Sword of Dawnbreaker

Chapter 1238: Chapter 1237: Accidentally Entering

Direct contact with the Shadow Sand Dust.

Of course Amber wasn’t doing this just because her brain short-circuited for a moment. Her personality might be all mischief and bouncing off the walls most days, but her talent for chickening out is even more outrageous than anyone suspects; ”cherish life and stay away from danger” has been her survival creed for many years—if she doesn’t have at least some confidence, she would never casually touch this kind of thing with completely unknown origins.

Other people had already come into contact with this Shadow Sand Dust. Whether it was Modir himself, who first brought it out, or Victoria Wilder and Maji, who later took charge of collecting and transporting the samples, they had all handled this sand, and none of them showed any abnormalities afterward. Fact was, even though this stuff might be connected to the gods, it didn’t seem to harm ordinary people the way other divine relics did. Just touching it should be no big deal.

These thoughts flashed through her mind, and Amber’s fingertip was already touching those grayish-white grains of sand—such tiny things produced almost no sensation at all on her finger.

Amber blinked, looking at her fingertip. A minuscule grain of sand clung to her skin, its gray-white edges quivering like mist as they spread across the pad of her finger.

”Huh, really no reaction at all...” she muttered to herself, giving the grain a flick and lazily leaning back—yet the expected pressure of the chair back never came. She only felt herself suddenly lose her balance, her whole body tipping backward, and the chair under her vanishing in an instant—everything in front of her jittered and twisted, and it all happened so fast that she didn’t even have time to cry out before she felt herself slam solidly down onto a stretch of sand.

”Oh my god...” Only now did Amber’s startled yelp finally arrive a beat late, the short scream carrying a long way across the endless, empty desert.

A dry breeze blew in from afar, and beneath her was the gritty feel of dust and sand. Amber stared wide-eyed at her surroundings, seeing a boundless gray-white desert stretching out across her vision, while the distant sky was a pale, washed-out color. Everything her eyes could see existed only in black, white, and gray tones—this was a scene she couldn’t possibly be more familiar with.

”Uh...” Amber scrambled up from the ground, the gray-white grains cascading off her clothes. She stood there, dazed for a moment, then started muttering with immense guilty conscience, ”Should I maybe not be courting death today...”

Even though she grumbled like that, the tense look on her face eased a little, because she realized that same familiar sensation was still there—the feeling of being able to control herself and the surroundings in the shadow realm was unchanged, and her ”connects” to the real world had not been severed. She could still return outside at any moment. In fact, maybe it was just her imagination, but she even felt that her perception and control of shadow magic was much stronger than usual.

On top of that, this place was indeed the shadow realm she was most familiar with. The good state of her own condition and the familiarity of the environment let her calm down quickly.

Calm or not, she absolutely didn’t dare relax her inner tension and vigilance in the slightest. She remembered the intelligence Maji had brought back, remembered the other woman’s description of this gray-white desert—this place was highly likely to be the Goddess of Shadows’ kingdom; even if it wasn’t the kingdom itself, it was some Otherworld similar to it, and for mortals, places like this were dangerous by definition.

This danger came from the essence of the divine itself; it had nothing to do with whether she was a ”Shadow Chosen.”

Amber took a deep breath, her conviction in her identity as ”Shadow Chosen” as firm as ever. Then she started looking around, trying to find on this vast desert the things Maji had described—that mountain-sized throne, or the black silhouettes of ruined cityscapes in the distance.

Yet after scanning her surroundings once over, she saw nothing in her field of vision but gray-white sand and some jagged, twisted black stones scattered across the desert.

”Weird...” Amber couldn’t help whispering under her breath, ”Didn’t Maji say there was a throne here as big as a mountain, or some kind of altar...”

Her words had barely fallen when she heard the wind rise in a sudden roar. A gale of unknown origin swept past right in front of her, towering gray-white sand whipped up by the wind, surging forward like a mountain taking flight and roaring across her path. The sky-darkening, earth-smothering spectacle made Amber let out a ”Holy crap” and bolt a dozen meters in a flash. Realizing you can’t outrun a sandstorm at all, she dove straight into a sand pit, crouched down tight with her hands clamped over her head, and mentally prepared to bail back to the real world the instant the storm actually rolled over her.

