Hermit Wizard

Chapter 111

Dragon’s Name (7)

After crossing the barricade, I kept flying.

There was a wide road that connected the desolate land under my feet. There were few regular vehicles on the road, and most were large cargo trucks with containers connected to them. Trailers ran along the quiet road and lined up into a huge building that looked like a warehouse.

I got off at the point where the Mana led me, then I stepped on the ground and looked around.

‘Certainly, this place won’t be accessible to the public unless it was decided.’

[It’s a difficult location to pass by accidentally. Moreover, it is a restricted area.]

The Free Zone was so vast that it was impossible to move on foot. However, I was standing so far away that I couldn’t see the road, and the warehouse was also not in sight. It was a wilderness with nothing in the restricted area.

[That’s why he made the entrance here.]

I nodded. The Dragon’s nest itself had existed for a long time, but the entrance location had changed several times.

In front of me was a square stone building with no curves on the entire building. The hidden magic was visible only to the wizards’ eyes, and it looked like a building found in the wrong era.

It looked like a historic site made of smooth stone walls without a single window. That was the gate leading to the Dragon’s nest underground. It was said that the nest was currently empty and sealed. I looked at the barriers surrounding it.

‘It’s also earnest.’

The magic was surrounding the entrance tightly. It was different from the barriers Hessler made in Hun-neung. There was nothing that couldn’t be dismantled, but it took time.

Although the magic formula wasn’t extremely sophisticated, it had a magical pattern applied like a kind of construction work. If you solved that one by one, a day or two wouldn’t be enough. It was what Alice told me.

I looked down at the ground I stepped on. The Dragon’s nest was a vast underground space that no executive knew the area properly. Moreover, it existed in a deep area that went far below the surface.

After the Dragon died, the ascetics couldn’t protect the entire wide area with complex barriers, and such barriers were made only at the entrance. That was because they thought it would be impossible to break into the nest without passing through the entrance and the connecting passage.

The assumption that intruders dug hundreds of meters underground didn’t seem to have been made at all. Well, if you started doing that, you would be noticed by the dug-up dirt, sand, rocks, or even by the passing time.

However, if it didn’t stand out, that was it.

I created a concealment barrier around me. At that moment, no one could figure out what was going on there, whether it was a satellite or anything.

‘I’ll summon him.’

[Yeah.]

Mana moved to the center of my chest, and the dimensional map in my head guided the gathered power. The dimensional contact point showed a gap in the calculated direction.

The Mana had not lost its direction. After finding the destination, the Channel continued.

-Whoooong!

I chanted the spell, and the promised language conveyed the will to him. It sent a signal to the soul of the contractor as if knocking. The other party accepted my invitation, and the door opened in front of his eyes.

He entered the Channel from the other dimension.

What popped out of the blue light source was a leg with shaggy brown hair. He was wearing shoes made of luxuriously colored silk, from turquoise to yellow to intense red. The dizzying color scheme was the same as the clothes he wore. In terms of humans, it was no different from sleeveless and shorts made with a childish pattern.

The Channel was so narrow that he came out of the door whining. He folded his body in half, pulled out his waist, and touched the ground with his arms. He almost crawled out of the Channel.

“Oh, My God! Isn’t this too narrow?”

He grumbled and moved his elbows, crawling. My summon, who came out of the Channel, patted his back and stretched his body.

“Oh my, my back!”

As he stood upright, my body was instantly covered by his shadow. He was about twice as tall as my height. Brown fur covering the arms and legs was exposed outside the garment.

Compared to the last time I saw him, the most significant change was his fashion sense. These races were always dressed in rough, rugged leather, but he, who appeared in front of me that day, was wearing colorful violence that reminded me of a rainbow.

He looked as if he was holding an exorcism at the moment. He wasn’t even a shaman.

He greeted me, “It’s been a while, Yoong.”

I answered him, “That’s right, Ghur.”

I laughed after a long time.

***

“By the way, why is this neighborhood so cold?”

He said while shivering. I check today’s temperature in Dubai on my smartphone. It was 38 degrees Celsius.

“Welcome to Earth. It’s my first time to summon you because I’m busy. How does it feel to cross the Channel?”

“Well, it didn’t feel much when I crossed the dimension. Rather, the feeling of calling directly to my soul was different.”

Ghur said so and looked around curiously.

“No, I mean, this dimension is where so many humans live, but why is the environment so devastated? Why is it so cold? It’s a terrible place to live. Do I have to be a great wizard like you to survive in this harsh environment?”

Well, it might be because of the environment, but not the temperature.

It was the last time I visited his village that I signed a contract with Ghur. The other party to the contract didn’t necessarily have to be a higher-level entity. He had magic and knowledge that I didn’t know about, and I thought he’d be useful someday, just like that moment.

“I’ve heard a message through the soul contract magic, but you need a divine spell?”

“Yeah.”

I looked down at the ground.

I could dig up the ground, too. It was just that the method was highly uneconomical. All I could do was break, split, and move. The by-products were piled up, and it was too hard to restore them again.

I didn’t want to inform the ascetics of the invasion here that day. Of course, I didn’t want to leave any traces.

The alternative was Ghur’s magic, a spell borrowed from the power of a God called ‘the Predator of the Earth.’

When he fought the Asphim Giants with me, I remembered that he moved the earth freely. His magic was to move the hard crust like clay, like building up the ground to make walls, burying giants clean, clearing the ground, etc.

