Cenotaph of Bones: Chapter 30 (Threads of Fate book 4) (Patreon)

Chapter 30: Lessons

The ramp continued to lead straight down at a constant angle for over five miles.  My calf and shin muscles were starting to get sore by the time it leveled off.  There had been several paths that trailed off the main tunnel, but a thin layer of dust over everything showed that no one had been down them in a long time.  In fact, I was pretty sure even the necromancer might not know about this section.  Or if he did, his undead army didn’t use it.

Eventually, we found a fork in the tunnel, with one side blocked by a recent cave in.  We probably caused it by dropping the cavern above.  It was a worrying sight.  There could be other tunnels affected, and I had no idea what the damage higher up might look like.  The sailors might have had a very rough day.

“Do you think that collapsed before or after they went through?”  Chu poked at the slabs of rock.  “Because I don’t see any tracks in the other tunnel.”

“It was long enough ago that the dust settled, but I can’t tell if it was before or after they came through.  Moving or shifting things out of the way might only make it worse.  We should check down the other side before we try getting through here.”  I started to go that way, and Chu quickly followed.  “It could just be that the dust stirred up from the collapse covered up any sign of them going this way.”

“Uh, Jim?  I think we have a problem.”  I looked back to see Chu’s torch gutter out, cutting the visibility to just the small circle of light put out by my glow stone.  “The air is really thin down here.”

“I noticed.”  I pulled out two more glow stones and passed them over to Chu.  “There isn’t much we can do about it though.  I’ll try something really quick, but it might not do much.”  I formed a construct using two parts wind and one part water qi, and shaped it like a large fan.  Then I started spinning it, faster and faster as the dust in the tunnel started to fill the air.  Chu and I lifted the visors on our helmets to cover our faces with a cloth, but I still ended up eating a mouthful of grit after a good five minutes of manipulating the construct.  By the time the dust had all been blown away, it was definitely easier to breathe.

“That’s better.”  Chu looked at the fan construct.  “Do you think you can keep that thing spinning while we walk?”

“Probably, but then we wouldn’t be able to see what’s in front of us because of all the dust we will run into.”  I motioned to the bare floors.  “And any tracks will get erased.”

“Well, all the dust you just blasted down the tunnel didn’t help, but I get your point.”  He tucked his handkerchief away, and changed the subject.  “My qi is almost back to full.  How is your level doing?”

“I’m almost to three quarters of what I can hold.”  I had a larger capacity, considering I was almost a full level higher than he was.  “The batteries in my belt are both full, so we should be able to handle most situations.”

He gave me a quick nod and we started walking again.  After a few minutes, he pulled a fresh torch out of a storage device and lit it.  “Just in case the air gets too thin again, the fire will give us some warning.”

The two of us kept going for several hours.  Neither of us said so, but we were starting to get worried.  Our pace was drastically slowed because of the number of side tunnels we had to check, most of them ending in a blank wall of rock.  It was like the people that made this place just decided to stop tunneling at random points.  Without any clues, it was hard to guess why.  I felt like it was because they were simply probing for ore, but Chu was convinced these were meant for temporary storage and sorting the ore that came down from above.  Either way, it didn’t really matter.  Or, at least we felt like it didn’t.  Until we found the bodies.

A pile of dry bones and rusted armor at the end of one of the tunnels told the tale of an ancient battle.  A group of seven bearing pickaxes and wearing little more than canvas clothing had fought against two warriors in heavy plate armor and ridiculously thick stone staffs.  From the holes punched into the armor, it was plain the pickaxes had wounded them heavily.  A dried strip of leather that almost covered the entire base of the tunnel looked like the dessicated remains of a giant worm.  I had a thousand guesses as to how this could have played out, but none of them made very much sense.  Had the men with pickaxes been fighting a giant worm, and the men with staffs shown up to defend the worm?  Or, was the worm with the miners, and the armored warriors stood against all of them?

“Take a look at this!”  Chu was holding his torch over the floor at the end of the tunnel, where a hole that led somewhere else allowed a breeze to cause the flames to flicker and dance.  “The air here smells… hot.”

“From the odor, I think this might past a lava flow deeper underground.”  I had seen the river of lava running past the city, and this might lead us straight there.  Or, at least somewhere along the river.  “What do you think happened here?”

“It looks to me like those two are guards, or maybe priests.”  Chu indicated the armored skeletons.  “Why else would they have a staff as a weapon?”

“That does make sense, I suppose.”  I bent down to pick one up, and found it to be heavier than the solid metal spears I carried in my storage belt.  Meaning, it was nearing stupid levels of weight.  There were runes spiraling down the full length, but they didn’t accept any form of qi.  It meant the runes were merely decoration, or the pattern had been broken at some point.  “Then why were miners fighting priests?”

