Ch277-Deep Mystery

Sylver Seeker Book 7

Chapter 11 (277) – Deep Mystery

 

There weren’t a lot of creatures around for Sylver to absorb health from to heal himself up on the mountain.

He got some foxes, a pair of hares, and Aleri almost managed to bring down a fur covered flying thing, but it whipped Aleri with its tail and by the time Sylver brought the flying shade back, the creature was gone.

He used the wriggling thread Mora provided to sow his torso closed, he didn’t have anywhere near enough flesh or bones to actually fix the damage, but at the very least nothing was going to fall out of him if he stood up too fast.

Without the muscles and bones the entire front of his torso was soft, like a folded up blanket, or a seat cushion, and the “skin” Mora managed to help him make was so thin that there was a serious concern about getting caught on a branch and tearing the entire thing off as if it were a shirt.

Klara fell asleep shortly after Mora stopped messing around on the ice, and went back to very smoothly sliding along her threads.

Sylver hadn’t sensed any damage inside Klara, at least to her soul. As for the physical damage, broken ribs, cracks on her arms and shoulder blade, various effects of long term starvation, oddly enough she seemed sufficiently hydrated, but as far as he could tell there was nothing that a mediocre healer couldn’t fix in a few months, or in a few hours if Edmund had a crack at it .

The mining town of Velrod would very likely have at least a pair of healers, as for paying them for their services… Sylver had taken inventory of what he had left in his [Bound Bones] and to no-one’s surprise, one of the bones that had been sliced open contained all of his local and foreign currency.

He had brought more than enough spending money with him from the “allowance” Lola/Chrys had provided him and the rabbits, but he had kept all of it in a single bone deep within his chest, barely an inch away from his needle. His reasoning was that if something managed to hit him that deeply he’d have much bigger problems than not having any money.

He wasn’t going to sell his daggers, he’d spent too much time and effort saturating them with mana, he had a couple of diamonds he wasn’t going to cry about selling off, and if it came down to it, the pirate shades had quite a few decent weapons and pieces of armour that wouldn’t be difficult to replace later on.

As far as Lostal was concerned…

Realistically, there wasn’t any reason not to let him write his report and send it to someone.

Sylver had been counting on Novva to clean up Lostal’s official report before he sent it off to anyone else, but given what he saw inside the hollow-vault having someone actually deal with it before it managed to spiral into something unmanageable was worth whatever consequences might come with Sylver being mentioned by name in a report that may or may not end up on the desk of the High King.

He mostly didn’t like the idea of people digging into him, into the people around, especially while Chrys was doing what she was doing, and it goes without saying he didn’t want anybody to know about Tuli, the dark elves, let alone what he had done in Tuli.

But now that Edmund was here, the potential consequences for Sylver and everyone around him were significantly fewer, but it would still be an unimaginable shitshow if Edmund had to ever seriously throw his weight around enough to deter the people Sylver was concerned about.

He wasn’t ready to go to war with a real army, country, kingdom, he almost lost to mishmashes of mere human beings melded into a single “creature” in a piece of Babel affected hollow-vault.

The smart thing to do would be to have Lostal write his report, make certain Sylver’s presence wasn’t mentioned, and then make Lostal disappear so nobody could ever read his mind or ask him for any details.

Then again, the man was so deeply loyal to his people that he was seriously thinking of murdering “children” to keep his country safe. If Novva told him directly never to speak about what he saw Sylver do in the hollow-vault, there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that Lostal would take the secret to his grave.

Instead of mulling the various possibilities over in his head, Sylver had Ulvic run close to Mora, and asked the man directly. He put a spell around Klara’s head so she didn’t wake up from them talking.

The crystal in his throat he used to speak had been nicked, so Sylver used [Mirage] to create his voice.

“I need you not to mention Nels or myself in your reports. Can you do that?” Sylver asked.

Lostal didn’t answer straight away, he looked at Sylver, looked at the back of Mora’s head, and looked up towards the sky for a bit before he turned back towards Sylver.

“I don’t have the authority to make that decision,” Lostal said honestly.

Part of the blame was on Sylver for freely handing out his name, but since a piece of Babel was involved, the right thing to do was to get the information to someone with enough firepower to deal with it as soon as possible.

