Chapter 40 — The Ancient Ruins

"And you call yourself a grandmaster thief—how embarrassing," Gao Yang said with a satisfied laugh, reaching up to pat Rebecca's head beside him and pointing at a fallen tree trunk not far away. "Here's a use for your fireball. Blow that thing apart. If I remember right, we're almost there."

Rebecca had been waiting for this moment a long time. She nodded happily at once, raised her staff, and a fireball the size of a head flew straight ahead.

He couldn't help feeling that the girl summoned her fireballs faster than before...

"Boom!"

After the thunderous report, the fireball burst apart, snapping the already rotten, brittle trunk in two; the two unbalanced halves rolled down the slope, and the road ahead opened up all at once.

An open clearing hidden in the mountains revealed itself to everyone.

This clearing seemed to have been deliberately leveled by someone long ago; the mountain rock had been cut into impossibly neat forms. Among the rocks could be seen ancient archways and collapsed walls, embedded between the great cliffs as though fused with the mountain itself—it even gave one the illusion that a magnificent fortress had once stood here and been swallowed by the surrounding stone.

In truth, however, the ancient site itself had been built inside the mountain massif; roughly two-thirds of its structure lay hidden behind that stone face.

Whether it was Amber, who had been cowering the whole way, or Rebecca, who had been listening earnestly to the teachings of the Xuanmai Sect, or the ever-vigilant Knight Byron—all of them could not help but stare wide-eyed at the sight of this ancient ruin hidden within the mountain.

They gazed in astonishment at this incredible primeval ruin.

Gao Song's eyes, meanwhile, roamed the surroundings and suddenly came to rest beside a heap of collapsed rubble.

He went over to the pile of broken stone, atop which was stuck a blackened thing whose original form could scarcely be made out. After studying it for a long while, he finally realized it was a broken sword, badly rusted and decayed.

On the ground beside the stone heap, a line of carved characters could be seen—cut so deep that even after seven hundred years of weathering they remained clearly legible: Squad 16. Kol sleeps here.

Rebecca's voice came from behind him: "What... is this?"

"Back when the company crossed the Whitewater River, we met pursuers. Squad 16 was ordered to hold the rear. Not one of them survived," Gao Xi said slowly. "The last surviving soldiers must have fallen back to this place when there was no hope of breaking out. If only... the magic tide was raging then, and the whole of the Dark Mountains was shrouded in corruption. In all my years, we never managed to retake this region, and by the time the magic tide receded on its own, no one remembered this place anymore..."

Knight Byron unbuckled his own sword, pressed the blade to his chest, and bowed in salute to the crude grave.

The soldier buried here still had a grave mound; the warriors who had raised the mound and left the carving could no longer be traced by the faintest trace.

Gao You stood in silence before the grave for a while, then picked up a piece of broken stone from beside it and pressed it atop the pile. "Rest easy. Everyone made it out alive."

In that moment, he wished he had spoken those words as Gao Yang Cecil, and not as the transmigrator Gao Song.

Then he walked toward the archway not far off. "Come with me. I'll show you what your ancestors left behind here in their day."