139 Discovery (2/2)

Li shook his head. 'No, not at all. Things are perfect here. Now where is this cave?'

'Let me see.' Ven'thur paused for a few seconds, sifting through his advanced memory. 'One hundred and fifty meters north to the center of the lake. There should be a trench there that leads into a cave system. It will be very apparent.'

As Li made his way there, he realized that Ven'thur was right. The trench was very visible. It was like a giant had slammed a cleaver into the lakebed, causing a massive, almost out of place fissure. He made his way down, parting through the dark waters and into the depths of the trench.

Eventually, the space around him grew narrow and narrower as the rocky walls of the trench closed around him, and just when he thought there was not enough space to move further down, he found there were several passages in the rock that branched out.

'Take the one straight ahead of you,' said Ven'thur. ��The others are lairs for beasts.'

Li obliged the lich's directions, and as he swam into the dark passageway, he felt it slope upwards until at a certain point, the water leveled off, leaving him standing on solid and stony surface. Though the place was surprisingly spacious, the air was thin. He doubted a normal human could have survived here if they even managed to get all the way down here in the first place.

As Li got further into the path, he realized the terrain was changing. What was previously jagged edges of rock had smoothed out. There were countless circular indentations in the rock that had smoothed the rock as if it had been beaten into flatness through repeated impact.

'You said this being was a golem, right? Does it eat rocks or something?' thought Li.

'That is what I perceived it as, though it was fashioned so perfectly in the form of a man that I initially thought it human. Perhaps it once was. That would explain why it was so curious about my research around ascension and resurrection.'

'Resurrection?'

'Ascension into my kind will involve death for I am of undeath. Thus, my ascension necessarily frees its subjects from their mortal coil. It is extracting the soul after the rigor of the ritual and resurrecting it into something beyond its mortal limits that is true ascension.' Ven'thur sighed. 'I thought it perhaps a fellow scholar, but alas, it did not have any true interest in the academic side of my research, merely the results. It had the miraculous power to create anything I wished, any tool or object, and it obliged my every request.'

'Interesting,' thought Li. 'Well, looks like I'm going to get to see this mystery being directly.'

Li stepped out of the passageway and into an enormous cavern. It was utterly dark, but his night vision could perceive that there was something like a crater spanning the breadth of the floor. The center of the crater was slightly upraised, forming a kind of seat that was awkwardly empty.

'Looks like it isn't home today,' thought Li.

'Impossible. It told me it was bound here, that it was sealed here such that it needed beings like me to aid it. And this place, it is far, far different. There was such power that flowed here, power unlike any I had witnessed until I came into your presence. Sigils of origin I knew not swirled like birds, casting great light upon this place. I thought them seals, but they are gone.'

'Meaning this golem is gone too,' said Li. He knelt down to get a read of the area and possibly pick up some clues. He needed to bring this being under his heel to get rid of loose ends for this case, and it not being here was quite troublesome. He would need to find it soon. 'Can you track this being down? If it managed to speak to you from its sealed prison, then it might have used a telepathy spell. Any way to reform that?'

'I shall try, but the magic it uses is of a nature I cannot accurately discern. It may be difficult.'

'That's fine, just get on it while I look around for anything useful.'

Li reached the center of the cavern. He realized the upraised platform was rather large, indicating that the being sitting on it would have been a decent bit larger than a normal man. He tried to see if there was anything of note there, and he did happen upon something.

He realized there were inscriptions all around the platform, and as he got a closer look at them, he saw that they were not runes. They did not have the austere, scratch-like structure of runes, but instead had flowing, complex builds which he suddenly realized were traditional Chinese characters.

The moment he saw this, the characters began glowing like a rainbow tinted kaleidoscope, flashing colors of all gradients that shone with an intensity that lit up the entire cavern. It was like a chain reaction after that.

Once the light from the platform radiated outwards, it revealed countless more characters around the cavern, some suspended in the air, some as large as a man, some as small as a pebble, but all radiant and overflowing with sheer power.

Li saw the characters intensify in their brilliance, crackling as they began shunting out power, and he then understood what was going on.

All the characters shattered in unison, unleashing a burst of iridescent force that swallowed up the cavern. It bloomed outwards, carving past the sheer stone walls of the cavern and even further beyond, rising up to the lakebed. As heat and force surged outwards, the lakebed began to crack, and each crack was outlined with a flowing burst of light.

Marine life skittered away at this sudden invasion of light and power so deep in the depths of the lake, but few were able to escape the geysery of explosive power that shattered past the lakebed like air escaping a popped balloon.