Volume 9 - CH 7

Chapter 7: The Green Crystal

Atlantis  2:28 AM

Our worries ended very soon.

Shortly after the medical teams pulled out Mohander and Ryan, a severe tremor came from beneath, and various teleportation arrays of different sizes appeared in the area.

When I saw those things, I knew that it was over.

The first ones to appear were Senior and Gasai. Both of their clothes were damaged, and then the several others that came out after them in scattered groups were all in the same state. However, it looks like they weren’t that severely injured; instead, senior Geng, Ryan, and Mohander, who were brought out, were in more serious conditions.

“Where’s Ryan?” As soon as Chifuyu came out of the teleportation array, before he even bothered with the wounds on his hand, he grabbed a blue robe and asked. With the other person as his guide, he quickly disappeared from my sight.

Watching Senior put his weapon away, without a fear of death, the assistant walked over to him and directly put his arm on his shoulder. “Then, what’s the result?”

Senior narrowed his red eyes as he glared at him, “He escaped.”

“What? He escaped? With a bunch of you black robes, purple robes, special level people and whatnot there, you actually still let a Ghost King’s subordinate escape?” The assistant used a kind of tone like he was simply looking for a beating to say, “Hey hey, you should start strengthening yourself.”

I’m very sure that he’ll get beaten up, extremely sure of it.

Sure enough, a second later, in an extremely swift motion, Senior grabbed that arm that was resting on his shoulder, turned around, applied force, and very violently threw him over his shoulder, directly throwing the assistant to other end of the street.

Probably very used to this kind of scene, the medical team by the side completely ignored this as they continued doing their own things.

“Do you want to look for a medical team too?” While taking the medicinal towel that a blue robe handed to him to wipe his hands, Randall walked over to Senior and asked.

Senior shook his head, “It’s nothing serious.”

I stared intently at XueZhang.

People say that if you have injuries or diseases, you should get them treated as soon as possible so that you won’t regret it after you’re old and the like…

“Chu, I just finished working, so I’m too lazy to beat you up.” Senior didn’t even turn his head around, directly giving me an ice-cold minus three hundred degrees sentence.

…I understand.

Senior was standing not too far away from me, as he took off his black gloves. I was at just the right angle to see that both of his hands were all purplish-black for some reason; they look a little scary.

Poisoned?

Gasai took off his mask, walked over, and said a few words to him. I only saw Senior similarly shaking his head, and then he put his gloves back in his pocket. After he shook his hands twice, the purplish-black on his hands actually slowly began to fade, bit by bit, layer by layer, as it gradually disappeared.

Just like what I saw before, I found out that Senior seemed to be able to self-detoxify.

The two people were standing a little distance away from me, discussing something with their heads lowered, and not long later, Gasai walked away again.

The surrounding blue robes were even busier than us; the injured students that came up from beneath were enough to keep them busy for a long time.

“Yang Yang, you can go find Gasai and the others first. I have something to do so I’ll be leaving for a while.” Next to me, Yido, who seemed like he was thinking about something, suddenly said to me.

“Aih? Where are you going?” My first reaction was a big question.

“I’m going to implant the last crystal.” Yido lifted up the thing in his hand, and after I saw it clearly, I realized that it was the green crystal that he and his brothers had been continuously throwing around during the competition. “This is an integral crystal used for information and transmission. It has powerful functions, but there is a downside, which is that one needs to put at least ten or more for it to count as an unit. Otherwise, it won’t be able to have any effect.”

Integral crystal?

I tried hard to think about the things that I learned in class before; it seemed like I’ve heard of it and also seemed like I’ve never heard of it before.

“The underground cave from just now is the only one that I didn’t have time to place a crystal in, so I’m making a trip back.” Yido shrugged, “Just for a while.”

I looked around. Everyone’s all busy with their own stuff. It looks like there’s nothing I can do here, “That…”

“?” Yido, who was just about to summon a teleportation array, paused, and looked at me, puzzled.

“Can I come along too?”

***

Up till now, I couldn’t understand just how they were able to fight until they ended up with such heavy injuries just now.

But right now I can probably make a guess.

A few minutes later, I had a dumbfounded feeling when I returned to the scene with Yido.

The entire underground cave had been leveled to the ground. The original drainage channel and cave had all disappeared, and was replaced by large pieces of a vast underground ruins and rockfall everywhere. There were a few people walking around inside as if they were searching for evidence and the like. The surroundings were still bright, so I can clearly see that half of them were red robes that had popped out from who knows where, and the other half were the medical team’s blue robes.

