Path to Transcendence

Chapter 652: Pillars of Fire

The marks weren’t exactly as game-changing as he’d been hoping for. Since the skill was only at level 1, there was a limit on how many marks he could place. At the moment, he could place two marks. Which, in all fairness, was already more than the one he had been capable of previously.

While it didn’t help him as much as he planned, it did help a little bit. He used both marks as best as he could. He stuck one down at the location where he killed the ambush variant and flew as far away as quickly as possible, before placing another mark.

Then he just moved around, shooting down the tunnels.

He was able to confirm several things. For one, the tunnels were not as stationary as he thought. Originally, he theorized that he was inside some sort of maze. He was right about that part; the tunnels did connect like a maze, but they also moved.

Somehow, someway, these bus-sized tunnels were being moved around like a constantly rearranging puzzle. It was no wonder he hadn’t been able to find a way out. Whoever was in control of this tunnel network was purposefully keeping him stuck in the middle of this never-ending loop of darkness and dirt.

He was a bit worried that they would be able to collapse the tunnels on top of him, squeezing him to death, but interestingly, that hadn’t happened yet. Either it wasn’t possible, or there was a different reason altogether.

He pushed that alarming idea to the side for the time being. He actually had a couple of ideas of how to escape this maze-like loop. One of them involved digging his way out.

But he had already spent almost half a day trying to dig his way through countless tons of hard stone, and that had ended in failure, so he wasn’t too excited about any ideas that required anything like that.

The other idea involved hiding himself. The creature or thing behind this accursed moving maze was almost definitely tracking him by some means. There was no other way they would be able to move the maze around him so well.

He was hoping to confuse them enough that they would lose track of him. The result would be for them to send more ant parties at him. Or they would allow some kind of gap that he could slip through. Clearly, there were tunnels that he didn’t have access to. It was from these same tunnels that the ants were coming.

If he could find one of these access tunnels, he would be one step closer to finding the source of this underground maze and escaping. He also had to figure out why these ants were corrupted in the first place. It had to be somewhat related to the corrupted rift; otherwise, he didn’t know why the Trial Key had forced him into this situation.

How far has the corruption spread already? Was it possible to stop it? And if there was, should he even try? The completion requirements only said he needed to investigate the corruption, not cleanse it, like the rift before.

It seemed that staying alive and escaping were more important than cleansing it.

But now he had a semblance of a plan, and he was at least going to try it out. He had already been down inside these dark tunnels for too long and wanted to breathe in some fresh air and let the sun beam down on his skin.

So without further ado, he began to make preparations. He found a good place to put one of his marks. He found an intersection where many tunnels converged. He would use this mark as a reference point in case he needed to find his way back or to keep an idea of how the tunnels were moving. Not only that, but he was going to use it as a decoy by deactivating the function that helped hide it, instead blasting his aura through it.

He hoped that this would confuse whoever or whatever was controlling this maze.

The marks were pretty amazing. They were responsive to his mana, aura, willpower, and intent like nothing he had experienced. It was sort of like extending his awareness to these marks.

He couldn’t hear or see through them, but he got a general sense of what was going on thanks to his spatial perception skill. It was sort of like peering through a dirty beer bottle, but he could still make out some details. He was hoping that one of these ant groups would pass his mark and he would be made aware of it.

He also did his best to erase his presence. He utilized his ruinous aura and his ruinous crown to help him with that. He let the destructive energy shred every ounce of remnant mana coming from him.

He doubted he was being tracked through sight alone, so he wasn’t worried about that as much. But he floated himself above the tunnel’s ground floor. He knew that plenty of earth mages could sense through vibrational detection. He still didn’t know if that applied in this situation, but he was playing it safe.

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He used the Lightweave and Umbral Loom Necklaces as best he could. By the time he was done with his preparations, he could barely sense himself and was happy with the results.

But now came the hard part.

Waiting.

***

He was dozing off when he sensed something ping off his mark. It was very subtle, but with nothing else to do but wait, he immediately latched onto this signature. He slowly moved toward the signature; it was coming his way, so he didn’t need to wait for long.

What he saw surprised him. It was a small team of ants walking down the tunnel. They were scouring the place for something, and he had a feeling that his plan had worked somewhat. They must not be able to track him as easily as before.

While the team of ants was small, he noticed that they weren’t the usual soldier ants. These ones were the more powerful variant. He hadn’t seen more than one at the same time, but now he was staring at three of them.

