“Yes, that’s the spell. Do you also know about this ring?”
Sister Devlin nodded. The autumn evening wind on the cliff rustled the hems of the blind nuns' robes. In the wind, they maintained identical postures, their eye masks reflecting Moonlight, which indeed looked a bit strange.
“This relic is not famous. I heard Grandma Cassandra mention it before, and even the spell was told to me by her. It is said to be her teacher’s Knowledge. This sage-level relic was originally controlled by the local Vampire clan in Middlesburg. According to Grandma Cassandra’s teacher, this relic first appeared in the fifth epoch, when a great one of the Vampires bestowed it upon a human male. After that mortal died in the Sicar Mountain region, this relic returned to the Vampires’ hands.”
“Oh, so it died in the Sicar Mountain region.”
Xia De nodded, feeling a bit lost. The sage-level relic ring should have been given by the Saint to the white-haired armored old man at the end of the God’s banquet. Now, after an epoch, Xia De heard of that ring again. The ring had transformed from a powerful divine item into a relic, but the old man had long since vanished.
“The vampire ring changes race, and unlike the metamorphosis ring, this one seems to be activatable by others chanting the spell. If I gave it to Mia, it would be equivalent to turning Mia from a cat into a Vampire. This way, she might be able to use the fish training ring, and then speak using the metamorphosis ring. What am I thinking? The user of the vampire ring will contract bloodlust. I can’t let that cat get such a troublesome disease.”
The nuns of the Spiritual Cultivation Order still had to rush to the mountaintop, so after confirming that Xia De was fine, they bid him farewell. Xia De watched the nuns leave the cliff and re-enter the dense forest, while he turned and walked to the edge of the cliff, then looked down.
Even without acrophobia, looking down at the dense forest beneath the cliff in the dead of night from this angle still made him feel a bit dizzy. And that Demon Hunter’s silver sword was in the secret cave below the cliff. The entrance to the cave was invisible by ordinary means; only those holding that parchment scroll could see it.
“Finally found it.”
It was already very late, and Xia De was also thinking about the cat at home. Although Luvia, who was stargazing on the third floor, would help Xia De feed the cat, Xia De was still a bit uneasy.
“Move faster, I need to get back as soon as possible.”
He looked up at the Moonlight in the sky, then pulled out some thin string from his pocket. After covering it with white cloth, he restored it into a thick hemp rope, tied it to the tree closest to the cliff edge, and tied the other end to his waist. After pulling it a few times to ensure it was very secure, he slowly slid down from the cliff edge.
“That’s why I say, finding things in the mountains is really troublesome.”
Fortunately, he found the right location this time. Before long, Xia De, holding the parchment scroll, saw a distorted Vibration on the cliff face. He pressed the parchment against it, and the entrance to a pitch-black cave immediately appeared.
Xia De swung into the cave, using Felianna's Witch Light to melt a handhold-like indentation into the stone wall at the entrance, untied the rope and tied it to the “stone handhold” to make it easier to climb back up later.
“Moonlight.”
He raised his hand, and Moonlight bloomed from his fingertips, illuminating the pitch-black cave. This did not look like a nest dug by animals; instead, it resembled a naturally existing stone crevice that had been widened to its current state.
The cave was very deep, going downwards, and he couldn't feel any wind, suggesting there was no other exit. Since the parchment scroll recorded the locations and disarming methods of the traps, Xia De didn't encounter any danger. He did confirm that none of the traps showed signs of being triggered, and the warning rituals were only damaged by time, not by human destruction.
“That’s good news. That sword is indeed still here. It seems my luck isn’t bad.”
The further he walked inward, the narrower the passage became. The deep cave was like an ant’s nest, with no end in sight.
Around nine o’clock, a voice by his ear suddenly reminded him that whisper elements, or traces of a relic, had appeared ahead. This meant Xia De was getting closer to his destination.
“How did that High-Ring Sorcerer from back then, Mr. Jacob Alfred, the ancestor of the ophthalmologist, find this cliff cave?”
He thought to himself, leaning against the uneven stone wall as he continued forward. The ground here was also not flat, making walking quite strenuous.
“And, why does it feel hotter and hotter?”
This was definitely not an illusion of a confined space caused by entering too deep into the cave, nor was it a natural temperature increase in a cave that had not been ventilated for years. He hadn't felt it when he first entered, but after the whisper element appeared, the feeling of rising temperature immediately became very obvious.
“Could it be that the power of that sword is related to fire? A sword related to fire... Can you sense anything?”
There is indeed an abnormal temperature increase, but it is not caused by the whisper element.
“No? Could this passage lead directly to an underground magma lake?”
Xia De thought in surprise, and as he continued to advance, even the rocks in the cave became scorching hot, making his breathing increasingly noticeable:
“What’s going on? This is definitely not normal.”
He continued forward, and this increasingly narrow passage finally reached its end. A faint red light flickered ahead, and at the same time, waves of heat rushed towards him. The Moonlight from his fingertips showed that outside the passage was a vast space, and according to Xia De’s estimation, he should now be in the belly of Sicar Mountain.
