Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Seventy-Six (Patreon)

"Okay, enough, we’ve got the crystal, let’s grab the water and go. We can examine everything later,” Beth said, stashing the crystal again before going back over to the pond. As tempted as she was to suck all the water up into the reliquary and douse one, or more, of the Empyreans within, she instead pulled out the Medallion and had that pull all the water within. After all, she had a couple planets worth of real estate to stash things; as long as she remembered where things were, which wasn’t a problem with her perfect, golden memory, then everything was fine.

“Blood,” Beth said, holding off Kris and Neph who wanted to grab even more of the water.

The wolf trotted out, scouting ahead again as the group resumed moving through the cave system. The crystal had been a really nice find, but they needed a lot more than that to either make an impressive showing with their items for the auction or to make enough that they could splash some serious cash around. The level seven hundred that Beth had killed, which was still a crazy thing to think, had yielded some extremely valuable crafting materials, but Millennia’s Echo is probably the one place in the Milky Way where materials of that level weren’t extremely prized. They needed something big, something super impressive, to really shake the people. Beth was keeping tapping into her connections as a last resort, though she was sure she could request a difficult assignment from someone like Fallon and find something else amazing to work with.

That was a bit of a last resort, and they still had plenty of time before the auction was coming up, though Beth knew all too well how time could slip away from them when they were busy or focused on other things. Especially considering how they had so much of it; it wasn’t that they were lazy, but something like half there group was practically or functionally immortal at this point, and the half would get there well before there was anything to worry about. When one had, well, infinity ahead of them, one could sometimes lose a little track of weeks and months slipping by, and for Beth it went doubly so if she was doing something she greatly enjoyed like fighting.

The cave system stretched out for endless miles, sometimes narrow and twisting to the point it was practically impossible to navigate, and sometimes suddenly opening up into caverns the size of a small city. It was a bit of a dizzying experience to move through, and magic being involved meant that constraints Beth would have thought of being associated with such things before she and Earth joined the Path didn’t necessarily apply anymore. There should be a certain point underground where the heat or temperature started to increase, though that was quite deep. However, the rules changed a lot with magic, and they could explore for days, weeks, and not find the proverbial or literal bottom. There were endless tunnels and caverns, even if one focused heavily on moving downward instead of laterally, and they never reached the mantle or any kind of vastly different layer. Not that that was the goal, but the deeper meant the better resources, stronger beasts, and more value.

Speaking of more value, they had passed the point where they would be finding just any random old ore or minor gem. They were deep enough that they were in serious find territory, not represented any less than by the mana titanium they found in a small cave in a little tunnel system that had been crawling with insect-like beasts that swarmed over top of each other in what became a quite literal wave of chitin and pincers. That had not been a particularly pleasant experience, but it had been more than worth the aggravation, as the metals they found in those tunnels were extremely valuable, enough that they would be making piles of orichalcum coins off even just a part of the find. The mana titanium was the best, by far, not just because of its rarity nor quality, but because it was the prize the level five hundred beasts had been guarding. They had very clearly been eating little bits and pieces of it as well, but there was still a room full of the stuff, and it wasn’t a small room Beth was talking about. Titanium was a bit of a lighter metal, at least compared to things like iron or gold, but it being mana titanium increased the weight. Considering that fact, they were looking at tons of the stuff, many tons; Beth was once again glad for near-infinite storage space that didn’t transfer any weight back to her. Even her back would be aching from carrying around all that metal.

Metals and gems were great, and Beth was intending to keep at least a little of everything they were finding for their personal use, though just a little of the mana titanium would still be hundreds of pounds of the material, but that wasn’t what they were after. It was things like the time crystal, or large stockpiles of mana crystals, or unique items like long-buried relics of a distant age that would get them the real wealth, or just qualify enough to be placed in the auction they were aiming for. Those kinds of things were very rare, but depth and time solved many problems, especially with tracking down such things.

The crystal had been a great find, but it was what they stumbled on next that gave Beth a bit of hope. They had all grown long used to Path shenanigans, the overall construct that governed the universe doing strange things at strange times in strange places, but even Beth’s group could still be surprised every now and again. Not that they were shocked, but they stumbled into a ruin, though calling it that was a little misleading, as it looked much more like an abandoned city. It was surprising not just because they walked out of a narrow little tunnel that Bjorn practically had to crawl through to see this huge, empty city gleaming in a massive cavern before them, but because they were so far away from everything. Finding a random city, or the ruins of one, a few hundred feet underground wasn’t all that crazy, such things happened over time. Cities were built, occupied, contested, abandoned, lost, buried, found again, built over, lost again, and so on. Finding ruins of an old city, especially with the billions of years the Path had been operating, wasn’t anything all that crazy.

It was a bit crazier to find those ruins looking almost perfectly intact, and much more so to find them dozens of miles from anything. There was nothing above the city, Blood went up through the tunnels and checked, so no layers of housing and business built up over time through the years, and it didn’t look like there was anything below them, either. It was like a fairly new, clean city had been teleported, minus the people and most of the vehicles, a dozen miles underground. Just how clean and well preserved the city was cause some surprise, and the distance from anything else at all that linked in any way to civilization was both surprising and a bit suspicious.