He didn’t know if he should be worried or pleased to see that he was becoming more and more of a threat. He let these ants make their way down the tunnel and walk below his spot in the ceiling. They hadn’t appeared to notice him yet, but he didn’t have much time.

With as much stealth and as much finesse as he could manage, he slowly created a mark and let it brush up against one of the ants. He froze when the ant paused, and its antennae went up.

But he let out a sigh when the ant resumed its journey down the tunnel. Only when they were far enough away that he wasn’t worried about getting spotted, he followed from behind. They hadn’t detected the mark yet, which was a good thing.

Unfortunately, watching this group of ants was incredibly boring. He almost fell asleep several times, and he stalked behind them. In fact, he was getting so bored that he almost missed it when they disappeared.

Julius felt the mark flicker for a moment, but eventually it settled down. However, he looked around and didn’t spot the ants. He paid special attention to their location, and only then did he notice they had vanished behind a wall.

Walking over to the wall, he placed his hand on the stone’s surface. It felt hard, but not like stone. It felt more like a barrier of some kind. He quickly removed his hand from the barrier, just in case it had some kind of detection alarm attached to it.

Thankfully, he had an idea how to get past the barrier without smashing his face into it and alerting the ants. Once he made sure the mark was far enough away, he activated [Void Step]. The familiar waves of the void channeled through his body, and he found himself stepping into the void and out the other side.

He paid close attention to make sure that nobody had sensed that skill. He didn’t know if anyone had; the ants hadn’t detected anything. But at this point, he thought the ants were a little dumb. However, he was more worried about alerting whoever was controlling this place or whoever had made the barrier.

Stealth was on his side for the first time in a long time, and he wanted to keep it that way.

He could tell the difference between the tunnels right away. These tunnels had much more wear, and the corruption was much more concentrated. He continued to follow the mark he left on the ant, and eventually he spotted a faint light at the end of the tunnel. Curious, he headed towards it and came to an enormous clearing.

His eyes widened as he observed the cavern. It was large enough to fit the entire Burning Sun Sect inside. It was quite bright too; there were pillars of fire running around the cavern, almost like lava or liquid flames, illuminating it decently well.

However, he wasn’t really interested in that. Instead, he was too busy holding himself back from shouting in a panic. His mouth gaped open as he looked at the sight before him.

He had previously thought the group of ants that attacked him had been a lot.

He was wrong. So very wrong. Those ants were nothing but a small grain of rice compared to the whole colony.

In front of his eyes lay a massive sea of black ants crawling all over the place. There had to be tens of thousands. Maybe more, it was hard to tell with so many bodies. It wasn’t just ants, either; he was looking at a small city of ants. Structures and everything. He was both stunned and horrified.

He didn’t even think for a moment that he would stand a chance against these ants. It didn’t matter if they were Tier 4 or Tier 3. The sheer numbers would crush him. Not only that, but he doubted that Tier 4s were the most powerful ones inside this colony. The size alone would indicate that Tier 5s were roaming around. And he had a pretty good guess at where that might be.

He chewed on his lip as he stared at a massive honeycomb-like tower in the middle of the clearing. It wasn’t just the size or the powerful feeling of auras coming from it that disconcerted him. It was the sheer potency of corruption radiating from every inch and every pore of the structure.

He might have just found the source of corruption. And to be honest, he didn’t really have any plans of going inside that tower to check it out.

Unfortunately, there were a few issues with that. For one, he didn’t get any notifications or feel that his mission to investigate the corruption had been completed. Secondly, he needed to escape, and if his eyes didn’t deceive him, he spotted what looked like a possible escape shaft high in the ceiling. The problem was that the tower was placed exactly at that location, and he would probably need to enter the tower to access the shaft.

The question was how he was supposed to get inside? Let alone to get within a hundred feet without alerting this colony of ants. He didn’t want them to attack him in this kind of environment. That wouldn’t end up very well.

He hid in the darkness of the tunnel and started to examine the cavern as best as he could. For over an hour, he looked for a way to get closer to the tower while avoiding the sea of ants who would like nothing more than to tear him into tiny pieces.

He was about to give up when he looked at the pillars of fire and the pools of lava at their feet. Inspiration slowly rolled in, and he started to get some ideas. Now, whether any of those ideas were good was debatable. But it was worth a shot.