Volume 3 Chapter 8 Into Reauneian Academy of Elementalics

Chapter 8 Into Reauneian Academy of Elementalics

I

Cheius was researching Cuore Celeste, the gemstone, from which he was trying to syphon something.

Syphoned by him, there several small waterdrops coming out of the gemstone. Those waterdrops were glowing. They seemed to contain some kind of magnificent power.

Prudently, Cheius put the waterdrops into a small test tube, and took out a box from his desktop. He opened the box, inside which there were three things: a small bottle of black water that contained living necroviruses, a piece of machinite and a piece of elementium.

Frowning, Cheius dripped one droplet the water he syphoned from Cuore Celeste into the box. Within a second, the black water that contained necrovirus became clean again, while the machinite and elementium turned into ashes.

Without doubt, the water he syphoned from the gemstone could neutralize the essential materials that humans needed to reach a higher civilization.

The so-called Rain of Regrowth that could be summoned by the high elves must be composed of countless drops of this kind of rainwater.

With force, Cheius tried to syphon from Cuore Celeste once again, but he failed.

Sighing with worry, Cheius went into a secret chamber.

There was an altar-like device in his office. A line of inscription was carved at the bottom of the device that wrote “ꡰꡋ’ꡮꡞꡃ’ꡏꡞꡃ ꡗꡞꡋ’ꡁꡞꡃ”, which meant “the Engine of Antilife” in Reauneish.

He had been constructing this engine for several years. Yesterday, he finally finished its construction so that Hoemuo handed Cuore Celeste over to him last night.

What Fungruus wanted was clear: destroying Cuore Celeste and the Sanctum of Life. However, it was not easy because the Sanctum of Life had been protected by the magic of high elves.

High elves were the strongest beings on this earth, and the magical barrier they built to protect the Sanctum of Life was nearly indestructible. However, the Sanctum of Life must be destroyed because it was the only thing that could possibly harm great Trigon.

Therefore, Fungruus, the King of Reauneia, ordered Cheius to construct this Engine of Antilife to corrupt and destroy the whole Cuore Celeste.

There was a blue-purple water elementium inserted into the bottom of the engine. The elementium didn’t look like inorganic matter. It seemed to be a dollop of weird organic meat ball composed of whacky protein, or to be precise, some aberrational kind of slime.

Carefully, Cheius put Cuore Celeste on the engine. The instant the gemstone was put on this obscene engine, the elementium began to glow in blue-purple light.

Drastically, Cuore Celeste commenced to tremble rapidly too, resonating with the elementium. Seemingly a surge of unutterable power was flowing from the elementium into the gemstone. The water elementium that powered the engine was corrupting Cuore Celeste gradually.

Slowly, the protein that it contained was streaming slightly onto the surface of the gemstone. After that, the organic protein penetrated inside the gemstone and it began to tremble.

Several minutes later, Cuore Celeste became something organic as well …

II

Aisling was walking in the town of high elves.

The town was burning, especially the outskirt of it. There used to be grassland outside of the town but now everything had been eaten by fire, and the town was the only part in this dimension that had survived.

She had tried to use the Altar of Life to purify this dimension, but she failed. The Altar of Life was unusable since this Dimension had been corrupted.

However, Aisling couldn’t’ leave this town and she was trapped inside this dimension. Luckily, there were enough foods in this city, so it wasn’t difficult for her to survive.

She was sighing.

Solitude was what she feared most. She was only 12 years old when she mother passed away and thus she had to live alone. Her heart was full of sorrow at that time but there was no one she could talk to. She wasn’t afraid of evil and dark forces … She was only afraid of loneliness.

Now, she was trapped in this dimension alone, in this town that no one was alive. Maybe she would be stuck inside this realm for her whole life …

There was a voice in her brain that urged her to walk into the burning fire. The fire would devour her, burn her and killed her …

Unluckily, she couldn’t do that. All high elves in this town had sacrificed themselves to call Aisling here and Aisling was their last hope. She needed to be tough. She couldn’t just die like this.

“My friends will save me,” Aisling told herself over and over again.

Sometimes she would think about her future. She had no future. She was destined to sacrifice herself to the Altar of life and bring the Rain of Regrowth to this world. This world would be purified in the end.

After about one month, something happened.

When Aisling went to check the fire wall that surrounded the town, she found out that those flames disappeared. Now something far more terrible appeared ...

Tentacles.

The town was surrounded by a dense mass of tentacles. Those tentacles were three metres long in average. They were wriggling like loathsome worms.

On the surface of those tentacles were nauseating suckers. Some sort of mucus was coming out of the suckers, giving off gusts of disgusting smell.

What was worse, there were eyeballs growing out from the end of some of the tentacles. All the eyeballs kept staring at Aisling.

