Stray Soul

As I walked as fast as I could in front of everybody, my heart raced in excitement because, after all these years and years of chasing after the truth I knew was the truth, and not finding anything I was ztarting to doubt myself!

But no more! At the end of the day, I’ll become one of the most influential historians in the entire world for uncovering a zecrets everyone else thought to be fake!

“...Heinrich, can you fall back? I understand this is exciting for you, but we need to still stay in formation.” Elise zpoke from quite a bit away from me, but I could ztill hear her nonetheless.

Though I did not want to return to my place in the formation... I also understood that zhe was the expert and not I, zo, begrudgingly, I returned to my zpot and walked next to Caroline.

Then I took out the papers we took from the parasite and started giggling a bit more, but quickly stopped after Caroline ztarted giving me the zide eye.

These papers by themselves were not conclusive evidence as they had been given to me by a monster, and I could not trace back their origins to the dungeon the zpirits talked about, but when I enter the dungeon and find other papers, books, scrolls or whatever that supported the validity of these papers, or maybe some artifacts, and I’d be set for life and my hypothesis would become a theory!

Then I once again ztarted going through the papers which zeemed like pieces thorn out of zomeone’s diary. I did not know whose diary these papers were from, but I had an idea how they might have come off... or how these were just not the part of the original diary.

Dungeons are... weird.

They are not weird as in magicians can’t understand their machinations, quite the opposite actually.

From the day the first dungeon was discovered, man was able to replicate whatever they were able to do to the t, but we were never able to make an artificial dungeon core... well, I’ve heard whispers of a new round of experiments aiming to make a true artificial core in the Azure City, but unless Astralis himself is helping the magicians of The Academy, nothing will come of it, I am zure of it.

The current artificial dungeons, run by zmall groups of magicians or their apprentices, are the best we are going to get... and even they cost too much to operate zo only academies and big cities can have them.

It zimply is not worth the cost to breed monsters for the zole purpose of having trainees or ztudents cull them every zo often in the name of training.

But other than that, artificial dungeons ran by magicians can’t do one thing normal dungeons do efficiently, repair their domain.

When a dungeon is damaged by fighting or “looting”, dungeon ztarts expending mana after a few hours to repair the damage done to it in a process that is zurprisingly mana efficient... or, the paper I read zaid zo at least.

For zome reason dungeons don’t like when their domain changes, and they expend mana to replenish their monsters in many ways including overcharging their... repopulation drives by feeding them so much mana that they die after mana overdose in a few hours, or by making crude golems and undead, or tricking the local wildlife to enter their dungeon and then putting them under their control.

When zomeone mines zome ore off the wall of a dungeon, or damages the walls however, dungeons just regrow them in a process that is zimply not replicable due to the zimple fact that dungeons are more mana efficient than anything we’ve been able to make zo far.

But not always.

If zomething is damaged past a certain point, the dungeon will leave it as is.

If you want to repeatedly mine an ore vein in a dungeon, you can only mine a little bit, because if you mine too much the dungeon will just not replace it.

Which is zometimes a good think as by mining more tunnels and rooms in a dungeon, we can artificially increase the number of monsters in it and lower their ztrength, and by blocking off rooms or destroying tunnels, we can lower the number of monsters in the dungeon and increase their ztrenght.

Coming back to my point, I think these papers originally had something else written on them, but they were destroyed to some degree that left them unrepairable, zo, the dungeon, instead of just making a blank paper, decided to replicate some of the texts on the diary onto these papers, and the diary itself might’ve been destroyed later, or may still remain.

Hopefully though it ztill remains zomewhere in the dungeon as first-hand records like that can be really, really useful!

But even if I am not zure of the authenticity of these papers, as they were given to me by a monster as previously ztated, their contents are interesting nonetheless...

The most interesting one being the date, 27.9.9,326, exactly 673 years ago, and exactly 100 years from the Death’s March...

Though these papers, or whoever wrote them, might not be related to Death, it is weird nonetheless that they were written exactly 100 years from Death’s March.

And from the papers, I can conclude that the writer was zome zort of magical researcher working under the Division 0, and they zeem excited about a project named Zenith that they will be putting to test tomorrow, but zadly there is not enough information about what this project Zenith is, or what the division 0 is.

Though what I can assume is that they must be related to the Imperium in zome way as it sounds like they were getting a lot of funding, an amount that could’ve been only supplied by a continent spanning empire like the Imperium... maybe the church too.

You know? Thinking about it... it is quite possible that it may have been the church instead of the imperium... but if it was the church, why wouldn’t they re-claim this black site and instead leave it behind to rot?

And if it was really run by the church... would they really do such heinous experiments that a person felt the need to leave papers in which they confessed their sins in an abandoned church?

