Saintess Summons Skeletons

After a short silence, the greediest person of the group stepped forward. Sofia entered the vault proper with light steps. Before long, the machines on the ground and ceiling around the glass pillar came alive. Electricity and mana coursed together through the contraptions, moving parts separating and clicking together with soft sounds, and a thin trail of blue light appeared in the air, connecting Sofia and one of the machines on the ceiling. It was pulsating gently, motes of brighter light leaving her and flying toward the machine, as if to coax her to come closer.

“Feel anything wrong?” Sonia asked from behind.

“No, it’s just light. It wants me to go to that machine on top I think.”

“Could be dangerous.”

Sofia nodded under her helmet. “Only one way to find out.”

Taking steps in the air, Sofia followed the light trail. It brought her to a machine, which was of course currently upside down, and had a small glowing panel, engraved with a curious form.

Is that… A tentacle?

Sofia reached up, with a finger, she tapped the glowing panel.

She felt a shock, a weak electrical current entering through her finger through the armor. She pulled her finger out, but the current had already come and gone. It had prodded inside of her, as if searching for something until it found her mana heart, then had returned to the machine, all in a fraction of a second.

The glass pillar suddenly turned opaque, hiding the energy orb within, and all lights from the machines dimmed down. Sofia was ready to escape, expecting the worst, but with a simple light projection, images started playing, upside down, on all four side walls.

What…

In a series of rapid-fire static images, it showed majestic tall octopus people walking on land, and occupying many flying cities in the sky. At first the images were peaceful. Then the octopus people started fighting dragons. There were no explanations, just image after image of the flying cities burning, of octopus magicians fighting back. They seemed to wear their mana heart as a jewel on their forehead, and the stronger the magician was, the more jewels he had. Their method of leveling up was similar to modern ones, yet distinctly different.

While the images showed the conflict with dragons, it seemed to focus more on showcasing those jewels, demonstrating the power level of an octopus mage receiving its first jewel, and gradually going up from there.

One jewel was clearly the same as level 250, two was level 300 and so on, so only those with four, five or six of them could really fight back against the draconic invaders.

The images made it clear that there were very few octopi with six jewels, but it showed them fighting and dying to one particularly gigantic two-headed black dragon.

That was where the images abruptly stopped for a second, before the images showed a single 6-jeweled octopus, badly wounded, retreating to an underground facility. It was made of strange green bricks, and easily recognizable. This was the ruin.

Image after image, the octopus drowned himself in research. His goal? It was obvious from all of the scribbles on his research papers. The drawings transcended language. The seventh jewel.

After many failures, he seemed to be happy with his results, and started building a machine. Piece by piece. It was so complex that he constantly had to expand the underground facility to create more machines to manufacture the pieces for the actual one. Until one day, he was finally done. Machines all around a tall glass pillar, humming softly, energy started to gather in the empty pillar.

Slowly.

The next image showed an external view of the entire solar system. Or so Sofia believed. She recognized some planets, but some were missing, and some existed that Sofia had never heard of. Nevertheless, Veliadren was recognizable, and as the images picked up pace, it ran laps around the sun. One, five, ten, a thousand.

The image cut back to the glass pillar. Inside, a mote of light the size of a fist had gathered.

The view showed space again. More laps. Two, five, ten thousand.

The light was barely the size of a head, around it, a strange alloy seemed to be creating itself, slowly forming an arc around the energy orb. The octopus stared at the pillar of glass longingly.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

The next set of images showed him setting up this light projection. Ending with a simple showcase of the activation of the machine. The three mithril rods were levers, used to align the alloy rings. At least three rings needed to be aligned for the machine to work. It would produce an item that is the key to the seventh jewel, although even the octopus himself seemed uncertain of what it would look like exactly.

Finally the last images showed the octopus standing right where Pareth and Sonia were standing. He looked old and tired, the sheen of his six jewels no longer as strong. There was less than the third of one ring hovering around the energy orb. With reluctance, he left the vault, and the dragon scale gates closed behind him one by one.