Looking around the entire underground ruins, I had a feeling of not knowing whether I should be filled with admiration or be covered in cold sweat.

What’s with fighting up to this state!?

“This place will do.” Yido casually found a place and threw the crystal in. Then the crystal immediately rooted itself and climbed below. Its big eyes turned around to look at us. “This way we’ll be able to gather more information, to use as a reference later on.”

“Reference?”

“Nn, because Alis Academy is an astronomical school, we place quite a lot of importance on gathering information. Things like the geology of the place or the town’s design and so on, are also in our gathering range.” Yido took out a booklet, flipped to a page, and then put it in front of me. It was a blank page but there were ten green light spots on it. Not long after the crystal had gone down,  the light spots suddenly began to densely link together like a spiderweb, and then a large two-dimensional figure of a town emerged on the paper. “Once the ten crystals are placed, the effective range is a hundred kilometers. All the information obtained by the crystals will be transmitted to us.”

This is so convenient! Super convenient!

I wonder if Old Man Zhang’s shop sells this. I could scatter them around school next time, and then I wouldn’t have to worry about the problem of constantly getting lost on the way to class.

“Yido! Chu Ming Yang!” Someone suddenly shouted to us inside the ruins, and then a white dot appeared from far away. In a few seconds, that white dot appeared in front of us.

It was that glasses-wearing necromaniac black cactus, who was said to have gone to pick up a finger but for some reason had appeared here.

Yido very politely gave him a slight nod as a greeting, “Mr. Julian.”

The glasses-wearing necromaniac black cactus, who was wearing a white jacket, also greeted him back, and then he turned to me. “Is this the finger that you were talking about?” Saying that, a human finger suddenly appeared in front of my face.

“Wah!”

That scared the hell out of me!

I took a big step back, both eyes staring at that finger. “Yes…Yes, that’s the one.” But I would like to trouble you not to put it so close to my face, alright.

“Then that’s the right one.” Under his long bangs, the glasses-wearing necromaniac black cactus’s mouth curved up slightly, and then he put the thing into his pocket. “I just heard that they dug up a lot of bones here, so I came to take a look on my way back.”

…Which means that as long as a place has dead bodies, you’ll make it your first priority, right?

Wait a minute, a lot of bones?

Didn’t they say that Lake Town’s residents had all died without leaving any corpses?

“How could that be?” Obviously having the same doubt, Yido was the first to raise this question.

“It’s still not certain yet, but the human bones they dug up were buried two hundred feet under the cave. If it wasn’t because their fight destroyed the entire underground, we might not have discovered it.” The glasses-wearing necromaniac black cactus took out a small notebook from his other pocket. “However, we can currently tell that this should be an ancient battlefield. Among the excavated bones, we already know that some of them are of the Ghost Tribe, and some seem to be part of other races. The correct information will only be announced after the analysis is completed.” Then he withdrew his notebook with a “pa” sound.

Ancient battlefield?

Hearing this phrase, I believe everyone must be very curious just like me.

There’s actually an ancient battlefield underneath a town that has already been developed, and this was only discovered when the whole town was being annihilated. This is so amazing.

In this world, there’s actually an ancient battlefield that no one knows about. This only means one thing, and that is, if this battle didn’t take place a long time ago, then that means no one knew this had ever happened.

Probably having the same thoughts as me, Yido folded his arms and tilted his head, deep in thought about something.

“You guys can go and take a look.” The glasses-wearing necromaniac black cactus pointed to the area where a bunch of people had gathered at, and was the first of us to walk toward there.

I exchanged glances with Yido, and we quickly followed.

There was a huge hole in the area that the group of people were surrounding. It’s that kind of height where falling down would be equal to falling down a two-story high building. The entire ground became overturned clods of dirt, which made it look exactly like it was blown up and then dug up.

The point is, there were many bone fragments carried out of the exposed dug-open place below the hole. I can tell that they’re very old with just a glance, and there’s also a large amount of them; they’re all over the entire bottom.

“It looks like there was probably a very intense battle on this battlefield, so there was no time to bury and remove the corpses, or it could be that the ground had collapsed, resulting in all of them being mixed together.” Pushing aside the nearby people to let us get to the forefront to look, the glasses-wearing necromaniac black cactus even acted as a tour guide as he explained, “However, it’s really strange. Such a large-scale battle and no one actually knew about it, and it was even covered by an entire town; what’s going on here?”