Yet she never felt any sand falling on her. The thunderous rumble came and went quickly; after a few seconds she realized the sound by her ears had vanished, and the oppressive feeling from the surging sand had disappeared along with it. She kept her crouched, head-hugging posture for several more seconds before she finally dared to slowly rise and turn around.

She saw a colossal throne standing right before her. Its base looked like a collapsed, decayed ancient altar. One massive stone pillar after another lay shattered around the throne, each one thicker than the largest sentinel towers she had ever seen in her life. Around the throne-altar lay broken flagstones and all kinds of scattered, damaged objects, each enormous yet exquisitely crafted, like remnants of an era forgotten by the world, presenting itself to her in a fragmented heritage.

Amber stared wide-eyed at all of this, forgetting to breathe for a long moment. Only after quite a while did she snap out of it, vaguely realizing that the throne’s appearance was very likely connected to her earlier ”thoughts.”

”So that means...” she murmured under her breath, slowly turning her head to look opposite the throne. She was no longer the clueless little thief from years ago. Years of diligently absorbing knowledge and handling all kinds of theocracy Authority Council intelligence had given her a broad foundation in arcane lore. So faced with this strange situation, she quickly formed an initial hypothesis: ”These things were already here, but before I become aware of them, they’re invisible to me? Or is it...”

She gazed at the endless desert far away and recalled Maji’s description in her mind: on the far side of the desert there was a black silhouette that looked like ruined cityscapes, and Lady Night sat on the tilted throne as if eternally watching over those ruins...

The distant desert seemed to change faintly. Hazy sand rose from the edge of the horizon, and within it dark silhouettes began to emerge. Yet just before those shadows could fully coalesce, Amber suddenly caught herself and desperately tried to rein in her associations with those ”city silhouettes”—because she abruptly remembered that there was not only a field of ruined city there, but also a madly twisted, indescribably terrifying monster!

”Stop stop stop, don’t think about it, don’t think about it—god knows what will show up if I keep going... Things like that are fine as long as you can’t see them, fine as long as you can’t see them, don’t see it, whatever you do don’t see it...” Cold sweat broke out all over Amber. The knowledge she had about divine contamination was blaring like an alarm in her head. Yet the more she tried to control her thoughts, the more images of ”city silhouettes” and ”Twisted Chaos Flesh” bubbled up uncontrollably. In her panic she bit down hard on her own tongue—and then, suddenly, a flash of inspiration lit up in her mind—

”Let the function y = f(x) be defined on some interval...”

Amber forced herself to recall that The Ultimate Horrifying Dark Nightmare Unholy Forever Unclean Shocker of a Book she’d once seen in Gawain’s study. She had only just summoned up the opening line when her mind suddenly went completely blank—forget city silhouettes and indescribable flesh, she nearly forgot her own name...

”Whew... That was close... Good thing this trick still works.”

The half-elf—Amber—patted her chest, still rattled, and cast a quick glance toward the distance. She saw that the shadows that had started to emerge at the edge of the sand haze had indeed retreated back into the ”unseen,” which confirmed her earlier guess: in this bizarre ”shadow realm space,” the state of certain things is linked to the Observer’s own ”cognition,” and as someone with deep ties to the shadow realm, this ”special Observer” could, to some degree, control the scope of what she was able to ”see.”

And for certain things connected to the divine, as long as they cannot be seen, touched, or heard—as long as they never appear within the Observer’s cognition—no contact will be made, and no influence will arise.

”Unbelievable... Is this the authority of the Goddess of Shadows? Or do all kingdoms of the gods have this kind of trait?”

Amber muttered under her breath. Normally she didn’t have a habit of talking to herself, but in this overly quiet desert she had no choice but to rely on such self-talk to calm her overstretched nerves. Then she drew back her gaze from the distance; to stop herself from accidentally thinking again about things she shouldn’t, she forced her eyes toward that gigantic throne.

On the throne, she did not see the mountain‑like figure Maji had mentioned, the one that, once it stood, could blot out the sky.

”This should be the place Modir saw in his ’dreams’...” Amber grumbled inwardly. ”According to Maji, the Goddess of Shadows was sitting on this throne... Where did She go?”

