Chapter 3: Ch3 Submerged Castle

My name is Elayna Lumini. I was once known as Ryu Hinata and was transported into this world of magic and swords after I died in a fire. My school was burning and our teacher got split up from us by the debris that fell from the ceiling.

 

Most of our class was with our teacher on the other side. The only exceptions were my classmate Rika and me. Our practiced escape route was also cut off, so we had to improvise.

 

Panicking wouldn't do us any good, so I quickly calmed down and tried calming her down as well. She asked me what we should do, so I thought of something and started running towards the gym with her in tow.

 

We were on the second floor and we got cut off from the stairs that led downstairs. The gym, however, despite being on the first floor, had an observational area that we could enter from the second floor. There are stairs that lead downstairs to the bottom left corner of the gym and an emergency exit on the top left.

 

We struggled through the hallways that were already lit ablaze. For some reason, the fire alarm didn't go off, causing us to only notice it after it had reached outside our homeroom. During that time, the whole school was already burning.

 

I opened the door to the gym's second floor observational area and dragged Rika down the stairs. While we were running down the stairs, I noticed the falling debris increasing. When I looked up, I saw the ceiling cracking. The ceiling was supposed to be stable, but it seemingly couldn't manage this fire.

 

The ceiling was clearly about to collapse onto us.

 

We were just a few meters away from the exit.

 

Seven meters.

 

Five meters.

 

Three meters.

 

At two meters, the ceiling had started collapsing already.

 

It was falling fast.

 

One meter.

 

The debris was about to bury us alive. I knew that I could still make it if I gave it my all, but that would mean that I would have to leave Rika to die. No! I just couldn't do it.

 

I mustered all the strength that my adrenaline-filled body could exert and pulled on my classmate's arm, throwing her into the door that, fortunately, was easy enough to open on impact and let her exit just as I felt a pain on my head and was buried beneath the burning debris of our school gym's ceiling.

 

That was how I died.

 

When I came to, I could see multiple strange-looking people standing in front of me. My senses were very clouded and I could barely make out how a woman in white said something about someone or something 'meeting the requirements' before walking to me and stretching her hand out to me.

 

She probably meant me when she said that.

 

I didn't know what else happened though, as I once again lost consciousness after that.

 

The next thing I knew, I was reborn as a baby.

 

My life went smoothly. We lived in a small village that I had yet to leave.

 

This new world has monsters, so it was very dangerous for me to leave the village unless I knew how to defend myself.

 

There was also magic, but I wasn't able to cast anything except holy and fire magic.

 

When we tried measuring the other elements on my 16th birthday, which was a week ago, they said that I had the maximum affinity with all of them, but everyone thought it was the device malfunctioning. In holy magic, however, I excelled so much that the talent measuring device we used on me immediately broke, strengthening that suspicion.

 

Everyone at the age of 16 will have to get their talents measured, so a new device was ordered. However, before the new device could arrive, trouble found us.

 

Our Ballinger kingdom is at war with the neighboring Almar kingdom and our village is near the border of the two forces.

 

Our men, including my father, were forced to fight in the war. Six days ago, we were informed that he had been captured, and the day after that, we were invaded.

 

Our village is now occupied by the enemy.

 

Mother and I were already on the brink of falling into despair after finding out about my father not being able to return to us, and now that our village was also captured, my mother was devastated.

 

I was desperately trying to find a way to help with our situation but couldn't.

 

And now at present, I have got an idea.

 

Around our village are a few dungeons. There is a chance that I can find a treasure or some kind of spell book with spells that could be powerful enough to help us out.

 

It was wishful thinking, I know, but I am going to try everything I can and take the chance, no matter how small it is.

 

I am currently trying to sneak out of the village and am crawling through the thicket to avoid being seen.

 

This was my first time leaving the village, so I am a little scared, but I could only swallow my fear and move further into the forest.

 

I have now been moving for a few hours and am tired. Despite this, I kept going.

 

I was walking alongside a giant mountain's edge when I suddenly felt very light and noticed that I was falling into some kind of hollow room.

 

????????????????????????

 

My body fell into a deep fountain, abruptly waking me up. In order not to drown, I quickly swam up and out of the water.

 

My clothes were drenched. Luckily it's summer and we are situated in a hot area, otherwise, I might have caught a cold because of that.

 

After I had squeezed out most of the water from my clothes and put them back on, I looked around the place.

 

I am in a big hollow cave. There are exits, but they are all covered in vines and barely let through any light. I am in what looks to be a big park with the only difference being that it's underground.

 

There is a big wall with a ginormous gate with engraving on it.

 

'Is this a dungeon?' I walked up to the doors and figured that they were too big and heavy to push them open, even if we have 10 grown men per door.

 

I decided to inspect the engravings to see if they could help me open the door.

 

One look, however, puts me in shock already.

 

"This is Japanese!" I exclaimed in shock.

 

My mind was racing with all sorts of thoughts. 'How could this be Japanese?! Why is this here? Is it just a coincidence that I found this?' On second thought, I was convinced that this wasn't a coincidence. Every dungeon is recorded normally, but I know there was no known dungeon in our vicinity that was a submerged park with a giant gate as an entrance. Especially ones with Japanese writings.

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'This means that I am the first to discover this, which is too much of a coincidence.'

 

I tried recovering from my shock so I could read what the characters said.

 

"Find every weakness, no matter how small, and use it to achieve victory even if it seems impossible."