The images stopped and light came back up in the vault.

“Well shit,” Sonia cursed, “this is a level 550 machine, isn’t it?!”

“That’s what that thing thought, at least… Eleven thousand years and it only produced a third of a ring… There are seven full rings, each larger than the previous one…”

“At the very least, two hundred and thirty thousand years,” Sonia quickly calculated.

“Assuming the bigger rings aren’t slower to appear… Actually, wait, look! There’s the start of an eighth one…”

“... this is… This might actually be the oldest thing I’ve ever found… It’s my first time learning about the squid people, too. And what the fuck was that two-headed dragon!”

“Yeah, that thing was absurd… is it even possible for a living thing to be this big?” Sofia wondered.

It was bigger than the damned deep whale!

Hell, it was bigger than MOTHERFUCKING TIME’s corpse!

Is that the cataclysm?

Hmm… Probably not, if he survived an extra eleven thousand years after that… But still… Even grandma would look like a newborn put next to that thing.

“I wonder if it really works,” Sonia said, flying up to Sofia.

“Well… For one thing, it could be a trap, lure in an ascended with the promise of power to come to activate the machine. Maybe take over their body to resurrect even,” Sofia said.

Sonia looked at Sofia with wide eyes, “What… How do you even come up with such a convoluted idea…”

“... I’ve been reading a lot of fiction… It could be, though.”

“It could, actually, yes. But then what do you suggest?”

“I say you and the others leave the vault and close the door just to be safe, if it actually is a trap like that, I’m immune to it, so no need to worry?”

“You are?” Sonia asked.

“With absolute certainty. Not even an ascended can breach my mental defenses. Already tried.”

“The fuck you mean already tried?! But— never mind that, how do I trust you’re not going to pocket whatever comes out of that machine? And even if you don’t, if it can truly push an ascended to a new level of power, it’s not something we can just casually take and divide between us.”

“Well… To begin with, if it truly is that, we really cannot let the information come out, or we’re all dead, aren’t we? Can’t think of a better way to get a target on our back. So either we keep it for ourselves, a secret between us, and whoever is first to reach level 549 is free to try it, or we just give it to an ascended we trust to use.”

Sonia looked at Sofia with narrowed eyes, “As if I’ll ever reach that level. If you let me have that I’ll give it to my group’s strongest ascended. Can’t think of a better way to further our goal. We might not even need the artefact we’re after if it actually works.”

“I supposed I could give it to Erredis… The idea of keeping it for myself is tempting though. Very tempting. It’s something that took hundreds of thousands of years to produce!”

Sonia was silent for a long while, Sofia silently keeping an eye on her.

“Ah, whatever,” Sonia eventually said with a sigh, “I’ll let you activate the damn thing. If it actually does produce a miracle item that can take an ascended to a higher filter, here is my proposal: I let you have it now, but you must swear not to give it away, and that come the first signs of the change of epochs, if you still haven’t reached the level where you can use it, you have to give it to my group, no strings attached. How does that sound?”

“Pretty fair, honestly. Do you want me to sign a contract of sorts?” Sofia asked.

“Better not. The fewer traces there are of something like this the better. If you don’t willingly give it back, well… You’ll have to fight us. I won’t say anything to anyone until then.”

“What if you die before that?” Sofia continued, “Under those terms I could even kill you and nobody would ever know anything. Doesn’t sound very safe for you.”

“Heh, that’s for me to worry about. To begin with we’re debating how to share something we don’t have yet.”

“True… And even if the machine works, who knows whether the thing will work, and if it works whether it’ll work for us when our level up methods are so different from the octopus people. Then another detail, how do I know ‘the change of epochs’ has started?”

“It’s a bit unclear to me as well, but from what I know, it should be self-evident. You’ll know when it comes. By then, you better hope that my side has been successful…”

“Understood… I’ll let you leave with the others then. Pareth will know when to open the doors back.”

Moments later, Sofia was alone in the vault, a mithril lever in each hand, watching the alloy rings slowly rotating around the orb of energy.

“Hundreds of thousands of years…”