Chapter 44: Ancient Battlefield
"Black, emit light."
After his bloodline awakened, the half-dragon's intelligence had also advanced considerably. At least, it could fully understand Joshua's simple commands. As the warrior gave the order, the core on Black's chest began to glow with the radiance of arcane power. The fire element within him circulated, emitting a golden-red light.
The vast lakebed area was illuminated by this light, and in some places, faint crystalline reflections even appeared. Joshua noticed that, aside from the massive red rock before him, there were many similar dark-red rocks scattered around. However, the one in front of him was the largest, and its arcane reaction was also the most intense.
"Let's open it up and take a look."
After thinking for a moment, the warrior extended his right fist and struck the rock—formed from coagulated blood and as large as half a castle—with a measured force. A gentle, penetrating vibration shook its internal structure, lightly shattering the surface layer of this multi-layered sedimentary rock into countless fine, crystallized rock powder.
The massive rock was repeatedly broken apart by the warrior's strikes. After each blow, Joshua carefully observed what was contained within the flying dust.
Not long after, when he had shattered about half of the blood rock's structure, he finally saw what he was looking for.
"...This is truly a peculiar sight."
As the warrior muttered to himself, the tremors from the giant rock's fragmentation and collapse echoed back and forth across the six-hundred-meter-deep lakebed. Among the slowly falling red rock debris, the dim light of arcane crystal dust shimmered.
Illuminated by the golden-red light from Black's chest core, countless bizarrely shaped objects appeared within the dark-red giant rock. These objects had been completely assimilated by the arcane crystals, becoming crystal-like entities. They were scattered haphazardly across the blood-red rock, shimmering with a dazzling array of arcane colors.
And based on Joshua's years of experience, these were all corpses.
Countless crystallized bones were wrapped within the red blood rock. Although their original forms could no longer be identified, their races could be roughly distinguished.
These remains were preserved with incredible completeness. Aside from the lack of flesh, everything was indistinguishable from the real thing. Among them were horses, humans, and even clearly identifiable dragon-type skeletons. The warrior squinted, scanning the remains, and then discovered something new.
They were exceptionally well-preserved fragments of weapons and armor.
Sealed within the rock and constantly nourished by the arcane power of the crystals, these weapon and armor fragments—perhaps from a previous era—had all crystallized. They retained the twisted forms they had before being enveloped, worn or embedded in other equally crystallized remains, as if time had frozen at the final moment of battle.
"The arcane crystals preserved these things..."
As if struck by a thought, Joshua turned to look at other areas—at the arcane crystals hidden beneath dust, silt, and turbid crystals. He murmured softly to himself, "Is this an ancient battlefield?"
Could it be that some of the arcane crystals he and Moria had seen last time weren't true mineral veins, but rather assimilated ancient remains?
This was indeed highly possible. It would also explain why the arcane power in the ice lake was so cold and deathly still, with no biological activity for years—the aura of the ancient battlefield repelled all living things from approaching, and had even subtly altered the properties of the crystal vein.
Joshua felt that the secrets hidden in this Palmprint Lake at the foot of Nissier Snow Mountain might be even greater than he had imagined.
"Choosing a random academy site and finding something like this... Should I say that the foresight of those before and after is the same? They both thought it was a good spot."
Moving closer, Joshua approached the remains and weapons, reaching out to touch these crystallized ancient beings, carefully examining the marks on them.
Human bones, horse bones, dragon bones, bones of monsters he couldn't identify, armor, swords, shields—he didn't miss a single one, observing and memorizing the patterns on each.
"This design style... I feel like I've seen it somewhere before."
When he was examining the pattern on a large shield that seemed to have been dented by something, a strange sense of familiarity surged through Joshua. He frowned, thinking, "Right... this serpent design..."
"The Twin Serpent Ring of Flame!"
Joshua recalled the transcendent-grade magical item that Verdani had gifted him.
But how could that be? A magical ring forged in the Era of Falling Stars, no matter how powerful, couldn't possibly have similarities to equipment left over from a previous era. Yet why was the pattern on this shield so similar to the design of the Twin Serpent Ring?
"Wait, I remember..." Joshua suddenly recalled the system's appraisal result for the Twin Serpent Ring of Flame from long ago.
[—For the Flame Serpents, there is nothing more worthy of following than fire. This is a replica of an ancient relic, found among the wind-swept dunes of the Glittering Desert.]
The Glittering Desert was a vast desert region in the west of the Mycroft Continent. Legend said it was a place where life had been exterminated by a curse from the gods, containing countless ruins from the ancient era. On the outskirts of the desert were the famous City of Scholars and the ruins research organization, [Light of the Ages].