 

'"Find every weakness, no matter how small, and use it to achieve victory even if it seems impossible." In other words, what I am trying to achieve should normally be impossible. The "no matter how small" part suggests that the answer is very unsuspecting.' I was puzzled about how to do this while repeating the sentence to myself.

 

I have been thinking about this for at least ten minutes now while taking in every detail that looks unsuspecting and unhelpful and considering everything. My eyes fell on the middle of the door. The place where the gate's doors connect. The part that opens up first.

 

'I GOT IT!' I walked towards the doors' center with confidence.

 

Just when my nose should hit the doors, my body fit through the closed doors' only opening and turned back to normal afterward.

 

'This does indeed seem impossible every way you look at it.' I thought, while looking back at the opening, my body just slipped through like it was even more liquid than water.

 

When I turned my head back to the front, I was left in awe. There was a castle as big as the mountain it was submerged in! It looks so ancient.

 

I took a step forward on the path with grassland around it that looked mildly in chaos. What caught my eye was that there were so many glowing plants that looked very precious. I have never seen such plants before, but the mana they give off and the fact that the grass around it somehow is still healthy despite rain being unable to reach down here.

 

When I entered the castle, I was shocked once again. The light lit itself as soon as I set foot in the room, but that was not what shocked me.

 

There is a screen and a console under it right on the wall in front of me. On the screen was a map of the castle's first floor and, using the console, I could navigate it to show the other floors and the rooms.

 

'Just what the hell is this place?! First the Japanese writing and now screens!'

 

Navigating around the map for a few minutes, I noticed something that stood out from the rest. 'A cherry blossom garden? There are even cherry blossoms.'

 

I set my target on the cherry blossom garden and started making my way there. On the way, nothing unusual showed up anymore. The castle now looks just like a normal castle from the inside, with the difference to this place being very run-down.

 

After a few minutes of walking, I reached the cherry blossom garden.

 

I originally thought that the cherry blossoms would have already withered, but it turns out they look even healthier than back on earth.

 

The petals that fly around and seem to never get depleted, no matter how many fall off the trees, and the petals that still are on the trees are actually giving off a faint pink light.

 

The plants that are in front of the castle, which I thought were the cause of the grass around it still being alive, are nowhere to be found here.

 

There were only cherry blossoms and grass.

 

'Maybe there's something in the soil.' I thought and dug down next to a tree. I was curious about how they are so healthy.

 

My hands were scooping up the dirt and soon reached something hard and bright.

 

'These are mana veins?! And they are so large!' Mana veins are natural mana, being so dense that they form some kind of ore. To find them being so large meant that the natural mana in this castle is even denser than in holy springs.

 

Holy springs are springs with water made of mana. The 'water' there was also natural mana, which makes them some of the places with the densest natural mana in this world.

 

For mana to become solid naturally, meant that the mana needs to be even denser or concentrated on a single spot, but seeing as though these mana veins seem to be as large as the whole garden, which's size exceeded that of a tennis field, means that the mana here is several times more and denser than that of holy springs.

 

I didn't even know such a place existed, as holy springs have been said to be the places with the most mana in our world and, at the same time, some of the rarest places in our world.

 

'Harvesting this dense mana could make a civilization living down here a force as strong as the Ballinger kingdom we reside in.' This, however, brings up the question of why there was no one living here anymore. I couldn't even find corpses.

 

What also bothered me a little was that there were no monsters even though this is a dungeon. One with mana that could summon thousands of them too.

 

Moving on from the cherry blossom garden, I head to what I came here for in the first place. The library.

 

My hopes were high. Such a mysterious castle with such supreme mana needs to have knowledge beyond that of the Ballinger royal family. This, in return, means that if there are spells recorded here, they might be enough to free our village.

 

The closer I got to the library, the more destroyed this place looked.

 

Whatever the reason is for the castle to be submerged and so destroyed and desolate, it may be down that hallway.

 

The more I thought about it and the closer I got to my destination, the more fear crept up on me.

 

I felt the urge to turn around and quickly leave this place. The dread I was feeling was making my body shake, but I knew I had to push through. I can't just give up the chance to save my friends and family and the innocent people of our village.

 

I tried ignoring the fear and started running toward the library.

 

It took 2 whole dread-filled minutes of running. I was exhausted and scared.

 

The door to the library was right in front of me, but I felt that whatever was the cause of my fear was most likely in there.

 

I steeled my nerves and slowly opened the door, sneaking in as quietly as possible.

 

I hid behind a bookshelf and peeked at what was causing my instincts to scream at me to run away.

 

There it was. A creature of nightmares, a giant meatball of human corpses fused together. It roughly had a humanoid shape, but no face. Arms, heads, legs, and other limbs and body parts were fused into it.

 

I suppressed the urge to throw up. My body was shivering all over, but I still kept sneaking through the library to search for books that stood out.

 

The creature seemed to be unable to see or hear me since it didn't have a face, but I wasn't sure about hearing as it still had ears.

 

While looking around, I noticed a book looking extremely clean and with a golden cover.

 

It was in a display case made of glass and I needed a key to open it.

 

I now had two options: find the key that could be anywhere in this ginormous castle without a guarantee that it was even in one piece, like 50% of the books here, or I could break the glass and gain the attention of that creature. If I do that, I'd likely die if I didn't have a plan.

 

I can only try to distract it and then take the book and try my best at escaping.

 

But first I needed an escape route. I looked around the place and found a hole in the wall, a secret passage behind what I believe is the librarian's desk, and a pile of books and debris from a destroyed wall. It seems like there is enough space in it to fit under, but it is unclear if I will find a way out under there.

 

Here goes nothing!