Fantasy Game: Infinite City

Chapter 612 2 The Prince's Magic Book (2) Basting Dungeon

"What... what's going on?"

After rushing through the archway flanked by torches burning with inexplicable red flames, Han Zu experienced absolute darkness for the first time in a long time. This darkness was unrelated to light; it was a pure, all-encompassing sensation. No matter how he switched his visual abilities, he could only see darkness. Han Zu's brain told him that this place was utterly devoid of light, and even his perception of energy told him that there was absolutely no energy of any form or state here. But for some reason, Han Zu could sense that this place was definitely not emptiness. Although he no longer needed to breathe to sustain life, he could still breathe air from this incredibly dark environment. However, for some reason, while this air wouldn't harm Han Zu, he smelled a faint, yet nauseatingly sweet, odor.

The darkness lasted only a minute, less than a full second. The contractor's equipment, as if hacked, kept issuing error alerts, only to return to normal moments later, only to be met with a continuous barrage of alarms again, repeating this cycle endlessly. In that short time, the contractor's equipment sent nearly a thousand alarm messages to Han Zu, which annoyed him greatly. To avoid this situation, he temporarily disabled almost all of the contractor's equipment's functions, leaving only unimportant functions that wouldn't trigger alarms, such as the time display. But frankly, whether there was a time display or not was irrelevant in this place.

"Hold.."

Soon, Han Zu felt an irresistible suction force. In an instant, according to Han Zu's own perception, he was forcibly displaced by this powerful suction force for at least several thousand kilometers. This was not a serious matter, after all, this distance was not far for Han Zu, who could already fly. However, during this time, he suddenly experienced a long-lost, excruciatingly dizzying sensation. This powerful negative feeling was even somewhat unbearable for someone as powerful as Han Zu.

"Hiss... hiss~~!!!"

"boom!!"

Clang!!! Clang!!!

Before he could even adjust to this negative feeling, Han Zu was suddenly flung away from another direction by a powerful suction force. The surrounding darkness vanished instantly, and Han Zu suddenly appeared in the dimly lit mid-air. Han Zu's body quickly plummeted downwards. He instinctively tried to activate the energy within his body and use his flight ability to stabilize his body, but although he managed to release the energy, he was unable to take off. Instead, he accelerated his descent downwards.

Although the surrounding environment wasn't exactly bright, it was still considerably brighter than the absolute darkness before. At least, as Han Zu spun in mid-air, he could see the edge of the setting sun sinking behind the mountains in the distance. However, the absolute darkness was abnormal, so even though Han Zu's visual abilities were strong, his eyesight hadn't fully recovered. Naturally, he couldn't accurately judge his surroundings. Thus, without any preparation, Han Zu crashed into something during his descent, making a screeching scraping sound and breaking some cylindrical objects. Finally, with several deafening impacts, Han Zu's back slammed into some hard material, barely stopping his movement.

"Error, unknown area."

"No available...buzz...buzz..."

"Unable to confirm permissions... Attempting... Error."

"...Fault...All functions are offline...Attempting to activate emergency protocol...Successfully."

"Error, no available information node found, trying again."

"Error, unable to..."

"Sizzle... sizzle..."

"Damn it! These devices are so unreliable... Oh well, I can't blame them..."

After stopping moving, Han Zu felt as if his body had been hit by a heavy armed vehicle of the Tigris. He felt uncomfortable all over and his body felt heavy. Moreover, the dizzying feeling from before had not completely subsided. So, taking advantage of the fact that the dust he had raised had not completely dissipated, Han Zu grabbed the edge of the hard material into which he was embedded and pulled himself out. He lay on his back on the ground and recovered his condition.

Just then, the contractor's equipment seemed to enter an emergency state. Its underlying operating protocol overridden Han Zu's command to shut down the alarm, and numerous alarm messages rang out again. These sounds annoyed Han Zu, but thinking that perhaps the contractor's equipment could return to normal, he patiently waited for the equipment's test to finish. However, upon hearing that the contractor's equipment had completely crashed, he finally couldn't hold back and cursed loudly. But as he recovered, Han Zu's rationality prevailed again. He stopped cursing. After all, in the current situation, it was indeed not the contractor's equipment's fault. Although the equipment, manufactured by an extremely advanced civilization, should perhaps be more powerful, it was still a product of technology and could be explained. As for the places Han Zu was currently in, including the previous Bastienburg, although Han Zu didn't know their specific conditions, he could judge from his own experience that these locations had absolutely nothing to do with science. Therefore, it was normal for technology to fail in such places.

