Warlock Apprentice

Chapter 328: Traveling in Darkness

Angor could barely sense the nightmare aura from his position. Luckily, he didn’t fall for too long, and a tiny trace of the aura was still left above him.

He didn’t know where this would take them. But he had no other choice.

He already assumed the worst, yet he couldn’t say it. Angor only smiled at Toby to comfort the bird. “Go that way. There must be a way out.”

“Tweet!” Toby didn’t sound pessimistic at all.

As he guided Toby’s flying course toward where the nightmare aura was richest, Angor slowly went over his current situation in his mind.

Before falling into the tunnel, he only had a very brief glimpse at his back and saw the silhouette of someone… no. That wasn’t “someone”, but a human-shaped skeleton.

He knew because the skeleton looked really impressive, in a weird way.

That was definitely not a nightmare monster. Maybe a summoned creature or a magic puppet. Angor was sure that someone was controlling it from the dark, someone who attacked him just before the tunnel was closed.

And he could only think of one such individual who would do this in the entire Twilight Well.

“Twilight?” he wondered out loud. He couldn’t determine the culprit yet. But being contained in this lonesome darkness made him want to vent out his rage somewhere. Otherwise, the negative emotions would burst out of his mind.

His sanity and moralistic beliefs didn’t prevent him from using Twilight as an imaginary target for his anger. And he only grew more and more furious the more he thought about it.

But the only thing he could do right now was to roar into the abyss of darkness, which did no good apart from troubling Toby’s ears.

“Don’t worry, Toby… we’ll get to the exit soon,” Angor comforted his partner as well as persuading himself that there was still hope.

There was a novel he read before which said that “a world dominated by complete darkness obeys no rule of time. An era passes on every time you blink your eyes.”

He didn’t regard these words more than a simple method of establishing a meaningful atmosphere in the story. But he began to understand what it meant when he himself was trapped in dark.

It wasn’t about the rules of time. He couldn’t sense “time” at all.

He felt as if he had been here for a long time. A week, or maybe a month. However, his body kept telling him that a day had not elapsed yet.

He wasn’t hungry or tired. The mana he spent when he brought out the Nightmare Domain had not fully recovered.

It was barely several hours, at best.

Not being able to tell time gave him the false impression that he was here for a long time. Maybe when the inner organs adjusted to the darkness, he would finally believe so.

He took out the pocket watch which contained his hologram tablet and affixed it onto his chest carefully. He then activated the device.

The shining screen somewhat dispelled the looming darkness.

He didn’t feel particularly afraid before. But when there was a light source, he could look into the monstrous void all around him, injecting endless fear into his brain.

It was like someone who suffered acrophobia who stood on a safe, barred platform, where a bottomless abyss lied below. He knew he was safe, yet he felt terrified.

Angor looked back at his hologram tablet without minding the area around him too much.

It was the first day of Month of Harvest (August). Eight in the evening. He recalled it was the last day of Month of Soothing Wind (July) when he left Brute Cavern. At a similar evening time. After a brief calculation, he concluded that he only spent an afternoon inside this plane passageway.

It meant four or five hours. Yet he felt as if a month already passed.

“Hoot?” Toby called in a curious tone.

The bird saw Angor’s tablet for the first time. Angor didn’t wish to expose too much information regarding this yet, so he only told Toby it was a time-measuring tool he obtained from his teacher.

He wasn’t lying, since his teacher, Jon, did give him the tablet. He meant to give Toby the wrong impression that he was referring to Sunders.

Under Angor’s instructions, Toby kept flying for half an hour. Meanwhile, Angor opened a folder to look for information related to plane passageways.

Everything that was explained looked similar to what he assumed—that he had to know about a space coordinate in order to escape the tunnel in one piece. In most cases, a plane passageway only had one viable way that led to two points. Wandering around and relying on luck was very likely to get him nowhere.

He considered and opened another different folder.

It contained a book that he recorded in Sunders’ library when they were on the cloud whale— Fantastic Treasures and Where to Find Them (10th Anniversary All-in-One Edition).

It was a magazine published by a magazine office located inside a Wizard Fair called “Archaic Rivershore”. Monthly release. Angor was reading a volume they published to celebrate their 10th anniversary. The front page of the book even declared that the book was specifically gifted to Mister Phantom.

