Monarch of Evernight

Chapter 1263: Depths of the Lair

The battle was over after a while. Qianye had also joined the battle in an attempt to minimize werewolf casualties, slaughtering the beasts one by one with clumsy sword-strikes.

Qianye entered the forest again after the werewolves had cleaned up the battlefield and ignited his origin flames, once again luring out a wave of beasts.

This wave was much smaller than the last, containing only four thousand or so mediocre beasts. Qianye didn’t even need to do anything as Eiseka and his werewolves wiped them out.

Qianye entered the forest two more times but finally gave up after failing to lure anything out.

This didn’t mean that the entire area was clear of enemies. There were clearly alien beasts hiding inside the woods, but they already knew fear at this point and weren’t willing to appear. Knowing fear was a good thing. Fearful beasts would not recklessly appear to challenge Qianye and his fully-equipped army.

Since the creatures weren’t appearing, Qianye didn’t want to experiment on new methods just for the sake of eradicating them. The most important thing they needed to do was grasp the laws here and not engage in meaningless massacre. He began walking slowly through the forest and exploring its secrets. Naturally, the place with the three Holy Trees was where he went first.

After several days, the piles of beast eggs below the trees had disappeared. Only a couple of smaller ones remained soaked in the water. The liquid in the lake had also lessened quite a bit, causing the rocky island at its center to appear bigger. Only the base remained of that stone chair, sitting amidst some scattered stalagmites.

Qianye activated his True Sight and saw that the missing scouts were still buried within the trees.

There was no one to stop him this time. Qianye hopped over to one of the Holy Trees and hacked open its trunk with a swing of East Peak. The tree trembled and let out an infantile wail. The trunk below the cut-opening wiggled fiercely, and soon, a human body was spat out. The sticky tree sap then sealed up the cut surfaces like glue.

This was a naked human warrior. His skin was pale, and his body was covered in small holes where the Holy Tree’s branches had stabbed him. Muddled and confused after falling to the ground, the man wanted to clamber back into the tree. However, his limbs were so weak that he could only squirm on the ground.

Qianye knelt down and pulled his face up to observe. The warrior’s eyes were empty, murky, and unfocused. It would seem his eyes had lost their function. The strange smile on his face never changed, almost as though he wasn’t worried about his current physical condition.

Qianye’s heart sank as he came to an answer.

The soldier was alive, but his mind was dead. He was nothing but a walking corpse at this point, just like the scouts in the other trees.

Qianye stood up and remained silent for a good while before knocking on the tree-trunk with East Peak. Trembling all over, the Holy Tree opened its bark and spat out the werewolves and soldiers one after the other. This tree wasn’t the only one; the other two also followed suit with the ejection.

This proved that these three trees were of fairly high intelligence.

Qianye moved the bodies to an empty space outside of the forest and swung out a plume of origin flames. These living corpses were reduced to ashes under the fire of Venus Dawn, bringing an end to a life full of fighting.

After doing all of that, Qianye returned to the three Holy Trees and asked, “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

One of the Holy Trees stretched out a branch to point at the small island in the lake.

Qianye jumped over and observed the area carefully. The small island did not have an underwater part—the space underneath was filled with the Holy Tree’s roots, and it would seem that the island itself was formed from the secretions produced by them. The lower half of the landmass was stone, but the stalagmites jutting out from it had a metallic sheen to them. So far, it seemed that only the stalagmites possessed this stone-metal characteristic.

This proved that the value of these stalagmites was far greater than expected. At the very least, their mode of production greatly limited their availability. Qianye decided that he would go back and pick up all the spears the six-armed creature had hurled at him.

At the center of the small island stood the remains of the stone chair. Touching its base filled Qianye with a wondrous sensation, almost as though he had come into contact with three faint spirits. They were vague and weak, only capable of transmitting some basic emotions like fear. Qianye could not obtain anything else apart from that.

These three spirits were the wills of the Holy Trees. It was just that Qianye had blasted apart the communication medium that was the stone chair, so he could no longer converse with them. If he hadn’t destroyed this stone chair back then, he would have to face a beast army that was much stronger. The six-armed creature would not have been forced to appear in the body of a host, either. Qianye would have no easy way to deal with the creature if it were to hide in the forest.

Judging from the material, the chair was made up of ordinary stone. As for why it could serve as a medium of communication and how, Qianye had no idea. Blasting the chair back then was a decision based on his intuition, a power he had accumulated over the many years of fighting. He had merely guessed that the chair might be important to the six-armed creature.

Every rock on the stony island was formed from the secretions coming from the roots and hence should be valuable. Similarly, this sap-lake was enough for Qianye to bring a hundred thousand more soldiers into the new world. As for the other ores and resources, he still couldn’t figure them out yet.

