Infinite Mana - Chapter 209: The City Beneath (Thank you for you support, Jonathan!) (Patreon)

Sieghart watched the young adventurers disappear down the road after their warning, but the information they had given him refused to leave his thoughts. A completely new dungeon appearing near the border was exactly the kind of thing capable of ruining several otherwise reasonable plans.

The sensible choice was still obvious. Enter the goblin dungeon, test Fatigue Dart, gather some Experience, perhaps experiment with Property Consumption on non-human creatures, and then leave before anybody could involve him in another problem. Unfortunately, Sieghart was already becoming curious about the new dungeon. The fact that humans and the Fallen were both moving toward it only made the situation worse, because competition usually meant the place contained something worth fighting over.

A newly formed dungeon also raised questions he had never seriously considered. What did a dungeon look like before decades or centuries of adventurers mapped, exploited, damaged, reinforced, and built entire economies around whatever resources appeared inside?

More importantly, what kind of core would exist at the bottom of something new? Sieghart tried not to smile at that thought. Then another possibility appeared. The Lost Lands.

He knew relatively little about the territories beyond the human border compared with people who had actually fought there, but even the name alone suggested that humans had abandoned enormous regions filled with monsters, Fallen settlements, old ruins, and presumably dungeons.

How many dungeons existed there? More importantly, how many were corrupted?

The golem dungeon had been inside human-controlled territory and still contained Guardians altered by a strange corruption powerful enough to change monster populations, reshape abilities, and apparently interfere with the dungeon itself. If corruption was already appearing this far inside human lands, Sieghart would bet almost anything that dungeons inside the Lost Lands were worse.

That idea should have made him cautious. Instead, it made his curiosity significantly worse. A corrupted dungeon could contain dangerous cores capable of affecting his thoughts, changing his body, or introducing magical principles that ordinary people would probably consider reasons to burn the entire place down.

It could also contain magic nobody inside human lands had ever seen. Sieghart disliked how quickly his mind focused on that part. Assimilation Magic had already demonstrated exactly how tempting corrupted abilities could become. Property Consumption was powerful enough that he could imagine hundreds of applications without even leaving the road.

What would a dungeon deeply saturated by corruption produce? A spell capable of evolving monsters? Something controlling space? A branch based on regeneration? Perhaps entirely new forms of magic that never developed inside safer regions because corruption altered the rules governing whatever grew there.

Sieghart rubbed his forehead.

“That is exactly the kind of thinking that gets people eaten by something with seventeen mouths, and somehow knowing that does absolutely nothing to make me less curious about what those seventeen mouths might teach me.”

The thought remained annoying enough that he deliberately pushed it aside. The new border dungeon could wait until he understood more, and charging toward a conflict between humans and the Fallen immediately after absorbing another corrupted core would be spectacularly poor judgment.

For now, he already had a dungeon directly in front of him. Sieghart entered without wasting additional time. The broad staircase carried him beneath the enormous stone arch and into the darkness below. The temperature dropped gradually while natural daylight disappeared behind him, replaced by faint blue-white crystals embedded at regular intervals along the walls.

The interior reinforced his earlier impression that this place resembled an underground city more than a natural cave. The first corridors were broad enough for several carts to travel beside one another, while rectangular pillars supported ceilings carved with faded geometric patterns.

Sieghart activated Magic Vision immediately. Mana moved through the surrounding stone in familiar dungeon currents, but the structure looked considerably more orderly than the golem dungeon. Instead of chaotic concentrations around mineral formations, energy traveled through narrow lines built into walls and floors.

It almost resembled infrastructure. That thought made Sieghart slow down. The dungeon was supposed to be filled with goblins, yet he had already walked several minutes without seeing a single one. There were no footsteps, voices, weapons scraping against stone, or mana signatures moving through nearby passages.

That contradicted what he expected from a place apparently used by young adventurers as a training location. Sieghart had assumed the upper levels would be easy.

Not empty.

The party he encountered outside looked experienced enough to survive ordinary danger, but they were still teenagers using the dungeon as training rather than hardened veterans attempting some unexplored death trap. If people that young could operate here comfortably, Sieghart expected scattered goblin groups, crude ambushes, perhaps traps, and enough predictable enemies for novice Aura users to practice coordinated combat.

Instead, he found blood. The first stain appeared beside a wall roughly ten minutes after entering. Sieghart stopped near it. Dark red streaks marked the floor and continued several meters toward one side passage before abruptly ending. The blood had dried enough that it clearly was not fresh, but not enough to look ancient either.

More stains appeared farther down. Some were small. Others were not. Sieghart crouched near one patch and examined it without touching anything. There were no bodies, discarded weapons, broken armor, or obvious remains nearby, making it difficult to determine whether the blood belonged to goblins or adventurers.

The amount suggested someone had suffered a serious injury. Yet whoever bled there had either survived long enough to leave or been removed afterward. Sieghart resumed walking. The architecture remained strangely uniform. Corridors intersected at predictable angles, walls maintained almost identical widths, and side passages rarely ended abruptly. Even when one route turned away from his direction, another eventually connected back farther down.