Angor looked through the index and quickly found what he needed:

[Section Ephemera: a non-existent creature of unknown origin. Rumor has it that it is related to Candy House, an organization administered by Fairytown. The Section Ephemera held such great value that every single piece of information regarding its presence will attract a great many wizards. It has a unique property that establishes a new two-way passage inside a stable plane. The passage was only single-use, but it can achieve a lot of different goals in the hands of capable wizards…]

Angor carefully read the explanations, hoping that his Section Ephemera could help him escape.

However, the book only said that the creature worked in a “stable plane”, not a stable passage between different planes. Besides, Angor’s plane passageway was only relatively solid. Without the protection of the world’s consciousness, the tunnel could easily crumble if anything went wrong.

He sighed. It seemed he couldn’t use the Section Ephemera properly here.

Toby kept flying toward where the nightmare aura felt thicker. They would take a rest every now and then, where Toby would sit inside Angor’s pocket and have a snack. But they would immediately fall down again, albeit not very fast. In order not to lose track of the nightmare aura, Toby only rested for several minutes each time before returning to being a pilot.

About another half day passed by as they continued their seemingly endless journey.

Before Angor completely lost hope of their chance of survival, he finally saw something shining in the direction they were heading to.

…

Inside the inner auction hall of Twilight Auction House.

“What’s the matter, Angor?!” Sunders called anxiously. “Damn it. His signal vanished!”

The gentleman grimaced hard. There were many possible reasons for one to suddenly disappear from his “radar”. Considering Angor’s condition, the most probable conjecture was that Angor somehow entered the nightmare passage!

Sunders stomped and jumped down from the monster nest. Then he dashed toward the outside at full speed.

“Where are you going, Sunders?!” Devildare endured another hit from Froggy and noticed Sunders’ action. “Hey wait, there are two Sunders?! But the other one is black…”

Sunders called back from a distance, “Angor’s in trouble. I’m checking him out!”

“Angor?” Devildare also put on a grim look. What about the nightmare tunnels if something happened to that boy?

Sunders already read Devildare’s mind. “The tunnels are already closed!”

“But you can’t leave me here!” Devildare yelled, “And-”

Who’s that “black” Sunders?

Devildare didn’t get to ask the question because Sunders already vanished from his sight.

Devildare growled and looked around. He saw the harp-wielding fox still alive. The animal was wounded a bit but nothing too serious.

However… the harp was still here!

As they speculated, this item might be a Mystery-level weapon!

And Sunders just, left it here? To help his student?

“So the rumor is correct. His new student is really special to him…”

But what exactly happened over there? Devildare suddenly got a bad feeling about it. There was one terrible possibility that lingered in his mind, and he hoped it was not the case.

…

Since the tunnels were closed off, the mist covering Twilight Well was also disappearing rapidly.

Sunders hopped among the buildings quickly and grew more and more worried as he watched the mist growing thinner and thinner. In the last second, before he lost contact with Angor, the boy sounded relaxed, which meant whatever happened was very serious.

According to Fox, Shava was “her grace” to the monsters. This meant “Shava” was a really important figure in the Nightmare Realm. Maybe someone powerful in the core regions of that place.

This was why the dragonflies would never harm Angor.

But something got Angor in the last second. It was obviously not the nightmare monsters who did it, which only left the possibility that someone else ambushed him.

“Such a pity. It seems my beloved disciple has been murdered… He cannot provide his body to my experiments now,” a low voice came from beside Sunders.

Sunders looked around and saw the “younger version” of himself, who had black eyes and crimson pupils.

“Return. You can’t show up in front of ordinary folks,” Sunders said as he reached out a hand and released a tiny vortex which “absorbed” his other self.

…

Soon, Sunders reached Lady’s Juice. As he expected, no one was here. There were no traces that indicated a fight.

Sunders’ eyes shone with the light of “Remove Delirium”, a level-1 spell, which looked through the history using information that remained at the scene.

But he got nothing. There was no useful lead.

The entire Lady’s Juice was clean. No energy ruptures, no foreign hormones.

It was exactly the cleanliness that told Sunders that someone plotted against Angor.

But who the culprit was didn’t matter for now. Angor would still question if Twilight attacked him, yet Sunders would not—killing an innocent wizard or two wouldn’t make a difference now.