Twenty minutes later, after breakfast, Moga reached the woods outside the town. A faint white mist laced the morning forest; dew on the blades of grass refracted the light, and the damp, fresh air flooded her lungs, lifting the half-elf girl’s spirits.
Of course, what really perked her up was the fact that the Eldritch God intended to teach her magic.
“How much do you understand about the principles of magic?” Yvette asked.
“I—I don’t really understand that stuff,” Moga answered honestly. “All I know is, if you recite a specific incantation, it triggers mana.”
“Tell me the spells you know.”
“I know one spell, called Enhancement—”
Soon, Moga had recited the incantation for Enhancement. It totaled barely twenty-odd words and read like a little poem.
“Only one spell?” Yvette swiftly reversed the underlying rune structure of the chant and confirmed it was a very primitive, rough technique whose effect barely nudged stamina and strength. She couldn’t help being surprised. “That’s enough for you to roam around alone?”
“I mainly rely on this bow—” After a moment’s hesitation, Moga revealed her biggest secret to the god.
In the Adventurers’ Guild system, adventurers are ranked Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold, and the highest, Platinum,
with thirteen stars within each rank.
Moga had only just been promoted to Bronze One-Star. For her at nineteen, that was a solid achievement, thanks in large part to the magitech artifact in her hands—the “Emerald Bow.” Drawing the string automatically wraps the arrow in a wind-spell pattern, greatly boosting speed and penetration.
Though limited by her mana, she could only shoot twenty such empowered arrows a day. For a cautious lone wolf like Moga, that was more than enough.
It was precisely because of this bow that she dared leave the Elven Kingdom to become an adventurer and support herself. Otherwise, even if she didn’t starve, she’d likely have been snatched and sold as a slave long ago.
After listening, Yvette extended a tendril and inspected the bow, then fell quiet.
From a magitech standpoint, the bow—as an artifact—was quite basic, and its mana efficiency was abysmal.
Yet it happened to be set with a very high-grade natural mana crystal, so pure it was jaw-dropping. In the Origin Civilization, such a crystal would fetch a sky-high price; on the Radiant Continent, it seemed merely “rare and precious.”
With a faint sigh, Yvette intoned a long incantation directly into Moga’s mind.
The spell was called “Wind Walk,” a simple, unadorned wind spell that wraps the body in wind element to accelerate. Compared to the acceleration spell she usually cast on herself, this Wind Walk was a stripped-down version to shorten the character count; even so, Yvette had to repeat it several times before Moga barely memorized it.
A few minutes later, stumbling through the words, Moga finally succeeded. Azure wind wrapped around her body, and she suddenly felt light, like a butterfly among flowers.
“So fast, my lord!”
Compared to her usual Enhancement, Wind Walk’s effect was striking—like switching from walking to a little scooter.
She darted through the trees, startling flocks of birds; the orange-gold tips of her hair streamed behind her like flowing sand, and a rare flicker of delight crossed her cool face.
With Wind Walk, the trek that usually took hours now, with twists and turns, took her less than half an hour.
She ran into scattered monsters on the way, but shook them with ease; none posed real threat.
“My lord, there are more monsters over there—I don’t think I can just push through.” A moment later, perched in a treetop and surveying the hilly expanse where the Great Labyrinth lay, Moga spoke softly.
“How much mana do you have left?”
“Under two hundred.”
“Then you really can’t get through.”
“Not… even you, my lord?”
“I’ve only just come to the mortal realm; my strength hasn’t recovered, and I can’t squander what little I have,” Yvette said. “I can assist you going in—but only this once.”
“Thank you, my lord,” Moga said from the heart.
Soon, with Shadowstep, Moga slipped toward the newly discovered entrance. Plenty of monsters scented her,
but in the blind spots of their vision, she crept past.
She entered the cave and followed a man-hewn sloping passage downward until an open underground space unfolded ahead. Collapsed ruins lay scattered; more striking were the mana crystals—many visibly high-purity at a glance—and strange plants rare on the surface.
Some luminescent crystals were set into the domed rock overhead like tiny stars, washing the labyrinth in a hazy glow.
Canceling Shadowstep, Moga edged forward, loosing arrows to drop a few sudden bat-type monsters until she reached the ruins.
“What architectural style is this? Any ideas?” Yvette asked as a tendril slipped from beneath the girl’s skirt, shaping into an eyeball to study the megalithic walls—huge stone blocks etched with mana circuits.
She decided to label it Runic Megalithic style—and felt sure this had been a rather primitive, backward civilization. It might rival—or even surpass—today’s Radiant Continent, but compared to the Origin Civilization, it was caveman stuff.
“No idea. I’ve never had schooling—only heard a few bardic tales.”
“Didn’t the Legendary Mage promote knowledge parity and compulsory education across the world?”
“That was two hundred years ago. While the Legendary Mage lived, no one defied her. But after she fell, conflict among races and nations intensified, and that order vanished. Even the elves?” Yvette remembered that, in this world, elves were the purest of the ruling class.
“Um—my lord, I’m not an elf, I’m a half-elf…” Moga bit her lip, voice lower, explaining the difference between elf and half-elf. “My father’s an elf; my mother is human. Among my father’s children, there are many half-elves like me. If you’re not ‘excellent’ enough, you have no right to an education.”
I see. Yvette nodded, roughly understanding why Moga had left the Elven Kingdom to adventure.
She let the topic drop. Together they circled the ruin and soon found the stairway down to the next level.
“Do we keep going, my lord?” Moga asked. Outside, she could hear fighting; someone from the first wave of teams was close to breaking in.
“No. Stay here and search—see if there’s anything valuable,” Yvette said.
Once she confirmed the ruin held nothing useful to her magitech research, her interest plummeted. Besides, the ordinary mana she’d siphoned earlier was spent. Anything more would tap into her precious aberrant mana—she had to economize.
“Okay,” Moga answered. She’d already spotted several promising stone structures. Even if they just yielded antiques, she could sell them for a tidy sum.
A few hours later, her little pouch bulged with heavy ancient coins and oddly shaped antiques. Tallying the haul, a rare, contented smile softened the cool lines of the half-elf girl’s face—satisfied indeed.
More and more, she felt being coerced by an eldritch god wasn’t necessarily a bad thing—at least this god handed out benefits while twisting her arm.
Whether all eldritch gods were like this, or she’d just lucked into a reasonable one—she couldn’t say.
Instead of returning the way she’d come, she followed another path that seemed to lead up, hoping to avoid the teams now pushing in.
Yet just as she stepped onto the final underground stone bridge toward a narrow exit, a group of adventurers filed in from that cramped mouth, torches held high—meeting her head-on from the opposite end of the bridge.
.
!
Book 2: Chapter 171: The Ruins
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