There were surprisingly few dead ends. That made navigation easier than expected. It also made the place feel designed. Sieghart had already questioned whether dungeons were simply natural magical phenomena. This one made that explanation even harder to accept because the corridors looked less like caves and more like streets buried beneath kilometers of stone.

The path continued downward. Then farther downward. Then farther again. Sieghart checked the map he had purchased and quickly realized it provided almost no useful detail beyond the upper sections. Apparently most adventurers cared more about hunting accessible goblins than documenting architecture nobody planned to use.

He descended another broad staircase. Then another. After nearly an hour, Sieghart began wondering how deep the dungeon actually extended. The surrounding mana also grew denser. Not corrupted. At least, Magic Vision revealed no red waves or unnatural discoloration.

There was simply more of it. Mana gathered in the walls, moved through carved channels, and flowed downward alongside him as though every corridor ultimately fed something buried much deeper below.

That made Sieghart think about the golem dungeon again. Perhaps Guardians were not simply bosses. Maybe they acted as control points between dungeon regions. If so, this place could contain similar divisions hidden behind architecture rather than obvious floor transitions.

Sieghart continued. Still no goblins. He found more blood, however. Several patches marked the next corridor, accompanied by scratches across one wall and a broken wooden shaft that looked like part of a spear.

Sieghart picked it up briefly.

Ordinary wood.

No runes.

No mana.

Probably goblin-made, judging from the crude shaping. That at least confirmed monsters existed somewhere nearby. The absence of bodies became more suspicious. Sieghart placed the broken shaft back where he found it and continued downward.

Eventually, the corridor changed.

One moment Sieghart walked through the same broad rectangular passage he had followed for nearly fifteen minutes, and the next the surrounding walls simply ended. He stopped so abruptly that his boots scraped across stone.

The space ahead was enormous. Calling it a chamber felt ridiculous. The cavern stretched so far into the darkness that Sieghart could not clearly see the opposite wall even after enhancing his vision. Massive stone columns disappeared upward into a ceiling hundreds of meters above.

For several seconds, he simply stared. Then the scale became clearer. There was a city below him. Not ruins shaped vaguely like one. A city. Stone buildings filled the cavern floor in dense irregular clusters, separated by broad streets, narrow alleys, stairways, bridges, courtyards, walls, towers, and structures built directly into the natural rock formations surrounding the enormous underground space.

Sieghart stood on an elevated passage overlooking everything. Faint lights covered the city. Torches burned along roads. Crystals glowed inside larger structures. Smoke rose from hundreds of chimneys before collecting near the distant cavern ceiling, where some form of magical airflow slowly carried it toward ventilation shafts Sieghart could barely identify.

Then he noticed the movement.

Goblins.

Hundreds.

No.

Thousands.

They filled the streets below.

Small green figures moved between buildings carrying baskets, tools, weapons, crates, animals, and materials Sieghart could not identify from this distance. Some wore crude leather. Others wore metal armor. Several groups marched in organized formations.

Sieghart’s expression slowly changed. This was not a dungeon floor populated by monsters. It looked like a civilization. He strengthened Magic Vision. The result almost made his head hurt. Mana signatures covered everything. Goblins occupied houses, towers, workshops, streets, defensive walls, and underground structures extending beneath the city itself. Different signatures suggested enormous variations in strength, magical affinity, and whatever roles existed among them.

Several creatures were much larger than ordinary goblins. Others carried staffs surrounded by active mana. Sieghart could even see what looked like livestock being moved between fenced areas near the edge of the city. He remained silent for nearly a minute. Then he remembered the young adventurers outside.

Four teenagers.

Two spearmen.

Two archers.

They had walked out of this place looking mildly tired. Sieghart looked down again. Something did not add up. Either those adventurers stayed exclusively within the empty upper passages and hunted isolated goblins wandering away from the city, or the dungeon’s reputation as a training location concealed far more than he expected.

The blood made slightly more sense now. So did the lack of monsters above. Why would goblins wander randomly through empty tunnels when an entire underground city existed below?

That raised another uncomfortable question. Were these creatures actually generated by the dungeon? Or did they live here? The difference mattered. Sieghart watched a group of smaller goblins chasing one another through a street near a row of stone houses. None carried weapons. Their movements looked less like monsters patrolling a dungeon and more like children playing.

He frowned.

That complicated things considerably. Fatigue Dart suddenly felt like a less straightforward experiment. Killing dungeon monsters that attacked on sight was one thing. Walking into something resembling an actual city and firing Poison Magic at the first creature he found merely because the System labeled its species differently would require more information.

Sieghart shifted farther behind the edge of the elevated passage, reducing the chance that someone below might notice his silhouette against the light from the upper corridor. The city continued far beyond what he could properly examine from his current position.

A fortified central district occupied the middle. Several towers rose above everything else. One enormous structure near the far side resembled either a palace, fortress, temple, or some combination of all three.

Sieghart felt his curiosity return immediately. The border dungeon suddenly had competition. A hidden goblin city beneath human territory was already far more interesting than the simple training dungeon he expected to spend a few days clearing.

He looked down at the countless moving figures again. This was going to require considerably more care than shooting Fatigue Darts at random targets. Sieghart smiled faintly despite himself.

At least it definitely was not boring.