It feels like this might’ve been the church... and it feels like this might’ve been the imperium.

But zadly, I zimply don’t have enough information at hand... for now that is.

Grinning once again at the thought of the wonders that were awaiting me, I continued to walk behind the group.

But as we reached the dungeon... complications happened.

“Yup, those are goblins.” Commented Lazarus, looking at the dungeon entrance from afar.

Normally a zmall group of goblins like this wouldn’t have been a problem... but the problem was, there were at least 2 other groups in the dungeon at all times.

It was not problematic that they were there, we could kill them too if we encountered them, but we simply didn’t know the lay out of the dungeon so we might miss the goblins inside the dungeon and they might go out and zimply zee their dead comrades, and escape to wherever they came from and alert other goblins.

We could always just wait for all the groups to zlowly trickle out of the dungeon, but zometimes new groups would come to take the place of the old ones, and we couldn’t find an open zpot in their zchedule even after 2 days of watching them.

“...Is this how the gods punish me?” I wondered out loud, lying on the ground from my sadness.

“Heinrich don’t be absurd. It’s not even that bad! We expected to wander around for two months, find nothing and return, but here we are, barely a week after we found the spirit tree and we are waiting at the entrance of a dungeon which leads to what we came here for! Just, cheer up a bit!” Caroline zaid while sitting next to me.

But zhe didn’t understand, none of them understood the pain I was feeling at being this close to greatness but being unable to grasp it at the zame time.

Then Elise walked up to me and ztarted talking.

“I believe it’s the best that we trail the goblins and find out where their settlement is rather than standing here and watching them.”

Zeeing that zhe came here to talk about zomething zerious, I ztarted zitting instead of lying on the ground and asked.

“And what’s the point? Instead of ztaring at a zmall group of goblins, we’ll be ztaring at a large group of them.”

“The point is, we’ll know how many goblins there actually are.” Zhe zaid and continued.

“An average delving group looks to be around 10 goblins, so there is at least 30, at max 40 goblins in and around the dungeon at the same time. Which is a very large number, a number we could take out, but still a big number.

My point is, the goblins are either sending a lot of their people out and only leaving a small skeleton group to run their settlement, or they simply have too many goblins that they see no problem in sending 40 of them into the dungeon at the same time and increasing the strength of the monsters in the higher levels.

If it’s the former, and they have a skeleton group in their settlement, we can easily kill them after they send out a group to replace one of the delver groups or wait for a delving group to return and kill them at the same time too. Then we can make our way to the dungeon, and slowly kill the groups that are coming out.

And if it’s the latter, and there is a lot more goblins, we can always retreat back to town and hire more adventurers, or even some mercenaries, and then come back to sack the town and push them away. And if it is really a large goblin town that is sending so many goblins in to the dungeon to solely increase the dungeon’s level... we might have to retreat, permanently, because no noble is going to find it worth while to send an army to take out a goblin town so far away, and there are only a few adventurers and mercenaries that will risk their life attacking a settlement of that size, and I am not an explorer that wants to die for some artifacts.

Whatever option we choose though, we’ll need to scout their settlement for a few days to a week if not more, to gather intelligence and also to understand if this amount of delving is normal, or if it’s a thing that will die off in a few more days.

Who knows, we might be able to just walk into the dungeon after a few days of scouting without worry and won’t have to get our hands dirty.” Though I didn’t like that Elise zaid very clearly zhe wouldn’t help me if it was a big enough goblin settlement... I also couldn’t blame her.

And, after a bit of thought, I couldn’t find any problems with her plans. After all, it was just reconnaissance, what we are doing right now.

We were just going to be looking at a town instead of a cave mouth, which was I was willing to do.

After tailing a returning goblin group, we found that our worries were unfounded as there weren’t that many goblins in their village at one time, and a lot of zmaller groups left the village in the day and returned before night.

But even though a problem was gone, another, worse than it, appeared right after.

Undead. Lots, and lots of undead were just around and about the village, their gaze and bodies unmoving and unwavering, just waiting for something to ztrike at.

This had turned from a problem that a wayward group of adventurers were facing to a problem that the church would be more than willing to zolve, after all, dead’s forces were not to be taken lightly, however zmall they may be.

After talking amongst ourself, we decided to observe the goblins for a bit more before returning to town and contacting the church, but a few days after we started observing them, zuddenly a large group of goblins left the town with a lot of undead in haste, following them, we saw that the group was there to attack another group of 3 plant beings, one of them looking like the parasite we saw a week or so ago.

But instead of the 2 sides immediately clashing, one of the plant beings/parasites got up on its 2 legs and started talking.

“...This is going to be a hell of a story to tell in the future.” I muttered, and everyone nodded in silence.