Mist had filled the air, and the grassland outside the city had been turned into some kind of organic matter. The whole dimension was turning into a unity, a living monster with hive mind.

All those tentacles belonged to the same creature and this dimension was turning into its flesh.

With a gust of nausea running through her alimentary canal, Aisling began to vomit.

She ran to the centre of the town so that she wouldn’t see those monsters.

Fortunately, the town of high elves had been protected by an invisible magical barrier set up by the high elves so the flesh of that tentacled monster wouldn’t corrupt the city.

Perhaps one day, the town would be corrupted too. Buildings would turn into flesh and their windows would become the eyeballs of that monster.

“My friends will save me,” Aisling told herself over and over again …

However, it had been one month. Her friends hadn’t saved her yet. Had they died, or were they still struggling to rescue her?

She didn’t know.

Solemnly, she walked back to the Sanctum of Life and looked at that altar.

She was the last elf in this world and purifying the world with the Rain of Regrowth at the expense of her life might be her true destiny.

It was inevitable, just like the inevitability of the arrival of necrology, mechanics and elementalics.

III

Stasha and Yanni went out of the cavern.

It had been one month since Hoemuo robbed Cuore Celeste from them. However, they still had no idea why elementalists wanted Cuore Celeste so much.

Achnosiris, the leader of Macchina Gloriosa used to yearn for Cuore Celeste too. He wanted to use the energy inside it to update the Mother Matrix and let it mechanize this world.

“Why do you think that elementalists want Cuore Celeste so much?” queried Yanni.

“I have no idea, Yanni … By the way, I found that … Your sister is …” sighed Stasha.

“What has happened to her?” asked Yanni curiously.

“It’s just … I think something is wrong about her. When we were bathing in that lake of Starshine Village, she seemingly wanted to tell me something but … I don’t know what she wants to say … Does she have any secret that I shall know?”

“Um … That …” stuttered Yanni. Yanni knew that Floria had a crush on Stasha, but that was a secret among him and Floria. In all the cultures of this world, girl’s love was considered incestuous… Therefore, Yanni couldn’t tell Stasha the truth.

“Wow, Floria really had a secret which she has told you but hasn’t told me. I’m jealous. What is that secret?” complaint Stasha.

“I won’t tell you. I’ve promised to Floria that I won’t tell anyone the secret, even you and Aisling,” replied Yanni.

“Fine … I have a secret that I haven’t told her too. We’re even,” murmured Stasha.

Anyway, they had to leave this cavern that they were trapped in first. The entrance of the cavern had been sealed by fallen rock due to the flood, so it was impossible for them to backtrack to reunite with Floria. Therefore, they had to move forwards.

After walking in the labyrinth-like cavern for one hour, they found a hole which had been sealed by some planks.

Obviously, that hole was sealed by humans. With force, Yanni kicked the planks off, climbed through that hole and arrived into an artificial tunnel. Stasha followed him.

There were some missing kid posters on the walls. Though they were written in Reauneish, Stasha and Yanni could still guess out its meaning. Those kids must be so naughty that they tried to adventure into that hole but get lost in the nature cavern, and thus it was sealed after that.

Slowly and carefully, Stasha and Yanni walked through the tunnel and finally they arrived at the exit of it.

After leaving the tunnel, they arrived at a metropolitan area of Reauneia.

The architecture in Reauneia was quiet exotic. Built in a violet and white tone, most houses in the city was simple with white wall and violet roof. Those houses used wood structure and tile roofs. There were also some marble temple-like buildings in the city with white domes and pillars.

There were lots of pedestrians on the street. Most of the pedestrians were normal instead of mutant. However, all those normal people wore torn clothes and their hair was all tousled. They seemed to belong to the underclass. It was the first time for Floria and Yanni to see normal non-mutant Reauneians.

Those non-mutant people liked to hold a purple sphere in their hands. Their eyes were always fixed on the purple sphere as if those spheres were some kind of drugs.

“What are those spheres?” asked Yanni curiously.

“I have no idea,” Stasha shrugged.

There were also some mutant ones. Some of them had magma-rock-like skin and they must be soldiers like Hoemuo.

Besides them, there were also mutant people having characteristics of fishes. They had fish scales, and their eyes were abnormally big. Some of them even had aberrational gills. Those people looked hellishly loathsome.

Though mutant ones looked ugly and disgusting, but it was quite obvious that they had higher social status than common normal people. When looking at those mutant ones with nauseating mutations, the common ones would show sincere respect.

Though the whole city was exotic and interesting to Stasha and Yanni, one building attracted them most. It was a pagoda built of white marble. It was nearly thirty meters tall and towered over everything below.

