Chapter 180: 178 – Unearthed

Zel’s gaze jumped to the other side of the room, skimming over the two other doors. 

They, too, were sealed off, though each only by one seal. 

“Doesn’t smell like sealed-off antiquity,” she muttered as she stepped in, looking around. Besides the writing desk, there was to be seen an L-shaped counter in the right-hand corner, covered in elaborately decorated, archaic alchemy equipment, and equipped with a sink, though the fuel gem embedded in the wall above its spout had long gone grey and colorless. 

Her curiosity led her first to the writing desk, and therein she discovered exactly what she had expected. A shriveled, desiccated corpse, somehow untouched by rot, wearing a loose robe, an old-timey hat, golden earrings. He also had a number of rings on its hands which were still upon the table, a quill wax-melting mortar still half-full of blue wax next to the corpse’s right hand, and among his jewelry was an obvious seal ring. The man’s hair still held colour, its black strands reaching nearly to the ground, his face still possessed of a coherent, if gaunt shape. And his eyes, oh his eyes…

They stared up at her, glimmering in the light such that she briefly thought he was still alive, before she realized that they were spherical gemstones, entirely consumed by the cold-blue colour that had likely belonged to the man’s eyes. Maybe some sort of strange post-feudal artificial eye design?

It didn’t matter. Zef had followed her into the room, looking around, and so Zel called out: “Well, as well-preserved as he is, I don’t think the original sect elder is getting back up.”

She turned her attention to the many things strewn across the writing desk, particularly the small clearing amongst the chaos so purposefully arranged to highlight the letter in its center, the dead elder’s left hand rested upon it. It was sealed with blue wax, and when Zelsys took hold of the letter, his desiccated flesh instantaneously crumbled under the slightest of touch, even from mere paper brushing against it.

Not only that, the crumbling didn’t stop.

Like striking the tail of a glass droplet, the elder’s fingers crumbled to fine dust, moving rapidly up his hand. In seconds, he collapsed into his chair and onto the ground in a pile of dust and bones, his eyes rolling out onto the floor, bouncing about with sound akin to glass marbles and somehow finding their way towards the door. 

It was not Zef, but Ozmir who picked them up as they crossed the precipice, himself having walked up to the doorway. He raised them in his hand and remarked, “I knew the Elder had to have ascended. First bet I’ve won against that shriveled broom jockey.”

He gingerly placed the eyes onto the nearby counter, adding, “You may wish to see if there’s a third gem, it should look almost like an Azoth Stone. Those who ascend from the mortal coil tend to leave such Soul Seeds behind. Now, I’ll have to run quite a few errands to refill the pantry, so I’ll be gone a while - don’t let my cake go to waste, would you?”

Without even waiting for a response, Ozmir just turned on a boot heel and closed the door behind himself. More and more he seemed less like a chef than a long-suffering butler.

A third gemstone was to be found in the dust, glimmering even through the grime of centuries past. At a glance it seemed an Azoth Stone, and yet, it somehow looked clearly different, its mass solid see-through without any indication of primordial mercury within.

“Huh. Always thought Soul Seeds would look more impressive,” Zef remarked from halfway across the room, her Homunculus Eye dilated and Philosopher’s Eye open as she caught a brief glance of the object in Zel’s hand. A moment later, she returned her attention to the contents of the drawer which she had pulled open.

Zel stowed the seed away for the moment, breaking the letter’s seal while cautiously holding it facing away from herself in case it was trapped. It wasn’t. Unfortunately, it was not written in modern Ikesian either.

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Familiar letters, a few almost legible words, but altogether it was an archaic jumble, a familiar one. 

“It’s written in Old Ikesian,” she sighed with a pang of frustration. “I’ll have to remember to get Sig or Makhus to help translate it later.”

“Old Ikesian, huh? I suspect we’ll have to read it too if we want to make proper use of the library here,” Zef complained.

“Yeah…” Zel muttered agreement, stowing the letter away and scanning the rest of the room. She thought that, perhaps, one of the doors might bear an indication of the room beyond it, but they were all the same design. However, a few indications sparked entirely arbitrary conclusions in her mind - the door behind the writing desk was within an alcove and faced to the left from the entryway’s viewpoint, such that even when it was open, there were very few spots with direct line of sight into the door. 

Such a privacy measure wasn’t necessary for a library in Zel’s mind, so she unconsciously passed the door over for the one on the left side of the room.

She gathered a few lungfuls in her Essentia Gut, and with a resolute utterance undid the seal: “Break.”

A flash of light. Obliteration.

The door swung inward with nary a sound, the smell of old paper and parchment instantaneously flooding her nostrils. Overhead lightgems came alive, flooding the labyrinth of dark, wooden shelves with an eerie red light that strangely sharpened the edges of everything it touched.

“Found the library. I’ll take a quick look,” she let Zef know as she strode into the labyrinthine archive.

“Just be careful,” the blonde said back, though there was no real concern in her voice.

Upon entering the library, its real scale sunk in - it was physically not very large, being a rectangular room with five rows of shelves in total, including the shelves carved into the walls, forming three corridors.

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