Chapter 622

Chapter 622: Howling Shadows

In the area of the World Tree’s ruins, now covered in ash and black cinders, Morris, Nina, and Taran Ael had already found several knowledge guardians who had woken from the phantoms.

Just as Morris had predicted, these knowledge guardians, who had in effect just taken their first Dreamwalk, had been scattered to random places across the ruins of Atlantis. Luckily, most of them had not been thrown too far apart. Nina’s fireball rising into the sky was very eye-catching, and the scattered knowledge guardians had all come to check it out. That let them regroup quickly.

All except one.

“We still haven’t found Lord Ted Lier,” a knowledge guardian in a short robe, holding a book and a revolver, came back to their temporary camp and said to Taran Ael, Morris, and the others who were waiting there. “I didn’t see the agreed-on marks, and the Aetheric Call didn’t get any response.”

“Could it be that he still hasn’t ‘woken up’?” Taran Ael frowned without thinking. “That shouldn’t be… I gave him quite a large dose. Even with a Truth Keeper’s body, it should have worked smoothly…”

Nina glanced at the uneasy knowledge guardian across from her, then at Taran Ael, who was frowning in thought. She hesitated, but still could not help speaking: “Then maybe the dose was too big…”

Taran Ael froze for a moment. When he reacted, he waved his hands again and again: “Impossible, impossible. I am a careful scholar. How could I make that kind of mistake with a dosage? And Lord Ted Lier is an expert in alchemy. He knows exactly how much potion he can take…”

The more he talked, the smaller his voice became, until he finally added in a doubtful murmur: “…Probably.”

Nina and Morris: “…?”

“How much Blood Raven Elixir did you give Ted Lier, exactly?” Morris could not help asking.

Taran Ael thought for a moment, then raised his hand and gestured: “About a bottle this tall…”

Morris stared at him: “…You let him down a whole bottle of the mixture in a beer bottle?! Ordinary people use a dropper for this stuff!”

“Come on, he is a Truth Keeper,” Taran Ael spread his hands. “It is really hard to push him into a ‘false death’ level of mental dissociation. A dose that could make an ordinary person drop dead ten times over only serves to quench his thirst. What else could I do? Lord Ted Lier even purified the potion once more himself. Otherwise, he really couldn’t drink that much…”

Morris listened in stunned silence. After a long moment, he muttered with a strange look on his face: “Back when I was in school, this Truth Keeper wasn’t this excessive…”

“It is from teaching graduating classes,” Taran Ael waved his hand. “First he drank to drown his sorrows, then he used neurotoxins to drown his sorrows. Now I don’t even dare guess what he puts in his cup of water after class… Anyway, no matter what, the problem is definitely not the dose of Blood Raven Elixir.”

“Lord Ted Lier might be trapped deeper in this dream, in a place even the Aetheric Call cannot reach,” a knowledge guardian nearby saw the topic drifting further and further away and quickly cut in. “This place feels very strange. When we split up to search the nearby ruins just now, we found that once we walked beyond a certain distance, we started feeling dazed. Our minds went blank, and there were even short periods of memory loss. Our Psychic Sensing of each other also became intermittent…”

“It really was like that,” another knowledge guardian nodded at once. “Selanie even said that for a few seconds she completely forgot who she was, forgot everything about the Mortal Realm. She felt as if she had been born here, and wanted to stay here forever…”

Nina looked at the two speaking knowledge guardians, thought for a moment, and asked: “You are really sure this isn’t because the dose was too high?”

“My dosage was absolutely fine!” Before the two guardians could answer, Taran Ael could not hold back. “Miss, please trust the value of a first-class alchemist license, and besides, I am the inventor of the ‘Sudden-Death Method’. No one understands it better than I do…”

“The fact that you invented something called the ‘Sudden-Death Method’ is reason enough for the Truth Academy to take your license away,” Morris could not help grumbling. But after thinking it over seriously, he still shook his head. “It probably has nothing to do with the side effects of the potion. What those two knowledge guardians described sounds more like the Nameless One’s Dream itself affecting them.”

Nina blinked as she listened: “But the two of us have been moving around in there for such a long time, and we never felt anything like that…”

Morris thought for a moment, then raised his head and looked at the distant, majestic remains of the canopy and the phantoms wandering in confusion among the ruins. “Maybe… because in the end, we are not elves.”

