Clack!
Clack!
Clack!
Footsteps echoed in a dark room.
"I wonder how deep this ruin was created?" Noel muttered while looking around. He had gone down for another four levels. The deeper he got, the lower the temperature.
Even Noel became more wary of the dangers lurking beneath him.
"Should I prepare a few more traps?" Noel looked down, contemplating. On the one hand, it would decrease his speed. On the other hand, it could help him a lot if there was indeed a hidden danger on the bottom floor.
"The temperature, the Spiritual Energy…"
After he went down to the ninth floor, Noel finally decided to open the room to prepare some traps. Not only was the hidden danger underneath him, but the Supreme Devil Organization would also come for him from the surface. Hence, this trap would be proved to be useful in case of emergency.
When Noel opened the room, he was startled by the interior of the room. Inside, he could see numerous tables lining up just like the dining hall he found earlier.
However, Noel felt weird because he found a familiar device on each table. He first found this device in the previous expedition that explored a hospital from the previous civilization.
"What is this?" Noel went to one of them, looking at it carefully.
The device had a big layer of screen. He knocked it gently and heard the clicking sound, allowing him to determine the materials used to build it.
"As expected, it's glass as well… If I'm looking at it…" Noel paused and grabbed a chair. Even in his noble house, a chair that could move was a rare commodity. After all, it was enough for the carriage to have it, not their house.
When he sat down, the chair moved slightly, which startled him.
"Oh?" Noel adjusted himself easily and started rolling the wheels beneath the chair forward. Eventually, he reached the table where his head was at the same level as the big screen. "As expected, this is how they work."
Noel looked to the side, finding a lot of mysterious thin sticks. This was what piqued his interest in the previous civilization.
"Right? It was said that this thing could write better…" Noel took off the lid and found a piece of paper on the table, trying to write on it. But as expected, after more than a thousand years, the pen couldn't be used anymore.
Then, his eyes moved to the big box underneath the table. The box was completely black and there didn't seem to be anything interesting. But he noticed a few cables that were attached to this box, linking it to the screen and a few others.
Noel slightly raised his head, noticing the rolling thin wooden plate under the table. He found this weird-looking box with numerous characters on it.
"What is this? Tab? Q? W? E? R?" Noel couldn't understand the sequence, but it was clear that this thing was attached to the mechanism. "Now that I think about it…"
Noel put his hand on top of it and started touching the keys. He realized that the position was natural.
"I see. Is this how the people of the past worked?" Noel asked. He had just learned how a normal office worker did their job in front of the computer.
"Still, is there any way to activate it?" Noel frowned. "Besides, I haven't smelled anything, including blood. In this huge ruin, why do we find not a single corpse? There don't seem to be any demons feasting upon them as well. If there is one, there should be some blood traces. It's weird."
Noel rose from his seat and looked around. Unfortunately, there was nothing suspicious inside the room. And there were only two things that piqued his interest, the pen and the chair.
He put two pens in his pocket for 'research' purposes while bringing all the moving chairs toward the stair. The people would be confused with the chairs as well and he hoped someone would try it and ended up rolling to the stair, injuring themselves from falling.
After that, Noel proceeded to the tenth floor. This time, the floor showed him another weird layout. Instead, he found multiple weird machines scattered in the area.
"What is this place?" Noel frowned. When looking at the layout, he felt this wasn't a place to work. Just by looking at the bright color of the wall as well as the layout of these machines, Noel could feel the joy crawling into his heart.
"Is this not a working place? But…" Noel arrived at a table. It had a robust body and green-colored surface. He noticed a few balls scattered on the table with two long sticks lying down. "Are these spears?"
Noel asked himself. Noel couldn't determine the building, unlike the hospital in the previous civilization. This ruin was so bizarre that he couldn't understand what it was.
On one floor, it was a place for eating. On another floor, it was a fun place. And another one, it was filled with a place where they worked.
"What is this building, to begin with? I have never thought you could build something like this underground. And surprisingly, it could last for more than a thousand years. The wall manages to withstand the sand for a thousand years. This is a miracle."
Noel had seen numerous giant buildings, but all of them were on the surface. So, this place was more mysterious than he originally thought.
After a while, he continued to the next floor, and on this floor, he could finally determine what kind of place this was.
The moment he opened the eleventh floor, he was greeted by a sight he could never forget.
"What in the world…" Noel dropped his jaws to the ground.
On this floor stood tall ten giant cylinders. Each cylinder contained a blue-colored translucent liquid. If that was all, Noel would think it was just where they stored their water.
But surprisingly, there was a demon inside each cylinder. The cylinders were already inactive and the demons had died, so there was no sign of them getting destroyed.
"What is this? What kind of thing are they building?" Noel's face became pale.
"If I remember correctly, the previous civilization had no demons looming around the world, right? Then, how could they build something like this? Or is this during the transition?"
Noel fell into deep thought. What Noel meant by transition was the time when the world fell into chaos after the demons appeared in this world.
There was a possibility of the previous civilization building this entire ruin after their appearance, trying to understand the demons so that they could fight back. That was the only explanation in Noel's head.
Noel approached the tubes carefully, staring at the demons. The first demon he saw seemed to be a Wolf Demon. It wasn't supposed to be found in this place, so they must have captured it somewhere far away and brought it here.
"Now that I think about it, it's true that the demon meat won't rot easily, but to capture a wolf from this place requires at least two weeks from this place. And they can actually preserve the demon for a thousand years? What is the method?"
Noel fell silent. It was true that the experiment was troubling him. But he had always wanted the method to preserve the meat so that he could use it for his territory.
While moving through those tubes, Noel examined the room, wondering what had happened. Just like the other rooms, there was no trace of a living being in this place. There were supposed to be people who took care of this experiment, but there were no remains.
"Still, it doesn't change the fact that the previous civilization was amazing. Being able to create a giant ruin underneath the ground alone is impossible with our current technology." Noel looked around. "And this place is extremely cool. In fact, it's already similar to the temperature of the mountain peak. If I go down even further, there is a chance that the temperature will be at freezing point."
Noel was a bit hesitant to explore this ruin. While there was no danger yet, the condition had become more extreme and ridiculous.
"Still, creating this ruin should take a lot of time or even decades. If I'm not wrong, the transition period only lasted for two years. Did this building operate after the transition period? But if that was the case, shouldn't the Atracaeca Kingdom have a record of whatever they were doing, considering those people would join hands with the founder of the Atracaeca Kingdom?"
Noel pinched the bridge of his nose, pondering. He could draw a lot of conclusions, but there might be a few things he missed, causing his conclusion to be not accurate.
The ruin was indeed mysterious even though the purpose was clear. But the only way to find it was to continue forward. He was trying to find any records left behind in this place to learn about it.
Unfortunately, he couldn't find a single log book, making it extremely weird.
Although he wanted to learn more from this place, he had to continue because the answer could lie beneath this floor.
He wondered what kind of thing he would find on the next floor.
