Chapter – 92 - The Ancient Graveyard Ruins

Also what few people knew was that the tunnel did not actually lead to the Graveyard...instead it only led to the teleporting portal. The actual graveyard was somewhere far away and far below the surface of the ground.

At the end of the tunnel was a dense water curtain. The water itself was a strange violet color, and it seemed to seep out continuously from the cracks on the rock floor. The violet water gushed upwards from the ground, and tiny silver lightning bolts could be seen swimming against the current, streaming up and down the water flow. A person needed to have the special Golden Racamure Bead to pass through this water curtain.

The Racamure bead was a strange evolution of nature, where the earth elements would clump together with wood element, and overtime, the clumps would harden to form rocks. What was surprising was the light energy trapped inside these stones. No one knew how the earth and wood elements managed to attract and trap the light element particles within it.

However these strange stones had a number of uses, one of which was their great potential for deflecting water-lightning elements. They were also great capacitors of light particles, due to which a number of array and inscriptions and rune stones needed these stones. These stones had a natural capacity of enhancing the power of an array or rune manifold times.

But.....they weren't really that readily available. That Beibei had one of these stone beads was already a topic of discontentment amongst both students and teachers in the academy.

Beibei held the passed her energy through the bead, and a thin brown layer formed over her. If one looked closely, they could see the fine golden veins running all over the brown layer. Once the layer formed completely around her, she stepped into the water curtain. The rising water droplets automatically separated, going around her, keeping a slight distance from the brown layer.

She could feel the brown and gold particles repelling the fine strands of lightning and water, and each passed the other, maintaining the minute gap, even as the different particles clashed, repelled and passed by each other. Beibei kept walking on straight, passing through the really thick water curtain, which stretched on for almost ten meters before the water thinned out abruptly, and Beibei found herself at the edge of a black stone floor.

The floor was actually made from large Black stone tiles. Each tile was perfectly square. Some of the tiles had a square patterns running from the edge of the tile towards its center in a hypnotic design. Some had borders running all around, with rune designs embedded on these borders. Some had encrypted patterns on the center panels of the squares. The entire floor looked like a large design pattern board, and floated slightly above the ground, with the water of the water curtain flowing out from somewhere below the floor tiles.

At the center of the floor was a large elliptical tile embedded within two square tiles, and a very fine rectangular frame made from some special material was floating on this elliptical tile. There were tiny hinges and clamps attached to the elliptical tile and a similar elliptical roof tile above, which were then attached to the fine metal frame. In the middle of this frame was a very thin plasma layer. This was the teleportation portal which one needed to use in order to get to the Graveyard.

Beibei paused slightly before the plasma barrier, before lifting her feet and stepping over the fine metal frame. The silverish-blue plasma layer started expanding and distorting, each distorted face reflecting a different color, till the entire barrier was shimmering in multi-colored hues, warping like a gelatinous, sticky sheet.

Beibei felt the pull of the sheet as it tried to constrain her movement, till her body, part by part, slowly moved through the barrier to the other side, and the barrier once again bounced back to its original position. The different colors once more shimmered through the plasma screen, from top to bottom, then the barrier returned back to its original silverish-blue hue, looking just as stretched and fresh as before.

Only...Beibei was no longer in the room. Instead she now stood in front of a stretch of dark and barren soil, spreading all around like a call of death, with large ruin-like structures slowly being eaten away by the worms of decay and weathered down sands of time.

Unlike the array portals, which often caused nausea, breathlessness, dizziness, muddle-headedness, and other side-effects to the people using it, the Plasma Portals could bend the very structure of space and time, and did not cause any discomfort to the users. On the downside, the amount of knowledge, elemental control and cultivation level required for making a plasma portal was too high of a requirement. Array portals were much more affordable and more easier to construct.

This place was a long way beneath the ground, yet it was not inside a cave or room. It was outside. She couldn't define what being outside under the ground was specifically. Just.....this place had its own sky of some sort....perhaps made from some kind of inscription or a spell. But there was a dark night sky above, with perpetual black smoke covering the light of the gray sky. but even the dull greyish-white light being reflected from the sky was enough to spill over the surrounding grounds, enough for someone to barely make out what lay where.

Nothing grew in this place. The land was black, and though there was no toxicity, strangely, it was filled with a high level of death and decay aura. No matter what she had tried to plant over the last five years, the land had simply devoured off all essence and left the plant to wither and die.

It was not a particularly rocky land either, just the soil was black and loved feeding on plant elements. Though it didn't particularly harm beasts and humans.

