Saintess Summons Skeletons

Sofia peacefully fell down, her legs crossed, lightly opening her wings every so often to keep her falling speed in check.

“How many times have I jumped down dark holes like this one now? The abyss under the holy-see, the Veik secret passage on Fenrir, the ladder down to the center of Cerberus Beta, then the multiple holes in the palace… I feel like I’m forgetting some… Nothing can ever top jumping from the Sun back to Veliadren anyway… Space is the largest hole out there.”

After a while she stopped, stopping something strange. Stepping on air, she jumped up a few times.

“Oh…”

The hole had relatively cleanly cut sides, but right there, the hole had a hole.

“Some kind of cavern? … No, that’s a tunnel. Something dug up to this point, encountered the hole and decided to turn another way. A monster of that size capable of digging through the stone without causing everything to collapse… Stone Drake? I wonder if I could kill one without cheating now. Shouldn’t be too hard, right? The one from the trial was only level 333.”

Now is not the time…

Sofia let herself fall down. A free fall was much faster than going down stairs, and even with frequent breaks, she reached the bottom in under an hour, finding herself in another small room like the one she had departed from, a closed door hiding what was to come next.

Velania had not lied, the mana here was thick and suffocating, saturating the air so much that it felt almost like walking through a dense invisible fog. There was so much of it that in corners it gathered densely enough to be visible to the naked eye, looking like white wisps of mist.

Another immediately noticeable thing was how much stronger the gravity was, from what Sofia could tell, almost twice as strong as the surface, and the air was also quite hot, though not unbearably so.

Breathing in such concentrated mana in her demon form made Sofia a bit high, but she took some time to get used to it before she finally opened the door.

She was surprised to then find herself in an unlit natural cavern, two sides of which had been walled off. This left the opposite wall as the only way to go, it was clearly part of a mana leyline, and had a small natural opening in which Sofia could probably squeeze herself without too much trouble. That’s probably it.

Sofia approached and touched the wall, the mana leyline felt like stone with wood grain, for lack of a better description, an ultra-dense continuous flow of mana ran through it, headed for an unknown destination.

The only other time Sofia had seen a mana leyline was in the Brighthall academy training room, where she had first given Bookie his current body. She had done some research on the Leylines after that, and there wasn’t much to be found aside from basic information.

Leylines were supposedly natural formations where mana gathered, like the veins of the planet. Because of the constant mana flow, they could have a host of different properties, but the one feature they all had was their almost indestructible nature. The constant flow of mana made it so they were extremely hard to carve through, and extremely unsafe to build in. But as proven here and at the academy, it could be done, with strong enough people and enough effort.

Curious, Sofia grabbed Anna’s dagger and tried to cut through the leyline.

The dagger had some difficulty cutting through, but with enough force, Sofia managed to shave off a piece of bark-like leyline. An intense geyser of mana shot out of the leyline where Sofia had cut it.

She woke up three seconds later, the mana in the air even thicker and more sickening than before, but the geyser had stopped.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

G- Good thing I always have my unlife runes on now… I didn’t even see it coming.

At least she was now the proud owner of a mana leyline shaving, what it could be used for, she had no idea, but she had it.

Maybe Remia will want it? She thought, storing it and starting to crawl inside of the small opening. Last test, here I come.

After a meandering crawl through the natural opening of the leyline, Sofia saw some light in the distance. It was Ihuarah waiting in a larger part of the tunnel, in front of a closed door.

“Lady Sofia. I’m elated that you would let me accompany you to the relic,” he greeted her as she crawled out of the hole.

“It was on CInthia’s suggestion, but either way, you deserve to be here as much as I do, so it’s only natural. Why not wait for me inside, though? Can you not open the door?”

“Oh, that I could, you were the one to triumph over the trials, however, so it should of course be you who gets the privilege of opening this place. Let me explain the rules first, however.”

“Right, that Romuald guy briefed you, I understand? Are we going to have to fight something?”

Ihuarah shook his head, “No such thing here. This last test is quite hard and quite simple at the same time. There will be many items waiting for us inside, you may only pick one, the first one you touch will be your pick. That is the test, you must correctly find the divine item. Of course simple magics like [Identify] are unlikely to produce any result. As for me, I may help you decide, and as a helper, I can grab and put away the items that you are certain are not it. If you make me grab the relic, however, you will instantly lose, and we will both be booted out of here empty-handed.”

“I already know the relic is a shroud,” Sofia said, “I imagine this will be quite easy.”

She walked up to the door, it was just like the entrance of the palace, opening up at the contact of her hand.

“Well, shit,” Sofia uttered as she glimpsed inside. This final testing place was also a final resting place, a closed stone sarcophagus resting in the middle of a large dome-shaped room, with thousands of large colorful woven squares of cloth flying in wide circles all around the burial chamber. “It’s all shrouds…”

“As you say…” Ihuarah said in an uncharacteristically worried tone. “This might be slightly harder than I had expected from the initial explanation.”

The duo entered and the door closed behind them.

“There’s an actual body inside of the sarcophagus…” Sofia immediately noticed, feeling the bones even through the thick mana in the air. “If it’s a burial shroud we’re after, are we meant to become gravediggers?”

Ihuarah shook his head, “The merciful mother would not request such a disgraceful thing of her children. The relic is without doubt one of these shrouds flying around. The only question is which one.”

“Hmm, I already notice that quite a few are embroidered with runes of different divinities, so those won’t be it,” Sofia said outright, even recognizing Sun’s rune on some of the shrouds. “We must have quite a wide public watching, I think. Probably even scripture.”

“Perhaps,” Ihuarah confirmed, “none would dare interfere, I’m sure. This place is under the protection of the headless one.”

“The demon king is that strong he can contend with gods?” Sofia asked.

“Certainly, he bears the essence of almost all Recessed, after all. There are great restrictions cast upon him but he is also immensely powerful. I have no doubt he must be observing us at this moment too,” Ihuarah explained.

“... I will never live it down if I pick the wrong item, will I?”

Ihuarah stayed silent.

“Alright… Why don’t we start by picking off all the shrouds with the runes of other gods? Ah, wait, no… Do you know what the rune of Progress looks like?”

“Progress… Progress was a fairly popular deity in my time, although I was never a worshiper. I am positive I must have seen it a few times in my olden days, these are memories long-gone however, I might be able to recall if you give me a minute…”

“We’re not on a timer, are we?”

“We are not,” Ihuarah confirmed.

“Take all the time you need then, in the meantime I’ll be making a list of all the runes I can see. Just keeping the shrouds with runes of Sorrow and maybe Progress will be a good start.”

Sofia sat down near the door, and taking a bone slate from her storage, started drawing a list of the runes she saw engraved on the shrouds, annotating the corresponding divinity’s name when she knew about them.

I wonder if this place inspired the orb floor in the second trial…