He wanted to say a few days wouldn’t make a difference, but he knew from multiple first and secondhand experiences that in cases like these a few hours could mean the difference between sending a couple of adventurers, and having to march an army.

“I respect your honesty. Can you leave Nels’ and my names blank in that case? Or come up with different names?” Sylver asked.

“I can do that. But if it’s as a big of a deal as it appears to me, they’ll want to talk to you…” Lostal said.

“What if I write down everything they would need to know? How safely to enter and exit it, how to prevent people from getting infected by the curse? ” Sylver asked.

“I don’t know. This entire thing is several rungs above my head. I don’t have the authority to make any sort of decision on it,” Lostal explained.

“I respect your honesty,” Sylver repeated, and had Ulvic create some distance between them.

Nels turned her head around in the makeshift holder Sylver had made out of [Black Mass] lined with warm red mushrooms.

“What will happen if he tells his commander about you?” Nels asked.

She didn’t bother speaking in a foreign language since Lostal had a perk that likely would be able to translate it, and instead she just covered Sylver and herself in a sound isolating spell.

It wasn’t the time or place, but her neat and straight lined sphere made the “bubble” Sylver had covered Klara’s head in look like a scribble on a napkin compared to high quality calligraphy on gold lined parchment. Just looking at it was honestly the second best thing he’d seen today.

“Probably nothing. Between the Cats and Lola’s connections it’s unlikely it will ever reach anyone who might cause problems,” Sylver explained. The keyword in what he said was “probably.”

“You have cats and an elf working for you?” Nels asked.

“Cats with a capital C. They only look like cats, it’s a long story. And a high-elf. Lola Aeyri is a high-elf, at least physically. I found her soul on an island with a curse, and I made her a new body but I couldn’t make her a proper high-elf core,” Sylver explained.

He caught a reaction in Nels’ eyes when he said Lola’s full name, and while that in itself wasn’t concerning, the fact that she tried to hide her reaction in the first place, was.

“Layla’s daughter,” Nels half said, half asked.

“Layla’s daughter,” Sylver confirmed.

“White hair, big eyes… Always tries to sit down on something?” Nels asked.

The last part sounded right even if Sylver never really noticed it, but now that Nels had said it, Lola did always try to find somewhere to sit down whenever they spoke.

“Ed said that he remembers that she died when she was born. And that Layla had made a burial gierth for her. White sand, with a piece of dried bark,” Sylver explained.

He saw the same reaction in Nels’ eyes, and saw her try to hide it again.

“Don’t do that,” Sylver said, and maybe warned, but he wasn’t sure if that was what he meant.

What Nels did to her body to survive was her business, but if she knew something that involved Lola, which by extension, involved him, then she knew better than most not to keep it from him.

But even with that in mind, Nels waited far too long before she spoke.

“You have to trust me on this. If it’s what I think it is, then I cannot be wrong about it. I need to speak to Edmund before I can talk about it to either of you with any degree of certainty,” Nels said.

Sylver just looked at her, and a piece of him wanted to pick her up and physically shake answers out of her. Obviously he didn’t do that, and wouldn’t do that. He just stared at her, and tried to see if the silence would be enough to pressure her.

It wasn’t, she knew him too well to believe there could be anything more than the staring.

“Anyway,” Sylver said, “I found Tuli. Her shell is damaged, but Ed and I have a plan to kickstart the healing process. Might be a good time to mention the Sun Demon is said to make a gigantic hole in Eira in the next real summer solstice. Ed also killed the Moon Demon that was being summoned inside Tuli. What else…” Sylver said.

He knew what he was doing, Nels knew what he was doing, and as shocked as she was, it wasn’t enough to jostle the information out of her. In fact, she didn’t even look all that shocked, just tired, in a way that was more than mere physical tiredness.

“If you know about the Sun Demon, that means Sonso is still around…” Nels said.

His face shouldn’t have shown anything, but Nels must have seen the reaction in his mana, but regardless of how she saw it, she saw it.

“I don’t know if he’s around, but his book almost made me not get Ed,” Sylver said.

As he said that, for some reason it clicked in his head that Edmund was in a mountain, and Nels had also been in a mountain.

