Re: Level 100 Farmer

Chapter 139 - Discovery

Li, led by Ven'thur's crisp and precise directions, found himself in the docks. It was still dark, and there were a few hours left before first sunlight. Because of the lateness of the hour, there were very few late night stragglers to be wary of. Mostly drunkards or shady low-level crooks, but both types quickly withdrew from Li when they felt his presence.

The docks themselves were devoid of people. An array of fishing boats of varied quality tied down to the docks floated gently. Fishermen went out in the mornings and came back at sunset and did not ever try and wade into the waters at night when lower visibility and more dangerous monsters might roam the surface waters.

Lord Lys's personal ship loomed tall and large in the night, even now manned by a small guard to prevent thievery, but knowing how idyllic Riviera usually was, these guards were probably sleeping on the job. 

'So, you want me to go to the bottom of the lake? You know, it's been a while since I've swam.'

'Is water perhaps one of your weaknesses? I can offer you some elemental protection if you so desire,' came Venthur's concerned voice.

Li sighed. 'No, it was just a minor joke. Honestly, I feel like everyone takes me a little too seriously most of the time. Anyway, bottom of the lake, right?'

'That is correct. There are a few meddlesome creatures, but I am certain they will be frightened away by your presence if they felt mine too much to bear. An entrance to an underground cave will be apparent there.'

Li knelt down by the water's edge, watching the water as it glimmered with moonlight. He liked to look at the water of this world. It was so clean, even right beside the docks, right beside sewage, that he found it a marvel to witness.

'More caves? Quite a few around here.'

'The lay of the land is conducive to underground caverns. But perhaps that is also because tribes of Molemen used to live here, though this was eight hundred years ago, well before any humans had yet to settle here.'

Li reached out and broke the water's surface with his hand. As he watched the shining surface of the water break apart, he wondered, 'But humans are here now. I assume the Molemen got driven off, then?' 

'The records from the earliest era after the arrival of the gods is murky. One of my colleagues had devoted his undeath to piecing it together, but alas, the burning of the citadel claimed his life. Yet from his writings I know that the Molemen suffered a great plague which weakened them enough for the humans to move in.

But that is to be expected. All civilization is built atop corpses. It is simply the price of development. Yet it is a price that I have observed humans to be the most willing to pay.'

'There is truth in that,' said Li. He knew full well the history of his own world built up by centuries of warfare. It was one devoid of the mystical, of the magical and supernatural that lay in every crevice of this one. He once thought that if magic existed, perhaps things like warfare and strife would just fade away. But like he had said before, magic, like science, was a tool, and people were always willing to use it for their own ends.

'But painting with a broad brush means you don't get to see the finer details. People can be good in their own way, and I'm confident that they can learn to respect the lives and world around them.'

'You intend to use your vast power to realize that ideal?'

Li shrugged. 'I don't see myself as a grand visionary. All I want to do right now is to grow my farm in a way that lets everyone from all walks of life enjoy it.'

With that, Li pushed himself into the water. An instant of coldness surrounded his body as he felt the water swallow him up, but then his bodily temperature regulated so that he felt completely fine. He had a functional swimming stroke, and with a tireless and immensely powerful body, he made quick work of the water, streaking down the depths of the lake with all the explosive propulsion of a missile. 

A streak of bubbles followed him as he opened his eyes wide, letting his night vision take in the sight of this underwater world. Schools of fish swirled around him like clouds of brilliant red and white scales. The occasional lumbering body of a larger, armor plated fish swung by, close at the heels of these clouds, chomping to try and get at a straggler. 

Balls of algae with glowing white eyes floated around him, looking at him curiously as he passed by. As he dove deeper, the water grew darker, and the fish became different. They were larger, more solitary, and more monstrous, covered with spines or baring vicious rows of teeth.

He recognized them as monsters from Elden World, but then there were also regular fish like pink salmon and trout. Here, the glowing algae creatures intensified in number and size, becoming like large floating lanterns that emitted a ghostly pale light from their bodies.

As Li swam downwards, the fish parted for him in the same way that people instinctively did, understanding he was not to be trifled with. At the bottom, he settled onto a sandy lake floor. Clouds of sediment wafted upwards, and he heard muffled sounds of movement as dozens of giant crabs that had blended directly on the floor rose up in alarm and ambled away. 

Directly above, a lesser sea serpent over a dozen meters long circled, its red eye leering down as it waited for Li to move so it could snatch up a crab. 

So this was what life was like underwater. He knew that people in his world used to dive down into the oceans and watch the life swim around them and peer at great and colorful walls of reefs, but the reefs had crumbled away and the fish population had thinned out long before he could have enjoyed anything like that. He only ever knew water as dirty, murky, and as choked as the air above water.