After recovering, Han Zu finally stood up from the ground. He put his hands on his waist, stretched his body, threw away the tattered temporary pack on his body and the golden potion inside that had been crushed and spilled into the ground. Han Zu then began to look for the Morning Star Hammer that he had originally stuck in his waist, but he found that the Morning Star Hammer had also been crushed and damaged by his own body. The wooden handle had become wood chips, and the metal Morning Star hammerhead had been crushed into a disc and broken into several pieces.

“Oh my god!!!!”

He stomped his foot hard on the ground, creating a crater several meters deep, causing him to lose his balance and fall to the ground again. After that, Han Zu jumped out of the crater, cursed loudly, and slapped himself hard. After calming down for a while, Han Zu finally calmed down and began to observe his surroundings.

"Restraint...restraint..."

Through his observation, Han Zu discovered that the solid material he had just smashed into was a stone dome, half-buried in the ground at the edge of the Black Forest. The stone dome had been almost completely smashed through by Han Zu; the iron spikes at the top, which had been attached to it, had shattered under the immense pressure of the impact, falling to the ground and embedding themselves in the soil. Looking to the other side, he could see the vast and deep Black Forest, in which more than a dozen giant trees, likely thousands of years old, had been broken. However, their broken upper halves hadn't hit the ground; the branches of other giant trees, not much younger than them, were supporting them.

In the distance, Han Zu could see the outlines of flocks of birds, resembling dark clouds, flying away from the Black Forest. It seemed that the loud noise of his own fall had frightened them away. Within the Black Forest, he could also see the outlines of some animals, rapidly moving away from the vicinity of the destroyed giant trees. But apart from that, Han Zu could sense the tranquility of the Black Forest. Apart from the occasional sound of wind and insects chirping, he heard no other unusual noises.

Half-buried at the bottom of the stone dome in the picture, there seemed to be a very heavy wooden structure. Han Zu spent some time digging out the area in front of the stone dome that was mostly buried in the soil. After Han Zu's earthwork had been going on for an hour, and he had dug out enough soil to bury an entire heavy transport plane, a pit that was more than 20 meters deep and more than 40 meters wide, Han Zu was surprised to find that what was buried under the soil was not only the solid stone dome, but also a huge oak door that was more than 10 meters high and half a meter thick.

"This... huh??"

Han Zu's surprise wasn't because such a massive structure was buried beneath the soil, but because the colossal oak door, despite being buried deep underground for so long, remained relatively intact. Aside from being entangled by numerous plant roots, it was largely undamaged; only the inscriptions and patterns once carved on the door had been worn away considerably. The door itself, however, remained sturdy. On the other hand, the equally massive metal lock that had once secured the oak door had completely rotted away, rendering it useless as a seal.

"So heavy?"

Even entangled by numerous thick plant roots, Han Zu still felt an unexpected weight when attempting to open the massive oak door. The creaking of the hinges as the door opened sounded like the panting of an ancient beast, startling a swarm of enormous bats perched in the cracks of the lintel. Startled, they surged past Han Zu like a black tide. This black tide of massive bats possessed considerable power, once again pushing Han Zu back, causing his legs to carve deep furrows in the soil and rocks below. Their haphazard charge also caused many of them to crash into the stone arches of the dome, producing soft, clattering sounds. However, their bodies seemed remarkably sturdy; even after colliding with the solid stone arches, they quickly regained their balance and continued flying.

"This place is much grander than Bastinburg..."

After the swarm of bats had completely left, Han Zu pulled his legs out of the mud and entered the area through the gap in the oak door he had opened. Inside was a magnificent porch, with twelve granite pillars, each requiring three people to encircle, supporting an arched ceiling about ten meters high. The pillars were covered with intricate religious patterns—crossed scepters, winged lions, and unidentified icons.