If you wanted to do that by controlling your Mana one by one, your brain would burn out of overload while calculating. It was the power of God that made it possible, a divine influence that wasn’t related to me.

I requested to Ghur.

“If you dig 500 meters down here, there is a huge cavity. Can you dig a hole there?”

“Twice is also no problem.”

The giant nodded happily, and I took a small box out of my backpack. It was the price of the contract.

“It’s silk and barrier artifacts. It has space magic on it, so when you open the lid, the contents will spill out.”

It was a box smaller than my fist, but what was inside was enough to fill a room.

“Oh, I’ll gladly use them.”

I looked at his clothes as he received the box quickly.

“By the way, your clothes…”

The combination of colors was so free that it was breathtaking fashion. The furry giant laughed, revealing his fangs.

“There’s so much left after making the underpants for the elderly with the ‘silk’ cloth you gave us last time.”

He snubbed and laughed.

“Every one of the Dells in our village wore a pair of clothes. Such a soft fabric, this is a revolution!”

“… Are all the villagers wearing that way?”

“The more colors you use in your clothes, the more you get recognition from the village.”

He then shrugged. How could the cloth I gave them make a culture like that?

“Okay, then I’ll start.”

Ghur collected Mana in both hands. He had a powerful origin that transcended dimensions. Hence, his method of operating Mana was a little different from mine. It took a while to use a divine spell.

[email protected]#[email protected]@%@@#@!…

As soon as he shouted the starter, the circular earth surrounding us began to sink underground!

-Grrrrrrrrrng!

“Ohhh!”

I looked at the clean section made by the sinking ground. No soil, rock, or dust was pushed away even when the ground was falling. A clean trail as if a paper was pierced with an awl. We dug under the grounds smooth as an elevator going downstairs.

After some time, our movement stopped, and Ghur told me, “There’s a huge space under the thickness of just half your height. I stopped here because there was a barrier.”

“Yes, thank you.”

As Ghur said, there was a barrier in that underground. Still, it wasn’t as terrible as the one surrounding the entrance. That was enough to penetrate without breaking it.

I looked at Ghur. I didn’t need him to go all the way down here.

“You can return for now, and please help me restoring the ground later.”

Ghur nodded.

“Yeah, I’ll do it without a price.”

I reactivated the Channel and sent him back to his original dimension.

I looked under my feet and used magic to break the ground. The original detection barrier should work, but I silenced it. I made a hole for my body to enter and jumped inside. I reduced the falling acceleration and sank slowly.

So, I entered the Dragon’s nest.

***

‘It’s not unfamiliar for some reason.’

I sent my thoughts to Parvache.

The Dragon’s nest was a huge cave located underground. A high ceiling of tens of meters ran above my head.

I spread Mana in that large space to find the object I wanted. While expanding my senses, I realized the identity of the déjà vu I feel right now.

‘Ah, it’s similar to that place.’

[Where?]

I think of a place that was so impressive that I couldn’t easily forget.

‘The underground cavity of the Silver forest, where I met the Truth-Seeker.’

[Ah ah… indeed.]

The feeling was quite similar except that there was no hazy light that filled the space.

A year had already passed since the Dragon died. There was no such thing as a dark presence in that space, like when facing Silver Forest’s Truth-Seeker. It may be just a feeling, but I naturally became cautious. Even though I knew, nothing was threatening me there at that moment.

‘There is really nothing.’

The Dragon’s nest was originally said to be a it was said that after he died, all the ascetics moved them outside. That place was too remote and spacious for the ascetic to manage. That was why they chose a different place other than his nest for the resurrection of the Dragon.

I concentrated on my mind, and I set the direction in which the wave of Mana was leading.

‘… I think I found it.’

I made magical lights that lit up the darkness, and I moved quickly while using the leap magic.

Most of the items in that place were taken out, but there were exceptions. There were two reasons why the ascetics didn’t take them. They didn’t have to touch them, or they didn’t have the ability to touch them.

I moved at high speed, and finally, I reached the area I was aiming for.

What I relied on were Hessler’s memory crystal and Alice’s testimony. Memory crystal and interrogation each had their own strengths and weaknesses. Yodmo, who digested the memory crystal, didn’t lie to me. Still, it bothered Yodmo to have a long conversation, and Alice was able to be interrogated for as long as I wanted, but I needed to verify that the content was accurate.

So, once I interrogated Alice and found out everything I wanted to know, I checked with Yodmo to make sure it was true. There were some strangely different ranges that Hessler and Alice knew, but most of them were cross-validated.

That was one of the contents that had been verified in that way. The thing that was left here… a kind of ‘garbage.’

I passed through a winding labyrinth-like area and came out again into an open space. I stopped walking.

‘Here it is.’

[Should we dig the ground?]

‘I don’t think I need to summon Ghur again. It doesn’t feel like hundreds of meters. I’ll just use magic…’

I exchanged my thoughts with Parvache.

What led me to that place was the Mana that I scattered in the underground caves. I poured out the sense of power to search all the material inside like a precise radar, and I came there following the reaction.

That was why I knew that that space was empty. The fact that there was no one to disturb me here and that there was no detectable entity.

Therefore…

“How did humans get in here?”

I heard a calm voice behind my back. I was surprised to the extent that my heart tightened.