There were a limited number of mountains in Eira, it would take years to check all of them, but it wouldn’t take a lifetime.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Nels sighed.

“About the clairvoyant with the two siblings, when did you last see him?” Nels asked.

It felt like being splashed in the face with cold water and having snow fall down the back of his robe.

“All three of mine were women. And the last time I saw all three was a few months ago. I got sent to a different realm, and two of them remained in that realm, the third one came back here with me, and left a few weeks ago,” Sylver said.

Nels closed her eyes and shook her head.

“Did they look like the son-or I mean daughter, mother, and grandmother of each other? Near identical apart from the age?” Nels asked.

“Yes,” Sylver said.

Three long creases formed on her forehead as she scowled for a few moments, but they faded away as her face returned to its usual neutral position.

“Did you find them, or did they find you?” Nels asked.

“One of them was waiting for me in the city. I ended up “waking up in” so to speak. She said she knew I’d be there, but didn’t know when. I came back to the village on the day I knew she’d be there, and that was the first time we met in person… But I met her sister before that but I didn’t know she was her sister. The sister had hired this dipshit dimensional mage to kidnap the pregnant wife of the original owner of the body I ended up taking,” Sylver explained.

The thing about her non-reaction he didn’t like more than anything was that he didn’t get the sense what he was saying was new information for her.

“What did they kidnap her for?” Nels asked.

“I don’t know, some sort of ritual. I showed the framework to Ed but he couldn’t make heads or tails of it either. Lola has a copy,” Sylver said.

There was being curious about something, and then there was what he felt about whatever it was that Nels knew but wasn’t telling him before speaking to Edmund.

On top of that Sylver really didn’t like how deep in thought Nels seemed to be over what he had just told her.

Mora sensed it long before Sylver did, and at his request instead of running around the creature, she headed straight for it, and Ulvic followed her.

He heard the large beast groan in a low guttural voice, its fluttering fur made it almost invisible against the matching fluttering snow.

Mora effortlessly slipped a thread around its neck, Sylver’s robe flung him into the air, and he landed on top Mora’s frozen in place thread. He walked slowly towards the creature, and through the thread felt Mora’s sharp wild magic skid along the hairy beast’s skin.

[White Hair Ape – Large Footed – 171]
[HP: 110,413 – 94%]
[MP: 4,000 – 100%]
[Stamina: 92,477 – 83%]
[Corpse – Grand]
[Soul – Lesser]

He walked along the thread it until he reached the white haired beast, briefly used [Fog Form] to materialize on its back as it swiped at him with a hand that was as wide as he was tall, and while Mora limited the movements of its arms, Sylver pressed his hand flatly against the left side of its back, and forced his mana into its chest.

It struggled so hard against the thin threads that the few that didn’t tear sliced through its fur and flesh, steaming blood leaked and squirted all over the white snow. As Sylver continued to push against its heart each time it tried to expand, he eventually slowed it down enough that the creature fell down into the snow and went limp.

He climbed up to its neck, pushed his fingers into the thin bleeding wound, and tried to reach the spine using the blood vessel coming out of the slit on his palm.

When no blood vessel came out, because he realized he was missing everything aside from bones from the tips of his fingers up to his shoulder, he took a loose blood vessel from his chest, and pushed it into the bleeding wound.

As he had expected, its muscles were so unbelievably dense that it was like trying to push a needle through a rock.

At his request Mora pulled down the creature’s head forward, which pulled at the skin on its back enough for Sylver to tear through the dense muscles, and reach the gelatinous liquid inside the vertebra.

He used [Dead Dominion] to make all the surrounding blood it spilled float up into the air, he cleaned the snow and debris out of it, and after infecting it with his mana, he injected it into the wide open vein on the creature’s forearm, and told Mora to release the threads.

The hairy beast made these really odd whimpering noises, the sort that made Sylver almost feel sorry for it.

As the curse snapped into place the creature’s whole entire body flinched so hard he was almost thrown off of it. Its regeneration fought the curse with all its might, but with Sylver feeding the curse in its blood with mana through direct physical contact, it was simply a matter of time.

Mora was standing far enough away that neither Lostal nor Klara would see anything, even if they might hear it, but as Sylver was about to cut the creature open to replace a portion of his torso, he instead decided to see how [Still Water] would handle it.