Who knows what’s going on here…

“Could it be because this battle was too sudden, and because the ground collapsed and buried both sides’ warriors, that no word ever got out?” Yido peered at the increasing number of bones being uncovered at the bottom, frowning as he thought.

The more dirt that was removed, the more bones appeared. It felt like there shouldn’t be a small amount of people buried here. Among the things that were dug up were also a lot of broken weapons and the like.

For some reason, looking at the bones at the bottom, I suddenly had a very strange feeling.

For a second, my vision seemed to have suddenly turned pitch-black as if I’d fainted, and then a few strange images flashed past.

I couldn’t clearly see what those images were, just blurrily drifting past me in an instant. Less than half a second later, they all vanished, and then my vision was once again restored to that scenery from just now; not a bit of the darkness could be seen.

It’s not my life flashing past again, right?

Wait a minute, I’m currently not in any danger!

“Julian! We found something strange!”

***

In that second, the glasses-wearing necromaniac black cactus suddenly jumped down from the steep slope of the hole, slid straight down to the bottom, and very miraculously came to a stop  without falling over.

After moving several bones away, a huge stone slab appeared below.

After several red robes dug a little deeper, we realized that it wasn’t a stone slab but rather an enormous rectangular sarcophagus-like thing. Once they removed the nearby obstacles, those people lifted the sarcophagus out together and put it at the side.

The sarcophagus had some strange things on it. They look oddly familiar, as if I had seen these sort of carvings that look like pictures and also look like words somewhere before.

The glasses-wearing necromaniac black cactus waited until the sarcophagus was lifted out, before he studied it for a long while and then discussed something with several blue robes and red robes at the bottom.

Seeing other people’s attitude toward him, I guess the glasses-wearing necromaniac black cactus’ status probably wasn’t low.

For some reason, after seeing that weird sarcophagus appear, my eyelid had been madly twitching. It felt like that was some kind of…thing that I don’t know how to describe.

“Yang Yang?” Beside me, Yido noticed my abnormal behavior, and abruptly gave me a pat on the shoulder.

“Uh, I’m fine.” Staring at that sarcophagus, for some reason, that thing kept on giving me an inexplicably weird feeling, as if it contains something incredible inside.

After those couple of people below finished talking, two red robes walked over, before they each drew out a silver scimitar and suddenly inserted them into the seam of the sarcophagus’ lid. Then with a “shua” sound, they were pulled out from both sides.

The sarcophagus’ lid was slightly shifted. At the side, the glasses-wearing necromaniac black cactus suddenly stretched out his leg and forcefully kicked off the sarcophagus’ lid.

A thunderous noise spread throughout the underground ruins, and several people who were still searching nearby immediately came over to see what happened.

Once the smoke passed, the surroundings slowly quieted down.

It really is a sarcophagus.

After the smoke, I saw the thing inside it.

A complete skeleton, and it was even wearing a full set of strange clothes, like a long black robe that was decorated with many bizarre patterns. The whole thing gave off a very uncomfortable feeling.

However, the sarcophagus looks like it was made in a hurry, because there wasn’t even a single funerary item inside. There were only a lot of words that I couldn’t read carved on the sides, the same kind as the ones on the lid just now.

I think I really did see those words before, but all of a sudden, I can’t remember where I saw them before. Other than that, that human skeleton in the sarcophagus really gave me a very weird feeling.

A strange sense of familiarity.

The glasses-wearing necromaniac black cactus suddenly looked up, and then he beckoned to us.

“Yang Yang, you don’t look too good. Are you sure you want to go down?” Yido looked at me, a little worried.

“I’m fine.” For some reason, I feel like I should go down.

There was a voice telling me that I must go down to see for myself.

“Alright, you hold on to my hand.” I did as Yido said and took his arm. He held me, and then we began sliding down. In just a few seconds, I was already firmly standing on the ground.

Looking from the bottom, there were bones everywhere; the whole thing felt even more gloomy.

The glasses-wearing necromaniac black cactus waved to us, and we quickly walked over to the sarcophagus. In that second, I suddenly smelled a very disgusting odor, and adding the surrounding chills, I felt completely faint. Then my vision suddenly turned black, and a huge pressure heavily hammered down on me.

I immediately fell to the ground, and although I knew that there were people all around me, I couldn’t stop myself at all.

I was fully conscious, but my whole body was like a puppet without its strings, completely unable to move.

“Yang Yang!” I heard Yido’s voice.

