Versatile Mage

Edited by Aelryinth

A loud screech penetrated Mo Fan’s skull, like a few hundred jagged thunderbolts going off in the sky. It felt like his head was going to explode.

Mo Fan’s head was buzzing, and his consciousness faded away slightly. He almost fainted from the piercing cry, recovering slowly only after after the cry faded away!

Mo Fan turned around and glanced at the golden bird, and almost fell to the ground. The golden bird was now an enormous beast the size of a cloud. Its wings were covered in sharp cone-like feathers, currently all raised up in anger. It looked extremely dangerous, its golden feathers easily able to pierce and kill its targets!

“It’s about to attack!” Mo Fan sensed a great pressure looming over him. He was having trouble breathing properly.

The giant Golden Bird beat its wings. The sharp feathers immediately becane a golden storm raining down from the sky.

The feathers were around the size of leaves in Mo Fan’s eyes. However, as the feathers descended on him like a spray of bullets, he finally realized how massive the beast was. A single feather was as long as his leg!

That was no feather, it was clearly a golden spear! Mo Fan and Heidi cast Blink at the same time. They just escaped a volley of the golden feathers, but more feathers soon poured down on them. They had nowhere to escape to!

“It’s massive!” Zhao Manyan looked up. Half the sky was occupied by the golden beast, but the remaining half was still as spacious as ever!

“Massive my ass, aren’t you going to lend us a hand!?” Mo Fan grunted after hearing Zhao Manyan’s comment.

Zhao Manyan, Meos, Mu Bai, and Shreev cast their defensive spells simultaneously. Magic of different colors forming an ice shield, a wind barrier, and a light rampart intertwined in the air above Mo Fan and Heidi…

They initially thought the spells were enough to protect the two, but to their surprise, the spells were penetrated by the feathers as if they were merely bubbles being popped. The spells did not last very long at all!

The group was shocked. How strong was this huge Golden Bird? The combination of their defensive spells was enough to resist a Super Spell for a while, yet it collapsed right away when trying to stop Giant Golden Bird’s feathers, not to mention how wide the area covered by the feathers was…

“Run, quick!” Mu Bai yelled. There was nothing they could do apart from running!

“I f**king know that too, give me a speed boost, will you!?” Mo Fan yelled.

Luckily, Mo Fan and Heidi were not too far away from the passage, and had run as soon as they noticed something was not right. They made it to the passage just before a bunch of golden feathers landed in front of it!

The feathers smashed the bricks into pieces. Some of the feathers even punched through the door. The others quickly ran away in a panic!

“Let’s go, that thing is scarier than the Scorpion Lord Medusa!” Mo Fan ran away as soon as he got back to his feet.

——

The group ran for more than ten minutes, almost reaching the entrance of the other chamber. They leaned against the wall, panting heavily. Their clothes were drenched in sweat.

“That thing… I don’t think I saw it in Beijiang,” Zhao Manyan wheezed while catching his breath.

“Mm, I think it’s the same level as the Sphinx,” Mo Fan agreed.

“That was so scary,” Heidi gasped, her face pale.

She felt like they were just a bunch of earthworms to the Giant Golden Bird. She would never forget the suffocating pressure the creature emanated when it was diving from the sky. Luckily, they had learned their lesson after stumbling into the Scorpion Lord Medusa. They knew how strong the guardians of the right chambers were, so they did not venture too far away from the entrance.

In simpler words, the tiny earthworms had only dug up to the surface at the entrance. They quickly dug their way back into the ground when they saw the giant Golden Bird, yet they still almost died to it!

“Shreev, are you sure there’s a way to skip that creature? It’s most likely Khufu’s right-hand man,” Mo Fan had to ask.

“We’ll have to see which chamber we end up in next,” Shreev said.

“Wait, don’t you know which chamber it’s going to lead us to?” Mo Fan asked.

“I can’t say for sure. When we turned back after entering the Giant Golden Bird’s chamber, it will lead us to a different chamber. The chambers are constantly changing, like a shuffling Rubik’s cube. I have no idea how it’s being shuffled, but after one or two chambers, I should be able to figure out what the sequence is again,” Shreev said.

“Let’s head to the next chamber, then,” Mo Fan said.

“By the way, remember to probe around in the chamber first. We’ll only fight the guardian when we know we can take it on. Otherwise, we will have to return to the passage to find another way,” Shreev said.