Time has slightly smoothed the sharp edges of the decorations on the pillars. The damp air condenses into dark green moss at the base of the pillars, slowly climbing along the cracks in the shaft, turning the faces of those unknown statues into blurry ghostly figures. The ground is paved with huge stone slabs, the mortar between the slabs long since rotted away. From the cracks, several wildly growing but strangely shaped plants, probably ferns, sprout, their leaves pale from years of being deprived of sunlight.

Continuing inward, Han Zu discovered three still-standing stone watchtowers at the end of the magnificent front porch. The surfaces bore the remnants of rusted iron chain buckles and some solidified marks, resembling the remnants of candles eroded by time, or contaminated, solidified wax. The surfaces were covered with hasty engravings, most of which were long since blurred, but some remained relatively intact. Han Zu glanced at them and realized they seemed to be marks used to record time. The deepest engraving even had half a rusted fingernail embedded at its edge, seemingly a mark of despair left by someone in their final moments.

Passing through the front porch, Han Zu arrived at a large, cross-shaped corridor. The corridor was ten meters high, with a bronze rotating watchtower standing in the center. Each of the watchtower's four walls had twelve arrow slits, the window frames crafted from thick wrought iron. Although rusted and deformed, the intricate structure of its original form was still evident. At the base of the watchtower was a ring of toothed gears that meshed with grooves in the ground, seemingly capable of rotating the entire watchtower and changing direction. Unfortunately, it was now fixed in place by a thick layer of rust and could no longer rotate. Most of the gears inside had rotted away; even without the thick layer of rust, the mechanism would likely be unusable.

The four paths of the corridor led to different areas. Each path's entrance had inscriptions on the wall, but these inscriptions were not only illegible but also of ancient origin, making their meaning unreadable to Han Zu. The contractor's equipment remained down, and Han Zu couldn't use a translator. Therefore, he had no choice but to choose the simplest method: deciding which direction to proceed. He threw his shoe.

"clatter."

The shoes landed on the ground, the toes pointing towards the corridor on the right. After putting the shoes back on, Han Zu broke off the deformed torch holders from the wall, physically removed the rust from them, then twisted and tightened them, using them as a temporary brass knuckle duster on his right hand before proceeding along the corridor on the right.

About half an hour later, Han Zu finally arrived at the end of the right corridor. Directly in front of the exit at the end of the corridor, opposite another relatively smaller corridor, there was an area with a damaged and collapsed metal door. Han Zu prepared for a possible battle, crossed the corridor, and entered the interior of that area.

Judging from the still faintly discernible tools and furnishings, this appears to be a massive torture chamber, perhaps the most sinister area of ​​the entire building. The floor is paved with bluestone slabs, from which dark red stains seep, traces of dried blood accumulated over the years. Perhaps because so much time has passed since any living creature lingered here, these stains have turned somewhat greenish. Even with the discolored stains, a faint, pungent smell of blood still lingers.

In the center of the room stood an iron rack, composed of four thick iron pillars with an adjustable iron ring at the top. Rusty iron chains, still bearing traces of dried blood, were wrapped around the rack. Beside the rack were dozens of instruments of torture, including barbed iron whips, branding irons, daggers that should have been sharp, and heavy, specially made iron pliers. Interestingly, when Han Zu tried to pick them up, he found that most of these instruments were well-preserved and still sturdy, though covered in a thick layer of rust. Upon closer inspection, Han Zu even discovered tiny bone fragments remaining on the edges of some of the instruments.

In the corner of the room stood a well, its opening covered by a thick stone slab. The slab was inscribed with complex, now blurred, runes, clearly meant to suppress something beneath. Han Zu pushed aside the slab, and a chilling cold emanated from the well. Upon closer inspection, he discovered that the well walls were covered in moss, and the bottom was pitch black. However, Han Zu's night vision confirmed that the water was quite deep, at least ten meters, yet surprisingly clear. He could faintly hear the sound of flowing water. Upon closer examination, Han Zu indeed found numerous rusted and broken iron chains at the bottom of the well. Something must have been imprisoned there in the past, but its whereabouts were now unknown.