Suddenly, Stasha saw a familiar figure.

It was Cheius! That figure must be him. She wouldn’t miss him since it was hard to forget his loathsome tentacles.

Slowly, Cheius wiggled into that pagoda. Luckily, Cheius hadn’t discovered their presence.

“Have you seen Cheius?” asked Yanni quietly.

“Yep, for sure. He is inside that building,” Stasha nodded.

“What shall we do now? Shall we walk inside that building, or wait for Floria?” pursued Yanni.

“Let’s go inside that building right now. We have no time to wait for her,” replied Stasha.

“You’re right. Let’s go, Stasha,” proposed Yanni.

Clearly, that pagoda looked different from other buildings in the city. Maybe it was Cheius’ base of operation, and Cuore Celeste might have been taken to that building too.

Sneakily, Stasha and Hoemuo walked to the front of the gate of that building. The air was cold and damp inside the building.

There were some weird chanting voice coming from the depth of the building. Those cultic chants were rather whacky, as if the chants of fanatic cultists.

A gust of cold wind blew by, and a surge of chill crawled all the way up along the spine of Yanni and Stasha.

Obviously, there was something horrible in this building.

Heart thumping in fear, Stasha and Yanni entered the pagoda and began to explore it.

Behind the door was a long corridor and there were doors and windows on its two sidewalls.

Firstly, they needed to identify what this building was actually. Sneakily, Stasha and Yanni peeked into a room through one of the windows. In the room there were several desks and one lectern.

It looked like a classroom in the Scholomance. Maybe this pagoda was in fact a school like Scholomance, or to be precise, it was a academy. Hoemuo once said that they could find Cheius in Reauneian Academy of Elementalics. If they were right, this pagoda must be that Reauneian Academy of Elementalics he referred to.

Those chants they had heard were not chants. In fact, they were sounds of students reading their textbooks aloud. They were reading their books mechanically in a foreign language, and that was why it seemed like fanatic cultic chanting.

Most of the students in the classroom were mutant slightly. There were some fish scales growing on some parts of their skin, such as face and arms. The mutation of the teacher standing on the lectern was more obvious than the students’.

Stasha had created a silence barrier with her tuning forks and those students were fully absorbed in their textbooks. Therefore, no one had discovered them.

Since this place was a academy, Cheius must be some sort of professor and they had to find the office of Cheius.

There was a map of the whole academy hanged on the sidewall of the corridor that they were currently in, but the map was written with Reauneish so they couldn’t understand it at all. Therefore, they had to search the whole academy carefully in order to find Cheius.

They continued walking deeper inside this building, and after one minute, they arrived at the end of the corridor, where they found a stair that led upwards and a bookshelf against the wall. There were several rows of textbooks on the bookshelf and one of the textbooks drew Yanni’s attention.

Carefully, he took that textbook off the bookshelf and began to read it.

That book was about Normania. Though both Stasha and Yanni couldn’t understand Reauneish, they could understand the illustrations, in which there were both Reauneian characters and Normanian characters.

In the illustrations, all Normanians were short, ugly, and violent, while common Reauneians were weak and helpless. On the contrary, all elementalists were beautiful, smart and elegant … They were heroes who could save Reauneia.

What was worse, in Normanian, there might be the same kind of textbook that stigmatize Reauneians. That must be the reason why those villagers in Everlight village and those residents in Mildwind Town hated Reauneians so much.

“Let’s go upstairs now. We shall find Cheius first,” urged Stasha.

“Yeah, let’s go,” consented Yanni.

The instant their voices broke off, they heard a scream.

They were discovered by a student who was taking a walk on the corridor.

“ꡋꡡꡲ’ꡏ’ꡇꡞ’ꡗ ꡔꡞꡋ!” [Normanians!] shouted that student.

Stasha and Yanni couldn’t understand Reauneish, but without doubt, that student had discovered them and found out that they were Normanians, because the pronunciation of “Normanian” in Reauneish was nearly the same as in Normanish. It was a loanword.

Upon hearing his shout, other students as well as teachers came out of the classrooms too.

“ꡋꡡꡲ’ꡏ’ꡇꡞ’ꡗ ꡔꡞꡋ …” [Normanians …] those students kept discussing about them two. Their faces were twisted in anger and real hatred.

Normanians had killed countless Reauneians, and in the eyes of Reauneians, Normanians were no different than inhumane monsters.

While they were discussing, a familiar figure came out of one of the doors on the sidewall of the corridor. He was fully mutant and didn’t look like a human anymore. His tentacles with suckers were hissing with sticky slimes.

It was Cheius. He was wearing a hood and his face was covered in shadow. Stasha and Yanni couldn’t judge his expression at all.

They had been discovered and surrounded.

They were done …