He carefully stepped out, trying his best to raise his right hand to illuminate his surroundings. Outside the passage was a small stone platform, and beyond the platform was a huge hollow within the mountain’s belly. Quiet, empty, dark, profound, in an incredibly oppressive environment, faint flames flickered, further intensifying the strangeness of the current surroundings.
The top of the large hollow was not very high, about three stories, but below...
Xia De bent down and picked up a small stone, then threw it down from the platform. It took a long time before he heard the sound of it falling.
“As expected, Sicar Mountain has everything.”
On the opposite side of the mountain’s hollow, there was another stone platform, connected to another cave. Between the two stone platforms, there was a thick stone pillar that seemed to extend upwards from the bottom. The two platforms and the central stone pillar formed a straight line, and when Xia De approached the edge of the platform, he indeed found traces of bridge pillars and a broken bridge.
In other words, a long time ago, there was originally an incredibly long rope bridge here, connecting this platform to the stone platform in the center of the large hollow, and then to the platform on the other end. But now, although the bridge pillars and a small part of the dangling rope bridge remain on the stone platform, the main body of the bridge has disappeared.
“What exactly happened here?”
Fortunately, Xia De didn't intend to continue exploring here. The sword he was looking for was on the stone platform where he was currently standing. More precisely, it was stuck in front of the damaged rope bridge.
The silver sword body glowed in the darkness due to the Moonlight from Xia De’s fingertips. He could clearly see the inscriptions on the sword body, those ancient characters from an even more distant era, from the era when Evil Spirits and demons ran rampant in the material world:
“My heart is clear, my sword slays demons.”
Finally seeing this sword, Xia De was not happy but frowned. This was because the sword was not stuck in the mud, but in a bonfire that was emitting sparks.
Although the long-extinguished bonfire only emitted a few scattered dark red sparks, the faint red light came from those sparks. The temperature of this bonfire was extremely high; as soon as he stepped out of the narrow passage behind him, he felt waves of heat rushing towards him, and the temperature increase he had noticed after sensing the whisper element earlier was due to the influence of this bonfire.
“What is this again?”
As Xia De squinted at the bonfire, the sparks suddenly ignited the long-extinguished Ashes, and dark red flames shot up. With a loud roar, Xia De was forced back several steps by the heat wave.
The flames almost instantly shot up to the top of the large hollow in the mountain’s belly, completely illuminating this stone platform. Flames splattered everywhere, and the firelight also cast Xia De’s huge shadow onto the cliff wall behind him.
The silver sword stuck in the bonfire vibrated with a hum. The originally black inscriptions on the silver sword body lit up with a bright yellow light from bottom to top, suppressing the rising flames. The bonfire was suppressed little by little, until it returned to its normal size. Amidst crackling sounds, the flames licked the diagonally inserted silver sword, as if the two were in a struggle.
Xia De stared at this scene in a daze. Faint whispers now echoed in this large hollow in the mountain’s belly. A voice was tempting Xia De, luring him to pull out this sword immediately.
“Oh, damn it, this can’t be…”
He pulled a ring from his pocket and put it on his right hand, placing his right hand behind his back, then walked over step by step as if truly enchanted.
Waves of heat impacted his skin, and the dazzling firelight forced his eyes to squint. In the bonfire flames, which were being forcefully suppressed by the silver sword, a terrifying face made of fire seemed to be watching Xia De, with sharp, elongated eyes and a mouth that split open almost to the ears.
It was whispering, it was murmuring, it was watching this mortal who had entered here for the first time in eight hundred years.
Light and shadow intertwined on Xia De’s body, the swaying bonfire made his shadow constantly flicker, and the firelight on the ground had a distinct layered feel. And when Xia De finally approached the bonfire, with another burst of the bonfire, from the surging flames, a giant hand, larger than Xia De’s body, seemingly made of fractured obsidian with magma-like glints in its crevices, suddenly reached out from the bonfire and grabbed at Xia De.
“Moonlight Greatsword!”
His right hand, wearing the demon hunting seal, fiercely swung the silver greatsword at the approaching giant hand. The two-handed greatsword collided with the demon’s giant hand, and at the cost of the greatsword scattering into specks of light, Xia De retreated a few steps to steady himself. The giant arm, meanwhile, was split into a cluster of flames, forced back into the bonfire.
The silver sword diagonally inserted into the bonfire completely suppressed the flames, and the crackling bonfire also returned to its state of only scattered sparks. Although it was still crackling, there was no sign of what had just emerged from the flames.
“So that’s it. So Dr. Alfred’s ancestor didn’t put the demon hunting seal and this sword together in the house where his descendants lived because of this reason.”
Xia De clutched his right arm, staring at the bonfire, and retreated step by step, the firelight illuminating his face:
“That High-Ring Sorcerer from eight hundred years ago actually used this sword to seal a demon here! Demon Scholar Sean Asmon was actually right!”
PS: metamorphosis ring (find a way to obtain a body, must be activated by the user chanting the spell) ← fish training ring (allows speechless creatures to speak, but cats cannot use it) ← vampire ring (transforms a creature’s race into a Vampire, but causes bloodlust).
