B6 Chapter 694: The Plateau, pt. 2 (Patreon)

Kaius sprawled on the sand and tussock, doing his best to ignore the haunting spectre of a ruin looming just behind his shoulder. All of them had gathered after his discovery, and none of them quite knew what to make of it. "How could it be in Common?" Kenva hissed, nervously spinning an arrow between her fingers. "It makes no sense!" 

Kaius wished he knew. It was bad enough that they’d found bodies. It left him feeling strange and melancholic, seeing the remains of the long dead curled up in fear, as if they could hide from the doom that had found them. It almost didn’t feel real. Part of him had been treating this place like some grand and dangerous Depths biome. It had made it easy to ignore the strangeness, but now it made it hard for it to sink in that these might really have been people — not just some simulacra. 

What had happened to them?

Kaius chewed on his lip, the sting and taste of iron stopping him from falling too deep into his thoughts. It was hard, when the words of the long dead kept floating through his mind. To be using the language of Vaastivar… Kenva had the right of it, it made no sense.

“Maybe the System did it?” Porkchop asked, eying the ruin behind them. He was the only one of them who hadn’t been able to take a look, and Kaius could tell he was holding back the urge to knock over a wall to peer into the cellar. “It changed our entire world, and did something with this one — translating a bit of text doesn’t seem beyond it.”

Ianmus looked deep in thought, as he had since they’d left the ruin. He shook his head, not looking away from the ancient remnants of the farmhouse.

“It wouldn’t have needed to,” he said confidently. “Though, it does have a hand in this, just not the way you’re expecting.”

“What do you mean?” Kenva asked.

“This isn’t exactly hidden knowledge, but it's more of a niche field of ancient history that is really only known by academics — Common is the System’s tongue.”

“Excuse me?” Kaius asked, shocked at the sudden revelation.

Ianmus nodded. “There are almost no records of what came before, but it’s hypothesised there were a whole swathe of regional and racial languages that used to exist. The best guess is that when the system came, it transferred knowledge of Common to the earliest generations so that they might understand its messages. Given the utter chaos that no doubt followed in the millenia after the first integration, the usefulness and ubiquity of Common seems to have just…pushed everything else out.”

Kaius just stared at the man in disbelief as the entire foundation of his understanding of the world shook just a little bit. What did he mean they all used to speak different languages?! How in the hells would that even work, things must have been chaos! Hells, it had been a nightmare for him and Porkchop to communicate before his brother had gotten his head around using Common, and he was both telepathic and could already bloody read it!

“How in the hells have I never heard of this before?”

Ianmus shrugged. “It’s niche history and not particularly relevant to anything? We don’t even really have any surviving records of what came before, although I suspect that the elves might have preserved some. My father occasionally used some odd words that didn’t sound like Common, but he never told me either way.”

“I’m no help there, my people usually avoid elves when they can help it, and I think they mostly use Common to communicate with us.”

Kaius locked eyes with Kenva, who looked equally in disbelief that the other pair could be so non-chalant about the revelation. 

“I’m not crazy right? This is big news?”

She nodded slowly. “Yeah, I’d say so.”

“It’s more of a curiosity, I think.”

Kaius sighed, rubbing his brow as he did his best to put aside the fact that not only did they not always speak Common, but there had been multiple damn languages. It didn’t work very well, but he did his best. Ultimately, Ianmus was mostly right — it was a niche historical fact, but it did mean one thing.

“Well, if these people also spoke Common, then that means they’d been integrated, right?”

His friends went silent at his words, a severe air falling over them.

If this place had once been populated and had been integrated, then who knew what hints they might find about their current trials. Gods, for all he knew, it had been failing the integration that had transformed this place into a Shardworld. Or it was something entirely unrelated. 

Whatever it was, it meant finding out more was important. If this was the price of failure, they couldn’t afford to let it happen.

An image flashed through his mind of Deadacre reduced to a dusty ruin, only by the feet of long distant delvers from another world. He frowned, shaking it off as he pushed himself to his feet.

