found there was theirs to take.
As he roamed, Alan spoke up.
“This looks like a military facility.”
“Why do you think that?”
“What other kind of place would make such efficient use of matter transmission?”
“There are distribution hubs and transit stations too. Though I'll admit, that workshop we passed earlier does bother me if that's your theory.”
“A facility like the one you described wouldn't have a workshop, sir. And also—”
“Also what?”
Standing in the center of the square hall, Alan pointed to a door on one side. To anyone's eye, the door bore unmistakable signs of careful craftsmanship.
“See the writing on that door?”
“It's all blurry, like fog.”
“It says Commander's Office.”
The moment they stepped inside, a mural came into view. It depicted a dragon and a dragonkin, along with people.
— End of The Key (5) —
— Dream (1) —
Dragons and dragonkin were regarded as transcendent life-forms on the strength of the traces alone they left behind. Their knowledge exceeded all imagination, and whenever one of their lairs was discovered, nations themselves stepped in to place the entire region under direct control.
Though the two differed in appearance, at their root they were the same. Only their habitats differed.
Dragons lived mainly on the Eastern Continent, while dragonkin made their home on the Western Continent. The New Continent, where the Soldos Federation stood, was split evenly between the two.
Of course, that was merely what scholars inferred from the dwellings and relics they left behind; the truth remained known to no one.
Alan took in the mural that greeted him the moment he entered the commander's office. The wall bearing the mural had no windows—only the two side walls did—and moonlight streaming through one of them was falling upon the painting.
The silence that stretched on for a while was finally broken by Shiva.
“This painting feels strangely familiar. I have a memory of seeing something quite similar in the pyramid that burrowed underground.”
“That's right. The dragon golem and the golden soldiers were waiting for the explorers there, weren't they.”
The composition of the pyramid's murals and this one was alike. The dragons and dragonkin were painted in the upper portion, the people below.
“It seems to be an attempt to express some kind of hierarchy.”
“Ruler and ruled can hardly sit at the same table. Whether back in their day or now, some things never change.”
“Rulers? Why do you think so?”
“A gut feeling? The people are prostrate, and the dragons and dragonkin are looking down on them with utter arrogance. It's hard to tell expressions apart when they're not even human, but somehow that's the impression I get.”
Alan studied the mural again. Looking at it carefully, there was plenty of room to apply Taylor's interpretation.
“Could the Labyrinth have been made by dragons?”
“It's possible. The evidence of their transcendence can be found in the things they left behind, after all.”
“If that's true, then at the very deepest part of the Labyrinth, there might be a mana fusion furnace running on a dragon heart or a Yeouiju.”
“Or perhaps something built on a form of magic engineering even superior to the fusion furnace.”
If the speculation was right—why had they built the Labyrinth? And why had they buried the Undergrounders, who had once served or lived alongside them, down inside it?
As those questions churned through his mind, a certain thought surfaced without warning.
“Whatever the reason or the process, it seems the two groups split apart and fought each other.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because the pyramid where the dragon golem and golden soldiers slumbered was a facility designed with intruders in mind, and this place is a military facility. And the difference in the murals and carvings is stark, too.”
“I see what you mean, Brother Alan. The carvings in the pyramid each carried a sense of prosperity and reverence, of dominion and submission.”
“Yes. And here there's a mural expressing dominion and submission.”
Moreover, the phrases Alan had found in the Ooparts were different as well.
Grant us the veil that shall shroud the radiance.
Grant us the lamp that shall light the darkness.
One had wished to drive out the light; the other had wished to chase away the dark.
That said, Alan didn't harden the thought that had come to him. When thinking flows in only one direction, it becomes difficult to exercise the flash of creativity.
An open mind and creativity were virtues essential to scholars, mages, and magitech engineers alike.
Alan gave up on admiring the mural and headed for the desk where, he surmised, the commander had once conducted his business.
The mages under Lorenzo had evidently searched the place thoroughly—the commander's office was truly spotless. They seemed to have taken away everything that could be taken.
Every drawer of the desk hung open, and even the safe hidden beneath it proudly displayed its empty interior.
“Those wicked people...”
“Can't be helped. Given their line of work, they can hardly leave anything they lay eyes on.”
“Spiritually speaking, I imagine they wanted to peel off the mural as well.”