She stood below the throne, straining her neck as she looked up. The mottled, ancient megalith and the altar were reflected in her amber eyes; she stared in a daze for a long while before she couldn’t help but speak quietly: ”Goddess of Shadows... Is this really the Goddess of Shadows’ kingdom?”

She looked to her side. A broken boulder that had fallen from some pillar was stuck into the nearby sand, and on the stone one could still see broad yet exquisite patterns. No one knew how many years it had been standing here; the measure of time seemed to have lost its meaning in this place. Lost in thought, Amber reached out and touched that pale block of stone, feeling only a chill against her fingers, and a vast... emptiness.

She was Shadow Chosen.

She had heard the voice of the Goddess of Shadows more than once.

That voice was warm and bright, with not the slightest hint of ”darkness” or ”cold.” That voice would tell her many happy things, and would patiently listen to her complain about the troubles and hardships of life. Although in the past two years that voice had been appearing less and less frequently, she could be sure that the ”Goddess of Shadows” gave her a feeling utterly different from this desolate, bleak desert.

The aura lingering in this desert... was not the Goddess of Shadows’, at least not the ”Goddess of Shadows” she was familiar with.

Yet this desert still gave her an extremely familiar sensation—not only familiar, but intimate.

Amber took a light breath and turned to walk toward the throne. She climbed onto the huge stones around the collapsed altar at the throne’s base, then crossed the gaping cracks between those boulders that were like chasms—such was the scale of this throne that even though she had been standing right beside its plinth earlier, actually reaching the foot of the throne required a long and arduous climb.

She herself didn’t know what she was trying to do. She felt that she probably just wanted to see what could be seen from the direction of that throne, or perhaps she simply wanted to see whether there was some different scenery upon the throne. She felt she truly was outrageously bold—the master of the throne was absent for now, but might appear at any moment, and yet she still dared to do such a thing.

But she continued to climb toward the throne with unswerving resolve, as if something there were calling out to her.

And just as she finally reached the foot of the throne and began climbing its body, which was covered in ancient, mysterious patterns, a voice suddenly came from not far away, startling her so badly she nearly tumbled all the way back down—

”Young lady, what are you doing?”

Amber was scared out of her wits. Her hand slipped and she landed on her backside, and in the next second she sprang up like a frightened rabbit, darting behind the nearest boulder. She even instinctively tried to use shadow travel to slip into the shadow realm, only to remember at the last moment that she was already in an Otherworld that was suspected to be part of the shadow realm. The shadows around her only flickered once before quietly dissipating into the air.

Her heart was pounding wildly as she craned her neck and peered out, watching for any movement outside. After a moment that voice came to her ears again: ”Young lady, did I scare you?”

It was an elderly voice, steady and kindly, with no hint of hostility. Even though she only heard the voice, Amber’s mind immediately filled in the image of a kindly old grandfather standing in the distance. She then began going over the information Maji had provided, and quickly matched it with the voice Modir Vealt had heard in his ”dreams.”

The Goddess of Shadows was not on the throne, yet the voice identical to Modir’s was here?

Amber quickly forced herself to steady, roughly confirming that the other party likely bore no ill intent, and only then dared to poke her head out, searching for the source of the voice.

”Young lady, I’m over here, do you see? There’s a pillar here...”

The voice sounded again, and Amber finally found its origin. She calmed herself and walked in that direction, while the other party greeted her with a laugh: ”Ah, I truly didn’t expect to see a guest here, and what’s more, a guest who seems to be in her right mind. I’d heard that on very rare occasions, intelligent beings accidentally stray into this place, but since I came here I really haven’t seen any... What’s your name?”

”Amber,” Amber said casually, keeping a close eye on the top of that stone pillar barely more than a meter high. ”Who are you?”

”You can call me Wilder,” that old, kindly voice chuckled. ”Just a useless old man, that’s all.”

Amber drew a soft breath, not relaxing in the slightest. ”Modir Vealt? Are you that Great Adventurer?”

”I don’t know what this Modir you’re talking about is. My name is Wilder, and I am indeed an adventurer,” the Great Adventurer calling himself Wilder replied quite cheerfully. ”Well now, I didn’t expect... Could it be that you know me?”

”I don’t know you, but I know of you,” Amber said cautiously, then raised a hand to point at him. ”And I have a question. Why are you... a book?”