And notably, the place where ruins were first discovered in the Glittering Desert was a massive sinkhole called the [Abyssal Eye]. There, the sand had been melted into deep green crystals by unknown, extreme heat from the ancient era. Strange arcane power halted all wind flow, making it one of the few places in the desert where travelers could rest.
Looking down from the sky, this sinkhole resembled a green pupil the size of a city.
The Abyssal Eye sinkhole—the Snow Mountain Palmprint Deep Lake.
Aside from one being filled by melted snow and the other being sunken among sand dunes, there seemed to be no essential difference between the two. They were both equally deep, hiding many secrets. The ancient ruins in the Abyssal Eye and the ancient battlefield beneath the Nissier Snow Mountain lake were indeed similar in nature.
"It seems similar ruins exist all over the world. After all, there are quite a few such sinkholes and ruins on the Mycroft Continent."
As Joshua pondered, he swam through the lake water, searching for other small fragments of blood rock, shattering them, and observing their contents.
Some contained nothing, but the vast majority of blood rocks, or the areas beneath them, held well-preserved remains and crystallized weapons and armor. He also swept away the silt and sedimentary rock to observe the arcane crystals beneath. After careful examination, Joshua had to admit that the shape of the surface layer of arcane crystals did indeed resemble twisted bones and various weapons.
This might be psychological, but Joshua believed his eyes wouldn't deceive him—the entire bottom of Palmprint Lake was an ancient battlefield. Thanks to the effect of the arcane crystal vein, some information from the Lost Three Hundred Years of the previous era had been preserved. The blood of some unknown, colossal creature, as it coagulated into rock, had acted like amber, freezing the remains and weapons in time at the moment the battle ended.
Although their material had been assimilated by the arcane crystals, becoming crystal-like, their shapes hadn't changed in the slightest.
He shattered another piece of blood rock. Initially, Joshua thought it contained nothing, but an unexpected flash of light caught his eye.
"A spiral crystal?"
Reaching out, he caught a pure white crystal that suddenly popped out from the blood rock debris. Joshua felt a familiar surge of power in his hand. Instinctively, he recalled the crystal disk that Artemis had used to convert holy light when treating his arm. The tactile sensation was surprisingly similar.
This wasn't entirely unexpected. When he had dived with Moria last time, they had also found an uncarved spiral crystal. But a few seconds later, the warrior was surprised to realize that the pure white crystal in his hand was fundamentally different from a spiral crystal.
"This isn't the power of holy light... This is the force of order!"
Joshua's eyes widened in surprise. His crimson pupils locked onto the white crystal, and his hands instinctively gripped it tightly, not daring to relax for a moment. Before he could utter a second exclamation, the warrior felt the Azure Orb on his chest react once again.
"An Order Crystal? Such a thing still exists?!"
Even underwater, Joshua couldn't help but gasp. He had only ever seen natural elemental gemstones like Sun Crystals, Frost Gems, Emerald Hearts, and Radiance Crystals before. But the crystallization of a special power like the force of order was something he had never even heard of.
Beside him, Black swam over to the warrior. Around this sea dragon, a vast amount of fire element continuously flowed, turning the cold lake water into a scalding hot current. Joshua held the Order Crystal in one hand and patted his mount's head with the other. As he listened to Black let out a comfortable dragon roar, he frowned in thought and murmured, "A crystallization of the force of order proves that an extremely high concentration of order force once existed here."
"And the lakebed is clearly an ancient battlefield. The countless remains of people and warhorses are enough to prove this. The blood of some colossal creature also coagulated into rock here."
The black-haired warrior muttered to himself on the lakebed, beginning to speculate based on the clues at hand: "Nostradamus and I both think that the space-time barrier in the Northern Lands is unusually thin. The precursor to the Great Magic Tide—the thickening of arcane energy—appears earlier and more noticeably here than in other regions. The Evil God also left a space-time passage here."
"Near the Sea of Bewilderment, there are also ancient fortress complexes that the Empire—no, not built by the Empire, but discovered and maintained by it."
All the clues were converging. Joshua stared at the crystal in his hand, pondered for a moment, and then said, "My family holds the Azure Orb, a sacred artifact against the Chaos Evil God. And the Northern Lands, during the Lost Three Hundred Years a millennium ago, was a battlefield between order and some unknown enemy..."
Everything pointed to one thing. Finally, he arrived at a shocking yet perfectly logical conclusion.
"The Lost Three Hundred Years might have been the time when the Radiant Era's human civilization fought against the Evil Gods. And the Northern Lands, the Glittering Desert, and other locations of ancient ruins—were they the battlefields of that time?"
(To be continued.)