Nina understood her teacher at once. Taran Ael and the Elven guardians around them also showed thoughtful looks.

After a short silence, Taran Ael slowly stood up. He walked onto a nearby boulder and gazed into the distance with a complicated expression.

The long stretch of charred ruins rose and fell in his view. The grand canopy had collapsed and fallen, turning into mountains and ravines on the ground. Ash covered the land, and dead branches crisscrossed through the ash.

It was like a giant city had fallen from the sky. Broken walls and shattered towers lay scattered everywhere. Bleak memories still clung to this land after its destruction, melted into the wind and drifting dust.

Taran Ael tried with all his strength to imagine what this place had once looked like.

Once there had been a forest here, a lush forest under the shade of the World Tree. The valleys and hills here had been full of life. The giant tree’s roots had rippled across the earth, and clear streams had flowed through the valleys. Many living beings had dwelled here, birds, beasts, and elves.

They were his “ancestors”, living in another age that he had never seen.

The lush life of that age far exceeded what people of today could imagine. But even harder to imagine than that life might be the order and peace of that time.

It was said that faraway Pland and Frostholm had already gained that kind of peace. But that “Captain Duncan” had said that even the “peace” Pland and Frostholm had now could not compare to the world before the Great Annihilation.

Taran Ael felt his imagination hit a wall.

No matter how he tried, what came to mind were not vivid scenes. Cold words seeped out of the books he had once read and into his memory, sketching only rough, vague impressions in his mind. Only with great effort, through the dream, had he finally learned what a “forest” really looked like. Yet he still could not imagine how birds and beasts had actually lived in that endless green ocean, or how the elves had formed a symbiotic pact with such a “forest”…

People always said that the elves’ ancient books and their stories passed down by word of mouth held the most complete legacy. If one day the archaeology scholars could truly restore the world as it had been before the Great Annihilation, that restored image would surely be sleeping in the libraries of Lightwind Harbor and Morka.

But now Taran Ael realized that image was already gone.

On a day long, long ago, when the seawater had swallowed this world, it had vanished together with the withering of Atlantis.

But… what had destroyed Atlantis? What had truly caused the Great Annihilation?

A blast of scorching wind suddenly blew from nowhere. The wind carried a sharp, unsettling noise, not the broken, irregular gusts that usually slipped through the ruins, but something harsher. It felt full of panic and destruction, a howl that could sweep straight through the mind.

Taran Ael snapped out of his thoughts.

The fierce howling wind almost lifted him off the ground. Taran Ael struggled to keep his footing, only to realize that at some point everything around him had sunk into darkness and chaos. It was as if all the light of the world had suddenly drawn back. The ruins of the giant tree in front of his eyes all turned into warped, uneven shadows, and huge clouds of smoke rose from those Shadows. It looked as if the World Tree had started burning once more. The other knowledge guardians who had gathered at this resting point, as well as Morris and Nina, had all vanished from his sight.

The gale began to howl. Dark sand and dust swept across the burning World Tree. Taran Ael tumbled off the boulder in a mess, rolling several times before he finally stopped when he slammed into a giant “branch”. It was a huge limb, slightly curved like a spine. He had hit its base, and then, without thinking, he looked up at the sky.

The sky was “caving in”.

In the chaos, Taran Ael saw a scene beyond imagination.

Dim red light pierced the clouds. The dark sky was collapsing downward as if some immense thing were pressing on it. The clouds twisted, and even the light in the clouds bent. It was as if some vast Great Terror was slowly grinding down, about to flatten the whole world. The crushing pressure of that Great Terror made Taran Ael feel as if he could not breathe. Even his thoughts froze. And in that suffocating fear, he saw white floating lights.

Specks of white glimmer spread out from the burning ruins of Atlantis. They slowly gathered in the air into streams of light. The glimmers flowed between the giant branches and the scorched ground, and as if sensing something, they gradually gathered before Taran Ael.

Taran Ael’s eyes widened. He felt a warm power in that stream of light, but for some reason, great panic and unease rose in his heart at the same time. He stared at the glow until it gathered in front of him into a hazy ball of light.

The ball of light had no form, yet it seemed to have a mind. It slowly circled Taran Ael, as if curiously observing something.

Then it suddenly stopped.

Taran Ael heard a sharp, howling sound. The howl seemed ready to drill straight into his skull and bore a hole through his brain.

The voice was young, full of great terror and a kind of mad anger.

“No! You are not elves!”