Chapter 8: The Strange Ancient Castle

Chapter 8: The Strange Ancient Castle

Fors’s gaze met Xio’s in midair. Neither of them spoke.

After a while, Fors laughed dryly.

“Haha. You weren’t asleep?”

Xio’s brows gradually furrowed.

“What happened to you just now?”

“Nothing. Didn’t I tell you before? Whenever the full moon comes, my condition isn’t very good. When it’s a blood moon, it becomes even worse.” Fors pretended to answer normally.

Xio looked her up and down, then pulled over the blanket.

“I remember you brought medicine to help with sleep?”

“I don’t need it for now. I’ve already adjusted.” Seeing that Xio did not continue questioning, Fors secretly sighed in relief. “Sleep, sleep. We still need to get up early and enter the forest tomorrow.”

Xio said nothing more. She turned over, hugged the blanket, and closed her eyes.

Before long, her breathing became slightly heavier, long and even.

Fors stared blankly at the ceiling, letting her thoughts wander for a while. At some unknown point, she too fell asleep.

…

The next day at noon, in the core region of Delaire Forest, before an ancient castle that had mostly collapsed and was overgrown with green vines.

Fors wiped the sweat from her forehead and let out a long breath.

“We finally made it…”

Xio glanced at her.

“The innkeeper told me it only takes two hours to get here.”

They had set out before six in the morning and had spent nearly seven hours on the road.

The corner of Fors’s mouth twitched.

“Theoretical conditions and actual circumstances are not the same. By the end, there was no road at all. We had to find our own way and open up a path ourselves!”

Xio took out her triangular blade and nodded.

“You should have foreseen this situation from the beginning. Yet you still rejected the guide the innkeeper recommended.”

“As an Astrologer, I do not believe such a small matter could cause trouble. Look, didn’t we arrive? And right now, the timing is perfect. Wraiths and ghosts must all be at their weakest.” Forcing out a smile, Fors held Leymano’s Travels in one hand and pointed ahead with the other. “I didn’t feel it before, but the more I think about it now, the more puzzled I become.”

“What are you puzzled about?” Xio also turned her gaze toward the abandoned castle, which was almost completely covered in vines.

Fors casually searched for a reason.

“Tell me, who would build a castle in the middle of a forest, without even opening a direct road to it…”

Before she finished speaking, she truly began to feel that this was indeed rather strange.

Xio thought for a moment.

“Perhaps there was originally a road. After the castle was abandoned and a long time passed, all previous traces were covered.”

Fors gathered the hair by her ear and shook her head.

“Then why abandon it?

“If safety factors were taken into account when it was built, the middle of an uninhabited forest far from towns would actually be even more dangerous. If it was for vacations, then with the style of the nobility, even if repairs and maintenance were difficult, they would not abandon it.”

Xio blurted out,

“Because it’s haunted?”

Fors considered for a few seconds.

“Could someone capable of building a large castle not hire Beyonders to deal with a haunting?

“I suspect the three major Churches and the kingdom’s government don’t know about this ancient castle. Otherwise, they would have no reason to let go of the Beyonder materials inside…”

At this point, she proposed one possibility:

“A Sanguine castle?”

Such supernatural creatures liked living in places rarely visited by people and were often associated with gloomy ancient castles and similar buildings.

In addition, the information on this castle itself had been provided by the Sanguine.

“It’s possible.” Xio first agreed, then raised a differing opinion. “Would the Sanguine be afraid of ghosts? They should definitely have the ability to handle the ancient wraiths here.”

That makes sense… Could it be that those Sanguine don’t like money and don’t care about collecting Beyonder materials? Fors thought about Mr. Moon’s behavior and rejected her own guess. After weighing her words, she said,

“Unless there are still other troublesome problems here, ones that make higher-level powerhouses choose to avoid it.”

If that were the case, her operation would be more dangerous than she had expected.

Xio gave a soft “mm.”

“While the sunlight is intense, we’ll immediately do a preliminary exploration.”

“Good.” Fors held Leymano’s Travels and approached the half-collapsed ancient castle step by step.

The two quickly arrived at the entrance, which was two-thirds blocked by stones. Beneath the green vines, they discovered that the stone walls were mottled and badly weathered, as though they had existed for a very, very long time.

Xio did not hurry in. She called out to Fors and slowly circled the castle.

Returning to the entrance, she said with puzzlement,

“This castle’s style is purely defensive. It seems to have given no consideration to habitation at all. In addition, I’ve never heard of many of its architectural features. It should date back to before the late Fourth Epoch, perhaps even earlier.”

“What is there to defend against here? Orcs? Treants? They were almost extinct after the Cataclysm. Haha, don’t tell me this is a Second or Third Epoch building?” Fors casually replied.