“Well, it looks to me like those miners were looking for something.  That’s why there were so many of these tunnels.  They knew how far to dig, they just weren’t sure where it intersected on the other side.”  Chu waved at the hole.  “When they found it, those priests popped up through the ground and started fighting.  I don’t understand the worm, though.”

“There are other tunnels farther down, meaning this discovery happened after they had already dug more of these.  And like you said, what’s up with the worm?”  I tried to inspect the bodies for any clues or treasure, but everything either turned to dust when I touched it, or I just didn’t see a use for it.  What kind of miner didn’t even have a coin pouch for a mug of ale after their shift?  “I guess it doesn’t really matter what happened.  What does matter, is I think we just found a direct route to the place where the necromancer has set up camp.”

“Guess we need to find everybody, and get back here.”  Chu poked his torch deeper into the rough section that was still too dark to see down.  “I can’t tell how deep this goes, but it can’t be too far from that lava.  We might be able to end this whole thing in just a few more days.”

“We need to backtrack to that collapse, and make sure the others are okay.”  I put one of the heavy stone staffs in my belt, but left everything else.  The total storage space was about three thousand square feet, and I was actually starting to worry about it getting full.  I needed to stop collecting everything that wasn’t nailed down everywhere I went.  Ah, who am I kidding.  I might as well be considered one of the rare Dragon Rats.  They were like Pack Rats, only with a larger hoard than a Storage Squirrel of the Apocalypse.  And those had been hunted to extinction millennia ago, due to their plot to destroy the universe.  Trying to steal the stars from the sky was a terrible choice, but some squirrels just have to learn the hard way.  “Let’s hurry, before the air gets too thin down here.”

Chu led the way back, and I focused on pushing up my qi levels to the maximum of my capacity.  We were about to dig through a large section of collapsed tunnel, and it would be important to have a reserve of power in case things came crashing down.  It was impossible to know what could happen when you were shifting things hundreds of feet underground.  I was tempted to try and use the focusing stones I had found in the altar of the small hidden temple, but waiting for a quiet time with no distractions was a better idea.  The circumstances of my death in my first life flashed through my head, reminding me of just how risky it could be to use a new focusing stone without any safeguards in place.

“When you get a chance, I need you to fix my armor.”  Chu interrupted my cultivation by holding out his right arm.  “I think the wire broke in that last fight, and now the shield doesn’t work right.”

“I’ll take care of it once we find everyone.”  I examined the armor with a qi thread, trying to see where the wiring had broken.  The orichalcum and mithril alloy didn’t allow me to see anything.  “I still think we need to look at a liquid qi option, but I’ll worry about that later.”  We finally made it back to the tunnel collapse, and the two of us started poking at the rubble blocking the path.

“How do you think we should do this?”  Chu picked up a rock the size of his head, then set it down gently after a cascade of rocks tumbled down around his feet.  “This is really unstable.”

“I have an idea.  It sounds counter-intuitive, but we need to solidify this whole collapse first.”  I spun out a thick strand of earth qi, and started to combine the small rocks into a greater whole.  “If we make all of this one piece, we can tunnel through it.  There is still a chance things will come tumbling down on our heads, of course.  It’s impossible to know until we try.”

“Sounds like as good of an idea as any.”  Chu reached out and pushed earth qi through his hands, forcing the mound of rubble into a solid piece by smoothing it out from the bottom up.  “I’ll hit the bottom, you handle the sides.”

We pushed out more and more qi, burning through our supply of energy as the loose pile slowly morphed into one solid piece.  I had to push deep into the tunnel to reach the point where the rubble ended and open air marked the end of the collapse.  Chu flopped down on the floor of the tunnel for a moment to catch his breath.  I pulled in some extra qi from a battery to bring myself up to a little over half, instead of just cultivating directly from the environment.  We were too close to stop now, and the unbalanced environment made regular cultivation take too long.

“It’s okay to catch your breath, but you need to stand up and stay close to me.”  I started shaping a narrow path straight through the blockage.  “If the tunnel comes down, I won’t be able to shield you from several feet away.”

“Fine.”  Chu levered himself back to his feet.  “I guess I need to improve my ability to cultivate on the move, anyway.”  He popped a medicinal pill in his mouth before walking over to me.  “No time like the present for some practice.”

The two of us shuffled forward slowly, letting the wall of debris melt away as we walked.  Since I was focusing on just earth qi, the occasional nugget of metal would drop to the ground.  Most of it was iron ore, but a few various pieces of more rare materials tinkled to the floor.  Chu collected them, so I could stay focused on what I was doing.  It did give us some idea of what the original inhabitants were looking for down here.  My bet was on the occasional pebble of gold, but that changed as soon as we found a fist-sized block of malachite poking out of the ceiling.