“We need to check out more of these ruins. If we can find a few more messages, we might learn something.”

His team stood up, shaking off the dust of the arid forest floor, and Ianmus summoned a notebook to hand, promptly scrawling notes within.

“I’ll do my best to record some notes on what we find. We don’t really have the time or expertise to really give this the time or depth of research it needs, but we can still tell the Guild and the Spires about it. I’d be astonished if it doesn’t lead to some sort of expedition, even if it has to wait until the Proving is finished. The more we can tell them beforehand, the better.”

Kaius nodded slowly. As much as hints on their path forward were important, there was one thing that rang true regardless of what they found. If this was the consequence of failure, then they simply could not fail. That meant they had to focus on being strong, and only made their performance in the upcoming challenge that much more important.

Besides, all they had to go off was a few words. They could be wrong.

Kaius really hoped they were wrong.

They stuck to the rocky floor of the plateau as they made their way deeper into the forest. It saved time, even if the low hanging branches and sprawl of waxy leaves made it hard for them to see more than a few hundred longstrides in any direction. They’d already seen evidence of more ruins in the direction of the source of the energy that suffused this place, so they simply made their way in that direction.

“I just wish there had been some hint to what this ‘Ingwa’ was,” Ianmus murmured as they picked their way through shaded tussocks and scattered boulders of pink crystal. “A god? Some sort of Champion? Something else? It could tell us so much.”

“Does it really matter? You found bodies cursing their fate, and the System has called this a Shardworld. Doesn’t exactly paint a pleasant picture.”

“Gods yes,” Ianmus replied. “If it was a deity, then the message is likely a simple curse of what had befallen them — which would certainly line up with cataclysm, though perhaps a regional one. If it was a champion, or maybe some ally, then maybe they were betrayed, or there was some other explanation for the ruin that befell them.”

Kaius raised his brow. “It’s a Shardworld, Ianmus. It seems pretty evident that something bad happened.”

Ianmus shrugged. “Sure, but we don’t know the cause. It doesn’t need to be the integration itself that caused all of this. Whatever wiped these people out might have done so before this place was turned into a Shardworld. Maybe the System simply…recycles dead worlds. Or something.”

“Hush,” Kenva said softly from ahead, scanning the branches above them.

Kaius was immediately on guard, his hand drifting to his blade. “Beasts?”

“No, the opposite. I just realised I haven't seen or heard anything in a good quarter hour. I think they’re avoiding the source of energy we’re approaching. We should be cautious.”

Kaius frowned — he wasn’t exactly fond of the repeated mysteries that were being heaped on them, but there wasn’t much he could do about that.

“We keep moving.”

Things were just starting to get interesting, no way they backed out now.

….

The forgotten bones of a large stone complex rose out of the desert. Set around the remnants of a courtyard, a once immense building had been reduced to hole-strewn walls with sand piled up high around the edges. The second story still stood thanks to a few anaemic traces of magic that clung to the stones, but whatever had lain above them had been lost to time.

Other buildings, squat and austere in comparison, had once flanked the courtyard. They’d been reduced to little more than foundations strewn with chunks of grey stone and shattered pottery now. The one remaining wall that showed their height wouldn’t last much longer, slowly being consumed by a snaking root from a giant tree growing only a hundred or so strides away. 

Kaius crossed the courtyard with his team. It was the sixth ruin they’d found, and the most intact by far. Not only that, but it was far larger as well. Judging by the magic that had clung on through what might have been millenia, a lot of money had gone into its construction. Maybe it was the estate of a noble, or some public institution, either way, it seemed a promising place to check.

The other ruins they’d investigated had held more bodies. Some were clustered, hiding wherever they could, much like the cellar they’d first found. In others, they found scattered bones laying on the floor with fragments of wood and cloth around them. As if they’d died in bed, and rotted where they lay. 

They’d only found one more piece of writing, in what could have only been a leather workshop. Some of the skins still survived, dessicated and damaged, but preserved thanks to the potency of alchemicals used to treat them, and the simple magical strength of the beasts they’d come from. They’d found a body huddled under a table, wrapped around a small square of pelt. Words had been scrawled on the torn and piecemeal leather. 