Large black stone structures pushed through the black soil in places, weaving around the land haphazardly. The tall stone remnants were crumbling away, some even turned to dust at a mere brush of wind. Most had inscriptions on them or arrays set up around them to protect them from decaying.

Beibei stood still for a while, just looking at the crumbling stone grave-markings, rising and falling like the musical notes of a song of decaying life. Broken carcasses and decaying bones of unknown beasts were strewn around in tandem like the percussion beats of a symphonic orchestra. The black soil merged and spread out like a black plague, into which all the remnants of the past had plunged forth, and were slowly being digested.

And at the end of these ruins and carcasses, slowly being digested and spit out again into the black earth, was a large lone building, half buried under the ground, and slanting to one side at a precarious angle. But it stood still and strong, gloomily looking over the entire orchestra of death like a symphony conductor , or maybe the grim reaper himself!

A tiny smile hooked onto those thin lips as she stood still, as if watching the symphony of death playing right before her sharp and sparkling eyes. This is what Menji thought as she walked out of the side door of the tilted building at the back. Sometimes she would be a bit scared looking into the girls eyes.

She could feel the girl had changed. Though she had not known her for long in the camp, and she was also not clear about what all had happened during the time she was unconscious. But something definitely happened. Initially she was all dark and gloomy and angry. But that was still better.

Now she no longer had the dark and gloomy air hanging about her head all day....but when she looked inside her eyes, all she saw was an immeasurable deepness - sometimes like a void sucking in her soul, sometimes like an ancient chill which could freeze her very bones.

Yes.....she now had traces of cold ruthlessness in her very being....something she did not have before. And that worried Menji very much.

Beibei had long seen Menji, and from her looks she could already tell what she was thinking. Signing inwardly, she smiled gently at the old woman, then walked past her and entered through the door at the side.

People thought that saw a deep dark void in her eyes. Only she knew that that was actually an abyss hidden behind her thoughts.....the abyss formed from her lack of identity and the sense of crisis which haunted her every day. Even now she had those dark dreams.....more often than before. And yet, just as in the past, she couldn't hold onto a single speck of visual once the dream ended and she woke up. Nothing. Only a deep sense of anxiety and loss was left behind.

Beibei walked down a long flight of spiraling stairs. The building above looked something like an ancient temple. The long pillars with tapered ends, which were strewn all over the lands before the building, used to be grave markings. this entire place was an ancient graveyard, built who knows how many thousands of years ago.

This building used to be a tomb. Supposedly, the dead body of an ancient great personage was buried here as his last wishes. However, much to the shock and bewilderment of all the elders and sect masters in the Main Sect, some loose cultivators and exiled criminals and unknown strangers, supposedly from the 'Outside' had gathered together to form a rebel group.

And this rebel group was working on banned experiments and devil cultivation methods with elemental energy. And unknown to all the higher ups of the Main City, those people had settled down and turned this place into their base. They called themselves the Zodamone - The Zoda's were Ancient warriors who were extremely powerful. Mone was a term used for Rebirth or Reincarnation. They truly believed they were reincarnated warriors from the ancient times.

It was only after a few hundred years and quite a few generation of tussling about with each other, that the elders of the Main Sect had a rude wakeup call, when a large number of corpses in the Outer Graveyard and the Resting Camps suddenly went missing.

These people used wizardry and devil cultivation methods as their base, and many of them were powerful necromancers, spell casters, puppet masters and summoners. Trouble began, when they started mixing using devilry methods with Qi-gathering methods. The effect was much higher and evolved than before.

This led to the War Of Three Hundred Years. There was a large scale clash between the Main Sect Cultivators and the Zodamone Group. In the end, the Main Sect had existed since times immemorial, and the number of techniques, methods, hidden skills, special weapon, secret weapons and armors and arrays.....were too many to even count. Moreover, the elders of the sect were each extremely powerful and capable. How could a meagre group formed of wandering and rootless cultivators, who neither had resources, nor much cultivation level, win against such a huge sleeping giant.

They lost, but they left the gift of their destructive powers for the later generations to enjoy. According to the historical records, though the lands around had always been desert lands, yet it was never as barren and green-less as now. Vegetation had been plentiful, and a lot more variety were available.

The current situation was due to the highly toxic miasma the last of the Zodamone members had spread across the lands, before succumbing to self-immolation. The poison was some kind of experimental stuff these people had created. Neither were there any antidotes, nor did they leave any records behind.

When the disciples of the Main Sect came to search this base, and all the other small bases, nothing was intact. Most things were either burnt or turned to toxic waste puddles. Till date the effects of the poison could not be completely removed. But the researchers in the alchemy, medicine and poison departments still carried on their experiments with high hopes.