Chapter 232

Beyond the boundary of the safe zone, the group stepped forward once more.

Fully restored, fatigue gone all thanks to Elle’s [Recovery Zone].

The woman’s laughter still lingered.

It drifted through the corridors like a residue rather than a sound, clinging to stone, curling around broken pillars, threading through the cracks in the ancient pavement. It echoed from places that shouldn’t echo, from angles that shouldn’t carry sound, as if the dungeon itself had learned her voice and decided to keep it.

Suri slowed, her scouts spreading like ink through the ground. Her eyes glowed faintly, reflecting no one else could see.

“There should be monsters ahead,” she said quietly. “Cloaked figures. Humanoid shapes. That’s what I saw earlier.”

Her expression tightened, “But I can’t see further down.”

She took another step.

“My illusion can only access the areas I’ve explored before. Beyond that…”

She hesitated. “They vanished. Like someone wiped them which I have no idea where they are right now. My mana thread with them is completely gone.”

A silence followed that felt too heavy for such a large space.

Kana instinctively turned, almost calling for Lex.

Almost.

Then she stopped.

Forget it.

For all she knew, Lex might be already deep within the dungeon, doing things on his own.

They advanced cautiously. 

Ahead of them stood an open ancient temple.

Its entrance was wide and broken, its stone doors collapsed inward long ago. Massive pillars framed the doorway, their surfaces etched with symbols so old that their meaning had been sanded smooth by centuries of decay.

Dust coated the floor like pale snow.

The ceiling arched high above them, fractured by time, with thin beams of faint dungeon-light filtering through cracks in the stone, illuminating drifting particles in the air like suspended stars.

They stepped inside.

The sound of their boots echoed too clearly.

Broken statues filled the hall.

They were not human, that was for sure . Some had wings, fractured at unnatural angles.

Others had elongated limbs, curved horns, segmented torsos, or skulls shaped for creatures that had never walked this world.

But every statue shared one detail.

Their faces were destroyed.

Not worn by time. Not broken by erosion.

Struck.

Deliberately.

Some bore impact fractures.

Others had clean breaks.

Some had their heads completely removed.

Whatever had happened here had not been gentle.

“I don’t see monsters,” Suri said, voice low, controlled. “But stay alert. Structures like this don’t need enemies to kill you. Traps, and powerful seals are enough.”

Toby knelt beside one statue, brushing dust from its base. Strange symbols ran along the stone like veins.

“What do we have here…” he murmured. “This architecture isn’t something that dungeon can create. The spacing. The symmetry. The road alignment.”

He looked around slowly, eyes tracing the layout.

“This wasn’t just a temple. It was part of something larger.”

A pause.

“This entire dungeon might’ve been a city once. A real one. Streets. Districts. Infrastructure. However there is none resembling a house.”

Kana nodded.

She had read those theories—high-level dungeons weren’t constructed. They might be existing places before from who knows where converted into a dungeon.

“I wonder if they have old coins or dungeon items hidden somewhere,” Kana muttered, scanning broken walls and half-collapsed corridors.

Her [High Awareness] detected no hostile signatures.

No monsters.

Only silence.

The place was empty as if intentional.

Everyone looked at her.

Yuri chuckled softly. “Kana… why would there just be hidden coins lying around in an ancient ruin?”

“I’m not sure,” she admitted, forcing a small smile.

But the thought unsettled her. Because it hadn’t come from books or experience.

It felt like a suggestion.

A whisper not from this world. There should be one.

Boris stopped near a winged statue. Thorne leapt from his shoulder and smashed part of its stone wing, fragments scattering across the floor.

“Must’ve been hard to fight with this,” Boris said, studying it.

Adam looked up at the high, fractured ceiling. “If I were them, I’d never land. Just throw things from above.”

He snorted. “Should we call them bird-men?”

Toby wrote in his notebook.

“Bad name,” he said. “But it’ll work.”

Rin glanced at him. “Why are you documenting everything?”

Toby laughed awkwardly. “Just a hobby.”

Kier chuckled quietly.

Rin turned. “You know why.”

Kier nodded. “Unexplored dungeon information gets rewarded by the Adventurer Guild. He’s logging everything for submission.”

Kana sighed while everyone else glared.

They all knew Toby was a member of the adventurer guild under a special case.

Suri and Rin approached him, smiling sweetly. “You’ll give us our share, right?” Suri asked.

Boris and Adam joined immediately.

“Don’t forget us.”

“Your reward should be shared across the party members.”

Toby’s shoulders slumped.

“This,” he muttered, “is exactly why I didn’t tell anyone.”

He looked at Kier, “I hate veteran adventurers.”

Kana finally surrendered the thought of hidden treasure.

Her [High Awareness] swept the ancient temple again and returned nothing. No hidden room. No concealed mechanisms. No false walls. Only silence and stone and old dust.

If there had once been secrets here, someone had either consumed them… or buried them so deeply that even her [High Awareness] couldn’t pick it up.

So they moved on.

The corridors stretched endlessly, winding through fractured stone avenues and collapsed archways. Time had turned the place into a skeleton of a city. Roads that once carried crowds now held only echoes. Pillars leaned like tired giants. Ancient murals flaked away into pale dust that coated their boots.

Half an hour passed.

No monsters.

Only a few old traps.

Kana warned them each time, her voice calm.

“Step left.”

“Don’t touch the center tile.”

“That thing isn’t real.”

They obeyed.

Then the corridor opened.

And the world dropped away.

A long wooden bridge stretched before them, suspended over a vast black chasm.

The bridge looked ancient. Weathered planks. Frayed ropes. Support beams reinforced with old iron bands. It creaked faintly in the still air, not from movement, but from age.