Qianye left the central region and headed deeper into the woods. Before long, he discovered that the ground in the depths of the forest was covered with holes, forming a beehive structure underneath. The openings were of varying sizes—a person would have to stoop in order to fit into the smaller ones, while the bigger ones could accommodate a truck. There were many more branches inside these tunnels, similar to the compartments of a hive. The rooms in different areas were structured differently, but those in the same area were identical.

This was the beasts’ lair!

Compared to the valley behind the “door,” this beast lair was massive and three-dimensional, almost like a maze. Even at this scale, it would be a fairly tight fit for an army numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

Qianye jumped into the largest tunnel, planning to explore the depths of the lair.

The passage sloped downward in general, but there were some places with precipitous slopes, while others were more gentle. Qianye walked along the path for a while before branching tunnels appeared on either side. These passages opened into four different chambers to the left, right, above, and below.

Qianye entered a random room and found that it spanned several meters on each side, and the walls were made of stone. Upon detailed differentiation, they didn’t look entirely like stone, either.

There was nothing on the ground except for some tree roots. Unlike common beast lairs, there were no bones, feces, scales, or feathers. It almost seemed like these beasts did not have any biological requirements.

Qianye cut off a random root and held it up, watching as the cut end squirted tree sap. This sap immediately turned sticky upon contact with the air and effectively sealed off the cut-end.

Qianye cut out some stone from the walls. The cut surfaces were clearly layered—the stony material stretched only a few centimeters from the surface and gradually turned into soil toward the center. Qianye cut down some more rocks and found that their thickness was varied. He collected some samples into Andruil’s Space before returning to the main tunnel to continue his exploration.

Using perception outside was completely different from applying it within the labyrinth.

The lair’s spatial design was extremely logical without the slightest bit of wasted space. The positioning of the tunnels was also made to maximize efficiency. This was very likely the work of a master.

Qianye looked back and noticed some sunlight around a corner of the passage. He recounted his tunnel-journey but couldn’t remember any transparent designs. Qianye didn’t care all that much about the architectural details, either, so he merely committed this characteristic to memory and moved on.

He remembered back when the six-armed creature was chasing after him, an ancient will had awakened in the depths of the forest. No matter what that was, such a gigantic and ancient existence wasn’t going to be easy to push around.

The lair was now empty after the beast horde moved out in full force. This was the best opportunity because Qianye was sure he could escape even if he were to run into that ancient existence.

The deeper he went, the clearer his judgment became.

The design of this lair was too well-knit to be an ordinary settlement. This had to be a professionally optimized military camp. A special tunnel appeared before Qianye as he went deeper in. All the other tunnels were made of stone, but this was made of wood, its walls formed by intertwining tree roots.

Qianye entered without the slightest bit of hesitation because the flame of Venus Dawn was the bane of all wood.

Within this passage, there were several rooms. Most of them were empty, but the chamber at the very end was full of beast eggs, embedded in the walls, floor, and ceiling. Each of these eggs was connected to a root, which probably served to transfer nutrients.

This floor was probably the hatching chamber, but the next floor down baffled him quite a bit. Every room here was fairly big with neat arrays of stone platforms inside. On these platforms were rows of indentations that looked to be made for eggs, yet the size was smaller than the beast eggs Qianye had seen before.

The rooms here were all empty, and it wasn’t evident what they were used for. Yet, it was simply impossible for such chambers to exist in a beast lair and not have a special use.

Qianye pushed his puzzlement away temporarily and went further down. Here, he became highly alert because he could sense an ancient will waking up from its slumber.

Qianye slowly walked forward with East Peak in his hands. When he once again stepped on even ground, a wide underground space appeared before him.

This chamber was as majestic as it was massive, almost like a giant palace. There was an underground lake of Holy Tree sap, and at its center was a spherical object floating in the air.

The object was greyish-white in color and covered in deep-grey patterns, levitating rhythmically above the lake. Qianye almost looked like an ant before this fifty-meter sphere.

A consciousness touched Qianye’s soul as he approached the lake, transmitting a querying message.

However, Qianye did not know how to decipher this message. It did not belong to any language he understood, nor could it communicate directly with him like the six-armed creature.

Seeing that Qianye wasn’t replying, the giant grey sphere issued its question once more. Qianye remained silent because he did not know how to reply. Hence, the grey sphere stated its question for the third time.

In this manner, it repeated the same question every minute.

Qianye gradually relaxed because many signs pointed to the fact that this entity, while ancient, wasn’t that intelligent. It did not have the power to attack, either. All it could do was reply passively, like a machine that needed to be operated.