“Don’t touch him. It’s just that the talismans on him have lost their effects. Let’s help him set up a new barrier around his body first.” The glasses-wearing necromaniac black cactus sounded out at the same time, and then there were a few footsteps.

Time passed very slowly.

All I could see was darkness, and my ears heard the sound of incantations.

In that instant, I suddenly felt very afraid. It felt as if there were enemies all around me, and every one of my hair stood up on end.

I heard the electronic sound of my watch.

All of a sudden, the pressure on my body dropped sharply. Bit by bit, it receded, and I slowly relaxed too. Then the dark fog dispersed, and a weak light reappeared in front of me.

“Chu Ming Yang, can you see clearly now?”

A voice that couldn’t be any more familiar drifted over, and I immediately blinked hard.

The ghost child’s face was right above me, magnified to the maximum.

“Yes, yes I can.” I was stunned for quite a while, and then I found out that the odor, pressure and whatnot had already disappeared. Now it’s just like before when I didn’t feel anything unusual.

The ghost child stretched out his long sleeve in front of me; I subconsciously pulled it, and a light force pulled me up from the ground. “Your talismans broke.”

Once he said that, I quickly took out the triangular talisman that Chifuyu gave me, and just like he said, the talisman was completely broken. I pulled out a few more, and they were all the same.

“Are you alright now?” The glasses-wearing necromaniac black cactus was standing by my side. It was only now that I realized a large group of medical team members were surrounding me. A feeling of completely losing face rose up.

I shook my head hard, “I’m alright, sorry about that.” But strange to say, I never expected that something that Senior enhanced would also break. It can’t be that its expiration date has come?

…

That’s impossible, right?

“Just now when we were about to help you reconstruct a barrier, Sir Tong Lang suddenly appeared, so count yourself lucky.” The glasses-wearing necromaniac black cactus was standing beside me as he rubbed my head hard.

The ghost child shook his head, “It wasn’t me. It was the Old Man on his hand who rebuilt the barrier.”

Once he said that, I immediately looked at the bracket on my hand. There was a faint black light on it, and only after a few seconds had passed did it gradually fade away.

“But it’s really weird. Just now when our people approached it, it was also the same. All the protective barriers broke apart in an instant. Looks like we probably found an important person.” Glancing at the sarcophagus, the glasses-wearing necromaniac black cactus said.

I followed and looked at the sarcophagus. There was a chilling feeling that caused my whole body to tremble.

To be honest, it’s not that I’m afraid of the skeleton in the sarcophagus. It’s just that the skeleton kept giving me a very strange feeling, causing me to shiver without knowing why.

“This is…” Looking at the skeleton in the sarcophagus, the ghost child’s narrowed eyes instantly became quite sharp.

“They seem to be ancient elven words.” As soon as Yido said that, I immediately remembered. During the previous outdoor lesson, I saw these kind of words before, with Senior acting as a translator.

“You guys can read it?” The glasses-wearing necromaniac black cactus immediately turned his head.

Yido shook his head, “No, I only know a few individual characters, but there’s no way for me to understand the meaning above.”

“I don’t have an in-depth study of ancient writing.” This was the ghost child’s answer.

“Find Senior, Senior knows how to read this!”

I injected a sentence, and everyone immediately turned to look at me. “Uh…only for reference.” I instantly added this sentence.

“Go find Prince Icy Flame.” The glasses-wearing necromaniac black cactus turned and said this to some blue robe. Then the latter disappeared from our sight at once, before he turned around again. “Yido, bring Chu up to rest first; his whole face is pale.”

My face is pale?

Why didn’t I feel anything?

“Yang Yang, let’s go up first.” Yido stretched his hand out to me, and after I took it, in a blink of an eye, I had already returned to the place above. “Do you still feel unwell?”

Looking at him, I shook my head.

“Let’s go to the side and take a break.” Saying that, Yido led me to a relatively flat place, letting me sit down and rest a little.

There was a constant clamor coming from the group of people not too far away from us. I was very mindful about that sarcophagus below, very, very mindful. I kept thinking that I should go back to see it…

Just when I was about to bring up the idea of going back to Yido, from the corner of my eye, I saw a greenish thing beside me.

The green crystal’s big eye was staring right next to me.

Strange, did Yido put the crystal here before? Why do I feel like it should be at a further location? It can’t be that they accidentally dug his up, because they were digging all over the place?

“Yido, your…” I reached for that crystal, and in an instant, the whole crystal suddenly emitted an extremely strange black light.

“Chu! Let go of it quickly!”

I heard Senior’s voice.