When Alan twisted hard at the corner of the desk with his fingers, a splinter of wood broke away. The walls, on the other hand, refused to budge no matter how he knocked at them or tried to score them.
“The framework and the walls are just like any ordinary part of the Labyrinth. Which is probably why they left the mural alone.”
“It might be the law that explorers cannot destroy the Labyrinth at work—or it could be some technology we don't know about that makes it this durable.”
“Oh, that does make sense.”
“Let's drop the complicated theories and focus on the job at hand. Is there anything here we could take for ourselves?”
“One moment, please.”
Alan shifted the empty desk and bookshelves this way and that, straining to find anything unusual. If there was some object the mages had yet to discover, the odds were high that it would be here—this was the commander's office, after all.
Several hours after his eyes had begun to burn with concentration, Alan was still circling the room, while Taylor and Shiva sat admiring the mural.
“Alan, take a break already, will you?”
“Indeed. Clear your head, and something new may come into view. The moonlight happens to be coming in through the opposite window just now.”
The eastern moon had drifted westward. Since the ruin's location knew an eternal night, when one moon set another simply rose in its place.
As Alan turned his head toward the opposite window, he saw the next moon peeking slightly over the horizon. This ruin was repeating the same hour over and over. Or perhaps it had been preserved, taxidermied in glass, from some era when only moons existed.
With his mind resting for the moment, his gaze naturally drifted back to the mural. Two moons poured their light through the windows on either side into the commander's office, and those lights caressed the painting.
In that instant, Alan spotted something glimmering within the mural. The Yeouiju clutched in the dragon's jaws stood out conspicuously.
Alan shot to his feet, and Taylor asked:
“What? What is it?”
“Can you see the mural?”
“Thanks to the moonlight, the mood is killing it, sure.”
“And you, Brother Shiva?”
“I share much the same impression.”
Unlike Alan, the two seemed to have detected no change. Alan hurried over and rubbed at the portion of the mural where the Yeouiju was painted.
Beep?
After he'd been at it for a long while, Box and Panther, who had been idling nearby, drifted over to watch what their master was doing.
Despite Alan's efforts, nothing special happened. And yet the Yeouiju was still glowing.
Through the window, the moon could be seen creeping steadily along. Before long, the western moon would vanish and only one moonlight would remain—and then this phenomenon, too, would hide itself away.
The Labyrinth's language is no use. Then... the Taylor Cultivation Method?
If the golden soldiers had not attacked back in the pyramid when Alan employed the Taylor Cultivation Method, then that meant the mana transformed by the method applied to the Labyrinth as well—or so he reasoned.
The moment he drew up his mana, three rings formed over his face, overlapping at the glabella and creating a bright light. Since his visor was raised, the light from his brow fell directly upon the mural.
The light Alan generated and the moonlight met.
Normally, when light is cast upon light, the two merge into one. This time was different. The light and the light were visibly pushing each other apart.
As Alan concentrated his mana even harder, the moonlight was steadily driven back. It resembled a snowman melting away under the sun.
The instant the light streaming from his brow completely enveloped the Yeouiju—
KWA-BOOM!
An explosion erupted without warning. The shockwave was powerful enough to slam Alan's Power Suit-clad body into the wall.
“Alan!”
“Brother!”
The two who had been relaxing leapt up in alarm and rushed to Alan's side.
Contrary to their fears, Alan rose to his feet unharmed. A blue mana shield rippled across the surface of the Power Suit—though it shuddered violently, as if laced with static.
“Mother's love, aid me!”
As Shiva hastily chanted his holy art, his hands flooded white. Healing energy seeped slowly into Alan's body. Anyone else would have absorbed it at once, but with Alan's Mana Overload, the process took a little time.
“I'm fine.”
“Even so, an impact of that magnitude may have injured you internally.”
Shiva, with his shaggy beard and hair, looked for all the world like a mountain bandit—yet only his eyes resembled a deer's. When those bright, gentle eyes hardened with resolve, Alan too took a step back.
Taylor glanced once at the mural, then turned to Alan.
“What on earth just happened? And you—how's your body?”
“Like I said a moment ago, I'm fine. Something was hidden in the mural. Apparently none of the mages who explored this ruin knew the Labyrinth's language. And even if they had, they wouldn't have been able to draw it out the way I did.”
The discovery was the product of the Labyrinth's language and the Taylor Cultivation Method combined. Only two people in all the world knew the cultivation method—