With all the snow around him getting water was as simple as waving his hand towards the ground. [Advanced Water Manipulation] let him gather it into a smooth sphere, and as the perk affected the liquid Sylver saw a very odd thing on the surface of the smooth sphere.

It changed colour, or rather, parts of it turned white, but not just regular water surface reflecting snow white, spots on the surface of the sphere turned into mercury like perfect mirrors, the spots grew and grew until the whole thing became an unnatural spherical ball of mercury.

What’s more, Sylver could feel the individual snowflakes that passed through the mirror into the space inside. He took out a dagger from his [Bound Bones] storage, threw it into the sphere, and watched it pass through the reflective surface like it wasn’t there.

As he flattened the sphere the mirrored surface disappeared, and only when he focused on making the water be still did he manage to make the entire ten meter disc as reflective as a mirror.

Getting the giant white haired creature inside was as simple as moving the disc underneath it, gravity did most of the work.

When Sylver tried to direct his dagger towards the creature inside the [Still Water] he was overjoyed to find that not only was the living creature still alive inside his storage, but he could actively choose to allow it to move around, or freeze the movement of each and every individual hair.

It was incredible, after so many headaches of dealing with dead bodies, he now had a method of storage that was almost on the same level as what he had when he was a Lich.

The only downside was that once Sylver allowed all the water to fall into the snow, his awareness of the contents of his [Still Water] storage became vague.

When he created water in his hand, and stopped its movement the physical contact made his awareness of what was inside the [Still Water] almost as clear as if he were touching the creature and dagger inside directly.

It wasn’t like when shades hid inside shadows, the water wasn’t acting like a medium to the water itself, it was more like it was a small portal to a parallel space.

What’s more, the space was centered around him, when he walked five steps forward the entire contents of his [Still Water] followed him.

As the perk had written, he couldn’t pull the creature out of a hand sized puddle of water, but his dagger came out of it through the small sphere without any issue.

When he touched the dagger to put it back into his sleeve, the handle was warm, from when he’d originally touched it.

As usual, Sylver felt conflicting emotions about this, on the one hand fuck yes, this was the solution to a hundred different issues he had, on the other hand, how dare something this amazing be given to anyone for merely killing things?

If this were a spell, or an enchantment, a mage could have built their whole entire legacy on it, and here it was just given to him.

Ultimately, he chose to decide that this was a good thing, because he didn’t want to be in a bad mood when Edmund showed up.

He was going to have to experiment with the specifics of this perk, but assuming contamination wasn’t going to be an issue he could store a thousand cups of piping hot coffee, along with a hundred dead bodies that could be worked on one at a time without worrying about rot and decay.

When Lostal sneezed and the blood that flew into the snow from his mouth connected to Sylver’s [Dead Dominion] he stopped playing around with the perk, and got Mora and Ulvic to start moving again.

Once they got out of the snowstorm, Sylver saw that it was the middle of the day.

Now that they could clearly see in front of them both Mora and Ulvic sped up, the wolf shade tried to race her for a second, but as Mora ran ahead of him by half a mile in the blink of an eye, the wolf shade accepted his defeat with grace, and instead focused on not jostling the person and talking head sitting on his back.

The view from the mountain was nice, there were several rivers weaving around the long hills, wonderfully colourful distant patches of green, yellow, and red trees, and the sky was that perfect shade of grey, with the kind of storm clouds that meant there was going to be heavy rain that was going to wash all the dirt away.

Sylver had kept an eye on Klara as they moved lower and lower down the mountain, she’d spent who knows how long breathing air with an extremely high concentration of oxygen, so how was she fine high up on the mountain where the air was thin?

The explanation he came up with was that the mask restricting her breathing had trained her lungs to rely on very little air, and now that she had her whole nose and mouth to breath through, the little oxygen she got out of the air evened out to be as good as trying to breath with the mask.

It was hard to make out with all the snow, but where there should have been a rectangular town, there was only uneven rubble sprawled on the ground and hidden by snow.

He had to really squint to see it, but hidden underneath an overhanging rock Sylver could see the glittering edge of a barrier, right about where Velrod’s mine was meant to be.

