Book 3, Chapter 113 (1/2)
Exploration(2)
Flowsand waved the Book of Time around, “Of course you can! Once you set up a Lighthouse of Time, the old dragon can extract fragments of a plane’s past in exchange for divine grace, putting it in the book. That’s what I’m looking at right now. It isn’t just the history of Zhubvar, but also the script of the troll civilisation.”
“This… This information also requires a payment of divine grace?” The look on Richard’s face grew slightly strange. The Eternal Dragon seemed capable of using anything at all to make a profit.
“Of course. Understanding a plane’s history is very important if you wish to conquer it. It helps greatly in the first stage of conquering the plane, integrating into it and establishing a foundation. This information is more important than a few rune knights.”
Her words were irrefutable, but Richard couldn’t bring himself to share the opinion. A plane like Faelor had an incomparably long history that spanned hundreds of thousands of years. Innumerable civilisations had come and gone since then, a place like Zhubvar but a tiny speck in the grand scheme of things. If it all required divine grace… The total amount of divine grace needed to learn the entire history of the plane would far exceed his wildest imagination.
He was starting to feel more and more like the blessings of the Eternal Dragon were simply omnipotent. In battles between two equal sides, the one with divine blessings would trump the other easily.
……
The group continued its journey the next morning, spending another day trekking before they finally reached the boundaries of Zhubvar at dusk. Only seeing it for himself did Richard feel awed by the vast capital of the trolls.
An enormous staircase was dug out from the side of the hill, every step a giant block of stone that was nearly a metre tall and an astounding fifty metres wide. There were stone platforms on each side, decorated with carvings of flames, suns, and giant beasts. There was also the occasional stone brazier, but the elements had weathered away all the carvings on those. The entire capital of the trolls was built atop the hill; the slope levelling out after a certain distance to become flat, inhabitable land. There were as many as thirty stone platforms until it reached that level.
At the end of the staircase was a pyramid-shaped sacrificial platform that neared seventy metres in height. Even looking up from the foot of the hill, one could still sense the magnificence and dignity of the place. Nobody knew just how long the trolls had taken to build this miraculous city.
Richard narrowed his eyes. Gazing into the distance, the layout of the troll capital seemed comparable to a gigantic altar. A thin mist filled the entire ruins, desolate cries faintly echoing everywhere. One could feel the increased humidity the moment they stepped foot into Zhubvar; just as Flowsand had expected, there were likely new sources of water here. However, there was also a marshy smell of decay in the air. With his sharp senses, Richard also smelt the stench of corpses.
He waved his hands and all the knights dismounted from their horses, growing more guarded. Giving the nameless elven sword to an elite humanoid, he drew Extinction and walked to the barracks on either side at the foot of the stairway. The roofs had caved in long ago, vines wrapping around the stone pillars. The troll rooms were of simple design; all the wooden wares had long since rotted away, leaving only the stone fire pits intact. A few metallic spear-tips were strewn around the barracks, long since rusted beyond imagination. Richard picked one up to take a look, but the tip actually broke apart in his hands. There seemed to be no redeeming quality about it, from the material to the forging technique.
He shook his head, continuing around the barracks. Walking to another broken section of wall, he suddenly felt a faint rotting odour and stopped to look in that direction. Under a brick on the wall was a strange dark-grey moss, the surface seeming like the thick white fur of a rotting corpse.
Some information from his time in the Deepblue surged to his mind, but he couldn’t be quite sure. “Zendrall!” he shouted, “Come take a look at this!”
The necromancer walked over and took a close look at the moss, saying with surety, “This is graveyard moss. They only grow in places where there is a dense concentration of souls, mostly graveyards where the undead are active.”
“Ghosts are active here?” Richard turned solemn. If a large number of undead beings appeared in this place, there was a high possibility of powerful ghosts appearing. There was even a chance of liches and the like that had the potential to become legendary beings.
Zendrall carefully examined the graveyard moss again, “The undead have definitely passed by here, and it hasn’t been a long time since. I can sense the aura of spirits.”
Richard nodded, “Then we need to be careful. Summon two warriors of darkness just in case, we might need to use them to check some places.”