The almost glass-like material looked milky white with only a tint of green in its unprocessed form, but I had no doubt the rare, qi conductive material was their number one focus when digging.  If there were more chunks this size, I was tempted to start a mining operation here myself.  It would be one heck of a massive upgrade to my financial situation.  Not that I was hurting or anything, I just knew how expensive things were going to get when five cultivators needed to get the materials to break through the Sage and Duke levels of cultivation.  There was a reason why the most powerful in the Empire were also the most wealthy.  It was almost impossible to have one without the other, especially when buying rare and precious materials at auctions.  Then, add in the cost of having those same materials being made into pills and elixirs by a Grandmaster Alchemist, and you were talking about entire fortunes disappearing in the blink of an eye.  Multiply that times five, and you get an idea of what we would soon be dealing with, especially considering we were reaching the limits of my own abilities in alchemy.  Well, as far as qi cultivation went.  I still had a lot of body cultivation formulas bouncing around in my head we could use once we made it to the Eastern Province.

After the distraction of the malachite, with Chu quietly mumbling future plans involving what sounded like a rather extensive plan to gain ownership of the mineral rights from the Empire, we finally broke through.

“Stars!”  I activated the shields on my armor, and tried to move my spirit wood ring into place before the sneaking undead waiting for us could knock me back.  Chu blasted an arc of wood qi over my shoulder toward the closest of the zombies, giving me a moment to react.  In retrospect, it was something I should have been prepared for, but thinking about the malachite had me daydreaming instead of focusing on my surroundings.  How I didn’t sense them when I was exploring with my threads had to be from the increased ambient dark qi, because once I was exposed to them, the intensity from the energy animating their bodies was cloying in the tight space.  “Back up, we need to get some room!”

Chu was quick to listen, immediately giving me the space I needed to shift back into the tight tunnel we had made.  It meant they could only come at me one or two at a time, and a flare of light from Chu’s torch behind me gave me a better look at what we were dealing with.  The beak of a giant bird missing half its face peeked over the pair of skeletons trying to crowd their way inside, and I tossed a handful of poppers by reflex to try and separate the monster from my bony opponents.  I immediately regretted throwing the tiny explosives, because the unsteady tunnel rained down a shower of dust and dirt on our heads.  Since Chu and I were the only ones who needed to breathe, we were the only two distracted by the coughing fit it produced.

“Jim, take two big steps back, and then duck!”  I immediately followed Chu’s instructions, already crouching down and lifting my spirit wood shield to block the dark qi-infused bony fists that were pounding rhythmically against my hasty protection.  “Now!”  I dropped even lower, and barely cleared the scything wind blade that came from the trap plate Chu had placed at neck height in the tight tunnel wall.  It held enough power to remove the skulls from the two skeletons crowding me, and their brittle remains crumbled in front of me as the dark qi holding them together was separated from the spinal column.

“I don’t think you made it better.”  The bird creature, now unhindered by the skeletons, hit me hard enough that I had to drop to one knee to hold it back.  An ominous cracking sound came from the spirit wood, and I spun up my heart core to empower the uppercut that I levered into the avian’s rotting chest.  My fist punched through the hollow bones, and I was covered in a wash of gore that made my qi shielding flare with a bright warning.  There was something in the coagulated blood of the large bird that the warding identified as a powerful threat.  Now that the skeletons were out of the way, and my shields were providing enough light to see by, I could finally tell that I was fighting some kind of oversized vulture with four wings instead of two.  The upper pair buffeted against my helmet as they reached over my shield, and the beak slammed down once more, this time causing a visible crack to run from the center of the circle of spirit wood to the lower rim.  “That’s it, carrion-eater.  Don’t you know it isn’t nice to break peoples things?”

Before it could hit me again, I used a wood qi thread to pull an adamantine spear free and slam it through the base of its beak, nailing it to the ceiling above.  It tried to pull itself free, and ripped its own damaged head off, dropping to the ground as its neck stump sprayed blood over me once more.  The thin shielding that protected me flared once again, cooking the disgusting mess in a flash of light and heat that made the tight area stink bad enough I had to hold back a gag.  I noticed a small surge of dark qi tint the area around me for a split second as the smoke and vapor cleared, but it was gone before I could inspect it further.  The memory of the infection inside the sailor I tried to save ran through my head, and I shivered at the thought of what could have just happened without the shields.  I didn’t even wince at the cost as I swapped out a fresh core in the back of my helmet.  There was no way I wanted to risk my shields running out of power if that happened again.

“Well, that was disgusting.”  Chu looked over my shoulder as I morphed my spirit wood ring back into its ring form, trying to inspect it for damage as it sat around my finger.  “Was that the last of those things?”

I shook my head, remembering what I had seen waiting for us deeper underground.  “Not even close, Chu.  Not even close.”