Adam stepped forward and peered down.

“I don’t see the end,” he gulped.

Just darkness.

Depth without distance.

A void that swallowed light.

Suri raised her staff, shadow forming in her palm. She shaped one of her scout illusions and sent it gliding across the bridge.

It vanished instantly.

“Here,” Suri said slowly, eyes narrowing. “This is where my illusion disappeared earlier.”

She tried again.

Same result.

Vanished mid-air.

“Something’s suppressing our skills here,” she continued. 

She frowned. “It feels similar to Chelle’s skill.”

“We still haven’t found the library Lex mentioned,” Kana said. “He has to be somewhere ahead.”

So they began crossing.

Slowly and carefully.

The bridge swayed with each step.

The air beneath them was colder.

Not wind.

The cliff exhaled it. Cold that rose upward. 

A chill that didn’t touch skin first.

It went straight for the spine.

The woman’s laughter echoed again, drifting up from below, threading through the ropes, curling around the planks, whispering along the bridge’s length like a voice woven into the structure itself.

Adam stopped.

Everyone stopped with him.

“I suddenly feel cold,” he said.

Yuri, still being carried by Rin, muttered, “Uhm… can we just cross already? I want to open my eyes again.”

Rin chuckled. “Didn’t know you were scared of heights.”

“I will overcome this someday,” Yuri said bravely, however her eyes stayed firmly shut.

Adam deliberately paused from time to time, pretending to inspect planks, checking ropes, teasing Rin with false stops.

When they finally reached the other side, solid stone never felt so heavy, so real, so comforting.

Lex stood there.

Waiting for them.

Like it was nothing more than a hallway.

“I thought you were going to exit,” he said calmly, pointing toward a massive stone door behind him.

Beyond it, the ancient city continued, its structures layered in broken symmetry and ruined geometry.

Then he turned and gestured in the opposite direction.

“That’s where I found the library.”

They followed and entered immediately, especially Toby who seemed so excited about everything as he wrote everything in his modified small book.

The library was vast.

Dust-coated shelves stretched into the darkness. Stone tables lay overturned. Broken glass cylinders littered the floor. Old lamps, long dead, hung from the ceiling like fossilized stars.

Books filled the space. Not storybooks. Not records. Not history.But research texts.

Some sort of Diagrams.

Some sort of Schematics.

Or Formulas.

Or even Ritual constructs.

“This looks like research material,” Kana said, flipping through a brittle tome filled with diagrams she couldn’t begin to understand.

Lex nodded.

“Indeed,” he said quietly. “We’ve found similar materials in northern dungeons.”

His voice deepened.

“I suspect this dungeon was a candidate site.”

“For what?” Toby asked.

Lex didn’t look at him.

“To reform it,” he said. “By imperial [Dungeoneering] people.”

Silence fell.

“Then—” Toby began.

Lex continued without pause.

“Yes,” he said. “If they succeeded…”

His face turned grim.

“…there could have been a southern dungeon overflow.”

No one spoke.

They all remembered the northern expedition. Because they couldn’t forget it.

The swarms.

The endless spawn tides that stretched almost century.

Everyone gulped. They could imagine the horror—northern and southern dungeons overflow at the same time.

The books were packed carefully.

Each research tome, each brittle manuscript, each diagram-stained parchment was placed into cloth-wrapped storage bags, sealed with binding cords. Even the dust was respected, brushed off gently, as if the knowledge itself might resent careless hands.

These weren’t treasures. They were records of something unfinished. Of something that had gone wrong. Lex watched in silence.

Then he spoke.

“You are planning to continue?”

Kana looked up and nodded.

Lex studied her for a long moment.

“I cannot ensure your safety for what comes next,” he said.

I don’t think you did everything at all. Kana almost blurted out.

Then he reached into his chest harness and pulled something out.

Kana’s breath caught. She was quite familiar with that scroll.

The surface shimmered faintly, runes embedded into the fibers themselves, glowing with layered spell matrices. 

A [Teleportation] scroll.

“This is a modified [Teleportation] scroll,” Lex said calmly. “It will transport you to a safe location that I know.”

Modified? A [Teleportation] scroll can be modified? Kana wanted to ask but now was not the right time she took a mental note. She would do research about it later.

He handed one to each student.

“Use it only if you must,” he continued. “If I find out you wasted it…”

His gaze hardened.

“…you will pay.”

“With coin?” Roy hesitated.

Lex looked at him intently then slowly nodded his head.

Silence fell.

Then he stopped in front of Kier and Monde.

“You two already have one?”

“Yes, sir,” they answered in perfect unison.

“Good.”Lex nodded,“I’m not planning to give you anyway.”

Their expressions stiffened.

Lex added, “It’s not my job to ensure my students’ escorts’ safety.”

“…..”

No one spoke.

“I will collect them afterward if unused,” Lex added.

Suri muttered, “So stingy.”

“No,” Lex said immediately. “I’m the most generous person that I know.”

“….”

Silence again though most of them were shaking their heads while looking at the royal knight.

Kana looked down at the scroll in her hand.

Lex’s warning earlier rang in her mind.

Her instincts screamed caution. Her logic whispered retreat. She was planning to call it off if not for the [Teleporation] scroll Lex gave them.

No.

She closed her fingers around the scroll.

And made her choice.

They would continue the raid.

One question lingered in her mind. It would be helpful if Lex could tell them what type of monsters or what he saw in the deeper side of the dungeon. Why not simply share it with them? 

Post note:

A bit late due to some events.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Hope you enjoy the chap! 🙂