Supreme Magus

Chapter 4322: Treasure Hunt (Part 2)

”The Veil also erases all traces of the tower presence, so even if someone comes checking on the geyser, they won’t find anything. Even someone as paranoid as Lith would think it was just a wild surge of world energy.”

”Thanks, Mom. I will.” Solus nodded.

Only a few geysers held magical resources, but she took a cursory sweep of the area with the Beacon, even when there was nothing to mine with the Watchtower. Most of the time, Solus found only things that would make an archeologist’s day.

On a few occasions, she encountered what she was almost certain had been ancient ore deposits. They were located not too deep in the ground and were surrounded by decrepit cloaking and earth-sealing arrays.

Yet what truly gave their original purpose out was the presence of massive enchanted doors guarding the deposits’ only entrance. They were made of simple silver, and no worthwhile gemstone was embossed on their surface.

After all, there was no point in building a door more valuable than the contents of the vault itself.

’Most of these deposits are centuries if not millennia old.’ The Beacon couldn’t examine things like dust deposits, but Solus had a deep understanding of runes and could identify how long each magical formation dated back based on the runes they employed.

’It’s no surprise they have been found and raided already.’ She inwardly sighed. ’When the doors haven’t been touched, you know it was an inside job. When the doors have been ripped off their hinges, instead, it has to be a lucky explorer.’

Solus had no idea that more than once she had witnessed Jorl’s handiwork. The Storm Griffon had used Life Maelstrom to overload the ancient arrays and brute strength to open the vaults’ gates.

He had no idea how to read runes that old, and any mistake would have triggered a cave-in, burying the Adamant under hundreds of tons of rock. Jorl solved the issue by making the focus points of the arrays implode with Life Maelstrom.

No matter how ancient, all magical formations were based on the same principles, and identifying the key nodes of outdated enchantments was easy. What once had been considered a secret of a Master Warden’s trade was now so trivial that children of any decent magical bloodline learned it from a tender age.

Jorl was responsible only for a small number of empty deposits. The rest, he was either unaware of their existence, or they were already empty when he had found them.

His energy signature had already faded days before Solus had even started looking for Adamant herself. There was no way to tell how long ago a vault had been breached unless one went there in person, and Solus had no reason to do that.

The deposits were located past the range of the Warp Mirror, and just going back and forth from all of them would have taken too long for no gain.

Solus had yet to find enough Adamant to cover the toes of one foot of her Divine Beast form when she ran out of known mana geysers in the Kingdom and moved to Jiera.

’Dammit, Mom must have pillaged most of the scrap mines back in her day.’ Solus sighed. ’To make matters worse, I have imprinted only a few geysers in the Empire and can’t use those in the Desert.

’When I asked Grandma for mining rights, I could almost feel her glare boring a hole in my skull and set my body ablaze. Maybe I should have started in Verendi, but I can’t forget what Lith said. If I find Meln’s hideout, we can get rid of him once and for all!’

Solus was particularly cautious, afraid of triggering Night’s defenses or being spotted by her steed, Moonlight. Once she reached Jiera, there was no such thing as a cursory examination.

Solus thoroughly scoured the ground both above and below, hoping to find signs of Upyrs’ energy signatures.

It was the reason she didn’t miss an underground complex at the fringes of the Beacon’s range. It was too far away to take a decent look at it, even after narrowing the Watchtower’s area of effect further.

’I can’t believe it. The arrays are several millennia old, yet they are still in perfect condition.’ Even from that distance, Solus perceived a regular flow of unimprinted world energy. ’Whoever built this place must have been as rich as they were talented.

’This is worth taking a closer look.’ Solus left the tower in place and the Tower Warp charged before opening a dimensional corridor as close as the Warp Mirror could to the complex.

Alone in a foreign land and in the middle of the Beast Empire, she needed to be swift. Even if she shapeshifted her features to avoid being recognized, the members of the local Council would detain and interrogate her the moment she refused to identify herself by showing her Council amulet.

After the breakout of the plague, most of Jiera had become a no-man’s land, and the colonization parties from Garlen had exacerbated the relationship between the two continents.

The presence of an unknown Awakened traveling alone in the middle of nowhere was bound to raise suspicions, and Solus couldn’t let anyone so much as glimpse at her life force.

She moved as quickly as the wind, using the Eyes to lock on the farthest dimensional coordinates available and the Mouth to always have Warps and Blinks at the ready.

Solus stopped at the first patch of trees she found after getting close enough to the underground facility to examine it with the Eyes.

’The arrays are old but functional just as the Beacon sensed. Let’s see what’s inside.’ Solus expanded the Eyes’ sensory range, filtering out everything she had already observed as soon as the headache caused by the artifact became unbearable.

’There are constructs, and lots of them. How can they still be functional after all this time?’ She thought as the Eyes scanned deeper. ’This place looks like a poor man’s Stonewall Fortress.

’Or rather, it would be on par with the undead’s underground castle if it had been built with modern magic. Still, there are enough arrays and powerful sources of mana I can’t identify to make this place dangerous.’

For a moment, Solus feared that she had found another Odi outpost and that she would have faced the horrors of Khula again. Then, the Eyes completed their scan and found no living being, undead, or anything in between in the complex.

’By my mom!’ Even better, the artifact pinpointed two massive surges of world energy corresponding respectively to a significant mass of Adamant and another just as big of mana crystals.

’The powerful arrays that protect the vaults create too much white noise for the Eyes to get an accurate estimate of the quantity of metals and crystals stored behind those walls, but I can tell it’s a lot.

’Probably enough to get myself a full Adamant armor big enough to cover me once I reach the bright violet and replace all the lesser crystals in the tower mines with violet ones. I’m going to need those too to fuel the enchantments of equipment of that size.’

Afraid to have jinxed her good luck, Solus shook her head and returned to the tower as fast as she could.