What was far more suspicious was the total lack of movement with the city, at least from what they could see and scan from the tunnel’s edge. Sure, if it was a ruin, it might not be occupied by any people living their lives and maintaining the place, but it should have some kind of interests to beasts or monsters in some capacity. Instead, the streets were all silent and empty, with not even a flicker of movement or life anywhere they could see or sense. It was eerie in an uncomfortable way, like a cold wind brushing against the back of the neck on a moonless night or a sudden sensation of chill when walking alone in the woods. The distance the city was from anything, the lack of any kind of movement or noise, and the highly preserved state of everything made Beth and the team more than a little suspicious. Beth might have even said they were on edge, and she did keep in mind there were plenty of things out there that could kill her and the team in a blink, but she wasn’t really afraid.

She was the first to hop down into the city, a drop of nearly a hundred feet from where they had emerged. That was another thing that was a bit eerie about the place; it was a fully developed city, looking quite modern and well engineered, with towering skyscrapers and large arenas and warehouses in various places. It could have passed for a city in the modern era or just a bit into the future on Earth, for all that the architecture was just a bit different and strange. Still, that everything was so modern and neat, and so large and expansive, while all fitting in one cavern was just another indicator or something that tickled at Beth’s senses. Lost cities weren’t all that rare, in the grand scheme of things; a few billion years of continuous civilization would leave a lot of remnants behind, but ones so well preserved were much rarer, and the size and distances didn’t make much sense.

The group had followed Beth down, and they cautiously began exploring the place, though they stuck together. They were well within the territory already, even before the strange city, where beasts could take a serious piece out of everybody on the team but Beth, and that was just an individual beast. Not that even Beth was immune, but her Ideal did put her a step above the others, and a lot of what they were encountering was particularly weak to crushing or pulverizing damage, something Beth specialized in. Still, it was a good idea to stick together in the first place, let alone in a city so devoid of all life yet so perfectly preserved. In fact, so perfectly was everything within the city preserved and maintained that it was proving quite difficult to have any idea how old the city was. Either when it was constructed or how long it had been abandoned, normally there would be some signs that would give a better indication than random guessing, but such things were much harder to determine here.

Without any kind of guidance or knowledge about the place, they figured the best course of action was just to head towards the center, which is what they proceeded to do, though maintaining a cautious pace the whole time. Bjorn and Sera led while Beth took up the rear, having their toughest members at the front and back to try to blunt any ambushes or sudden assaults during the journey. It was something they should always do, in remaining cautious there was a certain minimum level of safety while exploring the unknown, but it proved unnecessary. The entire trip to what was roughly the center of the rectangular city took about forty minutes at the pace they set, and not a single soul stirred. Beth couldn’t decide if it was even eerier that there was no wind, given they were underground, or if that made the place a little more normal.

The center of the city was a large building, in terms of footprint, at least, thought the structure itself was only five stories tall. It was some kind of governmental building and looked perfectly ordinary, even more so once they headed inside and found a small reception area with a hall that led back to a larger reception area with plenty of windows where tellers or administrators would normally be standing. What made the place feel just a bit off, other than the total lack of other people, was that all the documents were there and preserved. Not just that, but there were pens and pencils, staplers, copiers, simple computers, and all the other accoutrement of a functioning office and bureaucracy scattered about, all perfectly preserved as if everyone had just stopped and walked out mid-shift one day and never returned. Beth was just glad there weren’t piles of clothes scattered about, though maybe that would have been better, as that would have at least pointed towards either an attack or a sudden magical phenomena.

As it stood now, it looked like the city had been abandoned, and quite literally, at that. As if everyone had just…left, all at once, without bothering to take anything with them. She could understand leaving stupid paperwork behind if everyone had to evacuate the city for some reason, but the real key would be if they found any personal goods or effects abandoned in homes and apartments. That would point to just the level of both orderliness and warning that the evacuation was conducted under. For now, they might was well try to learn some things, so the group split up in the building, feeling like there wasn’t all that much danger, and started searching offices and storage rooms.

It was a bit lucky that everything there was in paper, or at least, the place had committed a huge amount to paper copy, even if they did have computer systems. The group was able to find a lot of things that explained quite a bit about the city and the people that lived there, but the worrying thing became just how…normal everything was. There wasn’t anything in any of the documents, even ones in the offices on the top floor, about any kind of crisis or impending doom or anything like that. In fact, the whole of what they found in the building was painfully, boringly mundane; requests for permits, requests for license renewals, requests for extra shipment space on trains, which was interesting, but didn’t really indicate anything other than some kind of rail network, which wasn’t anything surprising.

Beth still had an eerie feeling, but she didn’t have any real sense of danger, nor was the feeling growing or shifting. If anything, this looked like a very strange mystery, though not necessarily one that had to have something nefarious involved in its construction. It could have literally just been an evacuation order, maybe something last minute from a situation that was unexpected but never did any physically damage to the city or the citizens. Beth struggled a little to actually envisage what such a disaster might look like, but it was one of the few explanations she could think up that would really cover all the bases. Everything else, from beasts or monsters to war or disease, would leave some kind of sign, some indication of what had happened. There was, however, nothing like that, not in anywhere they searched so far, so she was left a bit stumped.

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