What they’d found had only raised more questions.

‘People flee in droves, but there is no sanctuary without the strength to cut a path through the Shardworld. The strongest have already abandoned us. Curse them, and curse the…’

There had been another word there, but it had been warped until it was illegible. It wasn't simply age that faded the words, they’d been changed. Kaius didn’t know if it had simply been a different language, or more worryingly, the System had distorted it so they couldn’t read it.

At minimum, it confirmed that this place had at least reached the same stage of the integration they now sat at. If they’d gotten further, or maybe even finished it, then it seemed the Shardworld was here to stay as well. 

He could only hope that this place had more for them. With how large and well preserved it was, they might be able to find something preserved by magic, or at least durable enough to survive the time and sand.

Crossing the courtyard, they walked up a pair of steps that had been almost entirely worn away by the sand. A doorway loomed large, its high arch empty to reveal a grand hall. Entire chunks of the stone ceiling had collapsed to reveal the next floor and the slowly dancing leaves of the canopy that swallowed the tallest reaches of the ruin.

They picked their way through scattered dust and the fading traces of a place lost to time. Broken and fractured pews littered the main hall, while scraps of red and blue fluttered on the otherwise plain wall as wind roared through the open space. The place must have been subject to some sort of enchantment at some point, though Kaius still saw no traces of runes. There was no other explanation for how it had survived so well in comparison to the other ruins. 

However, it was still a ruin. They didn’t find much at first, just scraps of faded cloth and collapsed remnants of what might have once been a bookshelf in the back office that was tucked behind the main hall. 

A shattered stone desk lay at the back of the room. Porkchop approached, hooking his claws under one broken half of the slab top to shift it.

“Hey, come look at this!” 

All of them hurried over. There, in a pile of rubble and dust that might have once been a shelf, lay a book. It was heavily damaged — but it looked like it had been neglected for centuries, rather than millenia. Kaius could still feel the faintest traces of potent protective magics emanating from the faded scale binding, though he still saw no sign of runes to explain it. Maybe they’d had a different method, or had relied solely on the Skills of crafters. 

Ianmus picked it up, cautiously flicking through. Most of it was illegible. The few pages that weren’t torn or disintegrating were still faded to an extreme degree. There were still fragments. It was a diary, judging by the handful of entries they found complaining about the headache of managing this place. 

Halfway through, the entries ended  — leaving only a final passage written in sharp, hurried handwriting.

‘Buchrast, Tetti-Ai, and Oolamu have all fallen since the descent, and I fear we are next. If I had been born a little earlier, maybe I could have done something, but Ingwa has proven fickle and cruel. My spite for the System, and for the ancestors and their cowardice. I leave for the Shardworld in an hour, for supposedly Tssni and its ascenders stand strong. They will welcome me, I think.’

“Another reference to finding shelter through the Shardworld,” Ianmus murmured. 

“Maybe this wasn’t because of the integration?” Kaius guessed. “If they thought they could reach safety through the Shardworld, the disaster couldn’t have consumed their entire world. Maybe the System simply excised a lost land and made use of it?”

No one else on his team was any more certain than he was. After they found little else of note, they carefully stored the notebook in the Voidvault and left, heading deeper towards the source of the energy that suffused the plateau. 

Looking back over his shoulder, Kaius watched the distant temple, only a few slivers of it visible through the shifting leaves. Whatever had happened, Kaius couldn’t help but root for the ancient author of the notebook. Whoever it was, they had been the only person that hadn’t reacted like they were facing certain doom. 

Kaius hoped they made it out with as many people as they could. If they were confident in shepherding people through a place like this, then they had to be much stronger than the second tier.

Turning away, he kept walking — and ran nose-first into a barrier of solid energy, pain flaring as glowing light rippled from the impact.

*Ding! You have encountered a Sealed, Celestine-rank Competition Zone! Please return when the Proving has commenced!*