As Mora hid her extra eyes, merged her feet back so she only had four, and Sylver used the recently acquired effect of [Undead Mastery] to make his undead appear as they did prior to death to make Ulvic look like a real wolf, they landed on the road, and approached the remains of the town of Velrod from the side.

After thinking it over, Sylver decided it might not be a good idea to ride into town on the back of a wolf, with a decapitated woman’s head glued to it. Nels didn’t say anything as he placed her head into a saddlebag made of [Black Mass] coated in a thin layer of mushroom to give it the appearance of leather.

He did the same to the [Black Mass] container with her torso and limbs too, and did his best to make the whole thing look like a proper saddlebag.

From the outside they now looked like a pale man in a black robe was walking alongside a white horse, with a young man in a fuzzy red robe, and an alarmingly skinny woman in a similar fuzzy red robe sitting on top of the white horse.

[A skill similar to [Appraisal] has been successfully blocked!]

“They see us,” Lostal said just before Sylver got the notification.

The “head” inside his body had been torn apart, and a piece of Sylver was worried the system wouldn’t recognize skin stitched together over the shattered remains of a skull as a “face,” but thankfully it was enough for [Faceless] to work.

The barrier erected around the town looked brittle and unstable, but it was more than enough to keep the shades Sylver tried to send into it out. From this angle it looked like the spherical barrier was holding the large overhanging rock above the town.

Lostal jumped/fell off Mora and kept one hand on her side to keep himself stable as he limped forward, and when Sylver wordlessly offered him a walking stick, Lostal scowled at him and shook his head.

“I don’t recognize their colours,” Lostal said once the two watchmen standing in front of the gates took off their grey cloaks and their uniform clothes came into view.

“It’s Countess Camilla’s De’Ariyo’s emblem, but I don’t recognize the colours either,” Sylver said.

Camilla’s territory ended well before Torg, there shouldn’t be anyone associated with her this far north.

Everyone who could took advantage of the chaos the moon flashing red caused, but even with that in mind having soldiers this deep into another noble’s territory was a bad look for anyone, let alone someone who was only recently formally given the title.

“Those are Baron Vaum’s colours,” Klara said quietly.

The name sounded familiar, but Sylver kept his book of minor noble houses in the library in his office back in Arda, he reached for Spring, but the shade shook his head, he didn’t know either.

“Is Baron Vaum on good terms with Novva Da’Perre?” Sylver asked.

Klara closed her eyes for a moment.

“I think so… They’re both on good terms with Marquess De’Leon, or at least they were back when…” Klara’s voice trailed off.

“Regardless of their relationship, we need to warn them about what’s going on in the Moaning Heights,” Lostal said.

“We should. They’re right next to it after all. On the other hand, a hollow-vault can be a massive boon to the first person who managed to get it under their control. And Novva has as much claim to it as Vaum or Camilla,” Sylver said.

What Sylver said wasn’t a lie, but it was obvious to everyone what he was doing.

In an ideal world, Sylver himself would get control of the hollow-vault, the Ibis only ever managed to get two to work as intended, the others were all far too unstable to be of any serious use. Throw in a dungeon, and the impassible mountain range might become even more valuable than Torg or Arda, especially if someone managed to create a safe path through it.

If not for the piece of Babel inside, getting back in and planting his flag into the whole thing would have been a very high priority for Sylver. If he ignored the white/black mask that basically killed him with a single swipe of the hand, and ignored what Nels said were a dungeon core given humanoid forms.

Then again, dungeons didn’t typically merge with a hollow-vault naturally, removing the piece of Babel might very well destroy whatever kind of delicate balance it had managed to achieve.

It was worth properly looking into, but by someone other than Sylver, he had more than enough on his plate as it was.

“If you clear the trees, the environment inside would be perfect for year-round farming,” Nels said from Mora’s saddlebag.

Lostal didn’t look particularly convinced when Sylver had spoken, but now that he was thinking of the thing in terms of Novva’s territory becoming a bread basket, the idea of reporting what he saw to the first military figure he came across seemed less and less like the smart move.

He couldn’t get a read on what Lostal decided, and didn’t want to scare the man into doing something drastic out of fear, so Sylver just rubbed Mora’s neck and with a smile continued walking towards what was left of the town of Velrod.