It was stunning, and it took Ven'thur to talk to him to snap him out of his wondering daze as he watched the life swirl around him.

'Is something amiss?'

Li shook his head. 'No, not at all. Things are perfect here. Now where is this cave?'

'Let me see.' Ven'thur paused for a few seconds, sifting through his advanced memory. 'One hundred and fifty meters north to the center of the lake. There should be a trench there that leads into a cave system. It will be very apparent.'

As Li made his way there, he realized that Ven'thur was right. The trench was very visible. It was like a giant had slammed a cleaver into the lakebed, causing a massive, almost out of place fissure. He made his way down, parting through the dark waters and into the depths of the trench.

Eventually, the space around him grew narrow and narrower as the rocky walls of the trench closed around him, and just when he thought there was not enough space to move further down, he found there were several passages in the rock that branched out. 

'Take the one straight ahead of you,' said Ven'thur. ??The others are lairs for beasts.'

Li obliged the lich's directions, and as he swam into the dark passageway, he felt it slope upwards until at a certain point, the water leveled off, leaving him standing on solid and stony surface. Though the place was surprisingly spacious, the air was thin. He doubted a normal human could have survived here if they even managed to get all the way down here in the first place.

As Li got further into the path, he realized the terrain was changing. What was previously jagged edges of rock had smoothed out. There were countless circular indentations in the rock that had smoothed the rock as if it had been beaten into flatness through repeated impact. 

'You said this being was a golem, right? Does it eat rocks or something?' thought Li. 

'That is what I perceived it as, though it was fashioned so perfectly in the form of a man that I initially thought it human. Perhaps it once was. That would explain why it was so curious about my research around ascension and resurrection.'

'Resurrection?'

'Ascension into my kind will involve death for I am of undeath. Thus, my ascension necessarily frees its subjects from their mortal coil. It is extracting the soul after the rigor of the ritual and resurrecting it into something beyond its mortal limits that is true ascension.' Ven'thur sighed. 'I thought it perhaps a fellow scholar, but alas, it did not have any true interest in the academic side of my research, merely the results. It had the miraculous power to create anything I wished, any tool or object, and it obliged my every request.'

'Interesting,' thought Li. 'Well, looks like I'm going to get to see this mystery being directly.'

Li stepped out of the passageway and into an enormous cavern. It was utterly dark, but his night vision could perceive that there was something like a crater spanning the breadth of the floor. The center of the crater was slightly upraised, forming a kind of seat that was awkwardly empty.

'Looks like it isn't home today,' thought Li.

'Impossible. It told me it was bound here, that it was sealed here such that it needed beings like me to aid it. And this place, it is far, far different. There was such power that flowed here, power unlike any I had witnessed until I came into your presence. Sigils of origin I knew not swirled like birds, casting great light upon this place. I thought them seals, but they are gone.'

'Meaning this golem is gone too,' said Li. He knelt down to get a read of the area and possibly pick up some clues. He needed to bring this being under his heel to get rid of loose ends for this case, and it not being here was quite troublesome. He would need to find it soon. 'Can you track this being down? If it managed to speak to you from its sealed prison, then it might have used a telepathy spell. Any way to reform that?'

'I shall try, but the magic it uses is of a nature I cannot accurately discern. It may be difficult.'

'That's fine, just get on it while I look around for anything useful.'

Li reached the center of the cavern. He realized the upraised platform was rather large, indicating that the being sitting on it would have been a decent bit larger than a normal man. He tried to see if there was anything of note there, and he did happen upon something.

He realized there were inscriptions all around the platform, and as he got a closer look at them, he saw that they were not runes. They did not have the austere, scratch-like structure of runes, but instead had flowing, complex builds which he suddenly realized were traditional Chinese characters.

The moment he saw this, the characters began glowing like a rainbow tinted kaleidoscope, flashing colors of all gradients that shone with an intensity that lit up the entire cavern. It was like a chain reaction after that. 

Once the light from the platform radiated outwards, it revealed countless more characters around the cavern, some suspended in the air, some as large as a man, some as small as a pebble, but all radiant and overflowing with sheer power.

Li saw the characters intensify in their brilliance, crackling as they began shunting out power, and he then understood what was going on. 

All the characters shattered in unison, unleashing a burst of iridescent force that swallowed up the cavern. It bloomed outwards, carving past the sheer stone walls of the cavern and even further beyond, rising up to the lakebed. As heat and force surged outwards, the lakebed began to crack, and each crack was outlined with a flowing burst of light.

Marine life skittered away at this sudden invasion of light and power so deep in the depths of the lake, but few were able to escape the geysery of explosive power that shattered past the lakebed like air escaping a popped balloon.