After observing the terrain, she brought Xio away from the entrance and to a relatively intact wall nearby. Then she stretched out her palm and pressed it against the surface.

Although she lacked experience fighting people, she was quite practiced in all the various preparations before battle.

Illusory light and shadow shifted before their eyes, and Fors and Xio suddenly entered the abandoned ancient castle.

The first things that entered their vision were a collapsed staircase, layers upon layers of upper-building wreckage, shafts of pure sunlight shining in from high above, and a ground that contained only bricks, stones, and rotten wood, with no droppings from beasts or birds and no green weeds.

A whooshing wind blew past. Even at noon, it carried a chill that seeped into the marrow.

Fors activated her Spirit Vision and slowly looked around, but she failed to see any spirit creatures.

However, she noticed that on the right side, surrounded by broken walls and ruins, there was a relatively intact stone staircase.

The staircase was mottled in many places and extended downward, leading to some unknown destination.

“Shall we go take a look?” Fors glanced at Xio and offered her suggestion.

In her view, the other parts of the castle were either clear at a glance, or else buried under layered collapsed debris. If they wanted to investigate those areas carefully, it would inevitably take a long time. In that case, it was better to first roughly explore the overall layout and gain some understanding.

Xio looked left and right, then nodded lightly.

“The cold wind is gathering underground… I suspect all the wraiths and ghosts here are hiding wherever that staircase leads.”

“Mm.” Fors carefully walked toward the mottled stone staircase, following the steps scattered with many broken stones and descending little by little.

The staircase was quite narrow, only allowing one person through, and it spiraled downward in circle after circle, making Fors rather nervous as she walked.

Tap. Tap. Tap. As their footsteps echoed more and more distantly, the light within the staircase grew darker and darker.

Xio lit the storm lantern in her hand. Fors opened Leymano’s Travels and skillfully ran her finger across one page.

A cluster of clear, warm light leaped out of nowhere, illuminating the mottled staircase ahead. Fors and Xio both tensed their nerves and descended floor after floor.

Along the way, cold winds blew past from time to time, causing them to overreact several times and nearly attack enemies that did not exist.

Tap. Tap. Tap. In that cramped, cold, and lonely environment, Fors finally reached the end of the stairs and stepped onto flat, solid ground.

She wanted to say, “Staying in a place like this for too long really would drive someone mad,” but because of the silent, deathly atmosphere around them, she failed to truly speak. She was afraid that breaking the current state would trigger an extremely bad change.

Using the light from the cluster floating diagonally above them, Fors cast her gaze forward, attempting to see exactly what lay at the end of the staircase.

It was a hall nearly ten meters tall, paved with black floor tiles from which drops of water seeped out. Cracks and damage were everywhere.

Dozens of meters away, at the opposite side of the hall where the light cluster could barely reach, stood a pair of bronze doors.

Those doors reached all the way to the top. On the left and right walls, stones had fallen away, statues were damaged, and the dark-brown soil hidden beneath was exposed.

The surface of the doors was carved with densely packed symbols and strange patterns, giving an immediate sense of mystery and heaviness, as though it were sealing something, blocking something.

Fors finally could not help speaking. Lowering her voice, she asked,

“Have you ever seen a door like this?”

Beside her, Xio shook her head.

“No.”

Fors immediately hissed softly.

“What do you think is behind this door? Where could it lead?

“Is… is this the reason the castle was built here? To prevent the creatures behind the door from coming out?”

Xio looked around but did not find any murals that could provide information. She only discovered that the closer one drew to the bronze doors, the more water seeped from the ground, and the more casually discarded silver-black longswords there were.

“In the Fourth and Fifth Epochs, murals were widely present in all castle buildings. And before the Cataclysm, judging from several elven ruins, supernatural creatures likewise liked using murals to praise deities and record daily life…” Xio spoke slowly, combining what she had seen and heard from her experience as a bounty hunter.

Fors nodded slightly.

“That’s true.

“This ancient castle is even stranger than I imagined.”

At this moment, her heart was quite uneasy. She even wanted to withdraw from this place directly and ask Mr. World for help.

After hearing Little Sun tell so many terrifying stories about relics and ruins at the Tarot Gatherings, she always could not help overthinking and frightening herself whenever she was in a similar environment.

“If we get closer, perhaps we’ll find more clues.” Xio boldly stepped forward, approaching that heavy door that seemed to be sealing off some place.

Fors tightly gripped Leymano’s Travels and hurriedly followed.

As she walked, a smear of bright red suddenly reflected in her eyes.

What seeped from the gaps between those black floor tiles was no longer water, but glaring blood!

“This…” Fors abruptly opened the notebook with the bronze-green cover, and the corner of her eye swept over Xio beside her.

In her vision, Xio had somehow turned pale. Her eye sockets were dark green, her lips blood-red, the area around her dim, and her expression extremely distorted.