93 The Chilling Cavern

Yun slowly entered the last cave while her sense of danger constantly bombarded her, telling her to run. Run fast and far and don't look back. The energy flowing out of the cave felt like a heavy, disgusting, tainted spiritual pressure, and even her hands began to shake as her mind felt heavy.

With her consciousness beginning to slip away from her Yun felt a strange sensation suddenly come from her arm. After a moment she began to regain the ability to think and realized that her spear had, at some point, appeared in her hand. The dense energy before her had become a thick and visible miasma, but it split apart in front of her spear like water flowing around a stone.

What a strange sensation this was. The tip of her spear gently vibrated as the miasma closed in on it, and with that vibration a strange energy pulse caused the cloud to split.

The dense energy, while visible, somehow didn't impede vision at all. Light traveled past it like it didn't exist, illuminating the small space around Yun that her lamp was capable of showing. Step by step she entered this final cave, and as she did the foreboding feeling in her heart grew stronger.

After what felt like an interminable walk into the cave she finally arrived in a slightly larger space, but this space was nothing like what any of the others were. This was a large man-made space, roughly cut out to be a rectangular room, with multiple side doors and rooms off each wall. Some of these side doors were open, some were closed, and some had broken doors shattered on the mantle.

A few of the shattered and open doors appeared to lead to hallways, and these halls were so dark that Yun could barely see a few feet within them. Somewhere above her head there was a dull glow pulsing in deep purple tones, similar to the color of the miasma, illuminating the room and the first few feet of each sub-room.

Yun stopped in her tracks.

Staring around the large room, she felt like something was preventing her from judging it's size. One moment it felt like it was hundreds of meters across, but the next minute, when the edges were in her peripheral vision, it felt much smaller. This disorienting feeling was certainly difficult to work with, but scattered about the main floor were large stone tables and benches. This looked to be some kind of communal space or work area, providing a relatively large group somewhere to sit and work or eat together. Just what was this?

Stepping into the room slightly, Yun had a sense of distortion, her feet fell upon the smooth stone of the rectangular room and felt something very different than the cavern she had come from. The temperature was different, the stone was different, even the air felt different. There must have been some kind of barrier that she had stepped through, but looking behind her she couldn't see even the cave she had come from through a dense purple haze.

Sighing with regret, she looked around again and felt that the distortion of the size of this space had reduced, but there was definitely still something strange going on with the dimensions of this space. She began to notice some finer details in the space that she couldn't see before she stepped through the strange barrier, and one of these details was various footprints in the dust. Some of these footprints were familiar to her, looking like Canis and Felis, but some of them looked very unfamiliar. She was almost certain one set belonged to the large beastial race of the Eizuru — a large lumbering and sagacious species that lived out in the ice wastes.

But other than the obvious tracks from her own people and the Eizuru, there were also a few traces of various Volvaka tracks. Yun looked around carefully again, not sure what to do about any of this, but noticed that all the tracks seemed to go towards certain doors. Each set of tracks paired with one door, and occasionally older tracks would be beside newer ones leading to the same door. The rooms with broken doors didn't have any new tracks, and the rooms with open doors didn't have any tracks.

Finally, looking towards some of the doors in the farthest back corner, she noticed another type of track that didn't make any sense to her. Unlike most tracks, this one was oblong, almost like some kind of insect with two larger circular segments overlapping in the center. Within the strange shape there were a number of smaller geometric shapes, some obviously scuffed from the motion of whatever left this track behind.

Yun was a little worried by this.

What kind of strange, large creature could have a track this big and this oddly shaped? She was reluctant to go anywhere near that set of doors to find out. Looking back to the newer tracks, she found what looked to be the newest. As she found these tracks Yun determined herself to follow them and find out whether they belonged to Wuying.

Step after tenuous step Yun approached. The deeper she traveled the stronger the miasma became, and the more her spear struggled to keep it at bay. She was beginning to become worried that she would be unable to stay here to investigate for long when she saw a shadow in the door before her, slowly walking out.