——

There were at least a few hundred mummy chambers in the Great Pyramid of Giza. They were the nobles of Khufu’s kingdom of the undead. The weakest of them were at least at the Commander-level, but there were many stronger creatures too!

They were treating the Advisor Mummy as the standard. If they stumbled into a creature that was weaker than the Advisor Mummy, they would defeat it and open up the doors so they could follow the route that Shreev came up with to skip the Giant Golden Bird.

However, if the creature was stronger than the Advisor Mummy, they would immediately retreat to the passage or run straight for the exit. If they took the same path they came from, they were more likely to return to the starting point.

Shreev told them since there were a few hundred chambers, there must be chambers with weaker guardians. He would rather visit more chambers than risk his life fighting incredibly strong creatures!

——

Shreev’s plan did work. It was just as he said, there were chambers with weaker guardians. When they took out the guardians, it would open all four of the chamber’s doors. It was like walking in a gargantuan maze. Even though they knew how to quickly reach the exit of the maze, they had no chance of defeating the Golden Bird, so they had to take a longer route in the maze to avoid it. Similarly, every time they encountered a strong guardian they had no chance of defeating, they would use the same method to skip past it.

It was a very stupid plan, since they would have to enter an extra four to eight chambers every time they wanted to skip a chamber. However, it was still better than getting the whole team wiped out!

——

“How many days have we spent in here?” Mu Bai suddenly asked.

“No idea, it’s hard to tell what the time is in here. But I think it has been at least half a month,” Heidi said.

(Editor’s Note: There’s this recent invention called a Watch that would work here…)

“Shreev, are you sure your plan is going to work? We’re not just running around in circles, are we?” Zhao Manyan began to doubt Shreev’s plan.

The route that skipped the chambers was a lot longer than they had imagined, especially since they had to skip a chamber every time they stumbled into a Mummy that they could not defeat. In the end, the number of chambers they had to enter kept stacking up.

“We are definitely on the right track, you have to believe me!” Shreev said.

“But you told us we just need to go through twenty-four chambers to reach the exit, and now you’re telling us it’s thirty-six… I feel like we are all going to die of fatigue at this rate!” Zhao Manyan said.

“I can’t help it, the Mummies in this Great Pyramid of Giza are too strong on average. Every time we want to skip a chamber, it increases the number of chambers we have to go through!” Shreev said helplessly.

“We are all going to lose our minds at this rate,” Meos said.

“I agree.”

“Let’s keep going, we don’t have a choice.”

—

—

Fatigue!

The group insisted on only challenging the weaker guardians after encountering the Golden Bird. Unfortunately, the Great Pyramid of Giza was not so easy to be overcome. They kept finding themselves in chambers guarded by strong Mummies. The numbers of chambers they had to go through to reach their destination eventually reached fifty-six!

They initially thought the Pyramid had a few hundred chambers at most, and that they would eventually reach the chambers they had visited before. That way, they could just go through them without fighting a guardian. However, they had clearly underestimated Khufu’s influence. A few hundred chambers? Based on the number of chambers they had gone through, there were at least a thousand chambers in the Pyramid!

The plan was much more difficult and time-consuming than they first expected. They were on the verge of suffering a mental breakdown.

“How long do we have to stay in here for?”

Every time a person asked the question, it showed that their determination was shaken again.

“By measuring the length of my mustache, I believe we’ve spent two months in this place,” Zhao Manyan leaned against the wall. He was so dispirited that he looked like a mummy himself.

“Why don’t we try our luck against the Golden Bird?”

“I would rather kill myself here!”

“I’m going crazy, f**k these Mummies!”

“How unlucky are we? We keep stumbling into strong Mummies… I guess it’s because we are too weak. If we were at the Super Level, we wouldn’t have to skip so many chambers, keeping up with this never-ending journey,” Shreev sighed.

“Just treat it as a way of training, get yourself together!” Mo Fan was more optimistic than the rest of the team.

It was torture for the team. Mo Fan was still motivated because he was able to claim the Soul Essences from the Mummies they killed. In addition to that, Mo Fan also noticed that if the chamber had a Huntsman Spider on the ceiling, he would obtain even more benefits from killing the Mummy!

It was the only thing that had kept him going for two months!