Saintess Summons Skeletons-Chapter 829 - Gold diggers

Standing on the edge at the end of the tunnel, Bookie pointed at the ledge where he and Crowie had died.

“Hmm, I see the pieces of mithril scattered about, but no traces of a monster around there,” Sofia told the others, easily able to clearly see something that ‘close’ between her magic eye and the helmet’s sight improvement. They had rushed to check the scene after hearing Bookie’s explanation, but it looked like they were too late to catch the culprit.

“Good sign,” Sonia chimed in, ”leaving the mithril, it was likely a simple monster. But this environment… It’s worrying.”

“Too many places for monsters to hide and to open for us to be unnoticed?” Sofia guessed.

“Partly,” Sonia answered, “but it’s not monsters you should be worried about this time, it’s people. Think about how easy it would be for an actual encampment to be dismissed as just another ruin by us. That and the ruins from the dark epoch that are spread around…”

“Oh yeah I see them, the metallic ones with a mess of wires everywhere, right?”

“Precisely… We really cannot afford to go near those. Ideally we would only enter and search through ruins from the lost epoch.”

“And how do we know which ones they are?”

“Generally speaking the lost epoch did not have any one particular architectural tendency, so mostly we are going to look for the ruins that look the most recent and search those. When we find actual items in there, I should be able to tell if they are from the lost epoch or not.”

“And the actual relic we’re looking for,” Sofia started, “can you tell us what it looks like?”

“Well…” Sonia said, “I’m not sure exactly, but one of the main components is a fist-sized rainbow elemental ruby. It’s a gem shining in twelve colors. So when we do find it, there will be no doubt that we have the right item. The complete thing should be about head-sized, but that’s only our best estimate.”

Sofia nodded along, “noted. Then we should probably start. I don’t think jumping down is too good an idea.”

“We could jump directly to one of the islands. The top of this one is pretty open,” Sonia said, pointing to an island adjacent to the one where Bookie had died.

“... Because we usually fly around I forget how far we can all actually jump,” Sofia muttered, “Pareth.”

Pareth seemed quite enthusiastic, while he currently had no armor, he still had an actual weapon and shield in hand. As far as he was concerned, that was enough. Standing on the edge, his knees flexed, and he jumped out with a bang. Crossing a hundred and fifty meters through the sky, Pareth drew a perfect arc, landing squarely in the center of the relatively small top plateau of the island. There were only a few trees, bushes, and a fully collapsed ruin nearby. Taking his maximum size, Pareth swung the Phoenix Ire around, clearing the space in just a few swings. The trees were shattered and blown away, the bushes disappeared, the ankle-high grass was ripped off with lumps of dirt by the strong shockwave. In a few seconds, the top of the island had turned from a verdant garden to a ravaged wasteland. Only the heavy stone blocks of the collapsed ruin had survived.

Looking back at the others, Pareth gave a thumbs up. No monsters. The ‘enemy detection’ method was a bit unconventional but nobody could argue with its efficacy.

“Nothing looks particularly attracted by the commotion,” Sonia noted, observing the creatures around, a group of weird orange butterflies was even hopping quietly from flower to flower on the side of the same island, completely unbothered by the noise and falling dirt landing nearby.

The entire group joined Pareth, Sofia carrying the three skeletons across the gap. Immediately Sofia and Sonia examined the small collapsed ruin while the skeletons stood guard.

“Lost epoch?”

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Sonia crouched down, rubbing some moss off of the stone white blocks, lightly shaking her head, “I call this one the holy realm epoch, they liked to engrave divine runes everywhere, look,” Sonia said, her fingers tracing a geometrical inscription on the corroded stone. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

That does look like the construction of the triangular divine runes…

“Do you know which god this belongs to?”

“The rune changes when the deity dies,” Sonia explained standing up, and looking around for their next jump, “I actually have guesses for a few of them, from the one time I found a partial mural from that epoch, but in the end it’s worthless information, just my archeologic curiosity. The people from back then were apparently a race of twin-headed lizards, by the way.”

“Twin-headed lizards? I wonder if there are still skeletons around…”

“You never know what you can find. From my experience bones are pretty rare, however. As are books and other written records. Mostly it’s stone or metallic things that tend to remain, jewels, money, and magic items.”

“You sound surprisingly passionate about the subject,” Sofia commented idly, scanning all the bushes she could see on the neighboring islands trying to find the hidden beast that had killed Bookie.

“Would I risk my life so willingly if I wasn’t?”

“Fair point. See any potential good ruins?”

“There are so many… But none that look really likely to be what we’re looking for… See these pink bricks there, though?” Sonia said, pointing back at a further section of the wall they had originally come from, quite a bit lower than where they were now.

Sofia scanned the wall, and there was indeed a hint of a few pink bricks hidden behind thick vines some five hundred meters away. “I do, those are?”

“Could be a few things, but this soft pink is usually from the golden age. Also named by myself, no idea what the people from back then were like, but their ruins are consistently loaded with magical jewelry. My snake charm was from one of those.”

“Snakes have existed for at least ninety thousand years…” Bookie said with a shiver.

“They have Dragon ancestry after all,” Sonia pointed out, “Dragons and Fairies are a constant.”

“Fae is exist forever!” Pestle approved.

Sonia continued, “Although they were more or less prominent throughout time, all epochs… Well, maybe it’s not the best time for a history lesson. We go check the ruins?”

“Obviously”, Sofia answered, “Can you knock down the pink wall first so we can peek inside before Pareth jumps?”

“Of course.”

Sofia expected Sonia to knock down the wall with an arrow, but instead the owl woman picked up the stone brick she had just examined, and threw it at said wall. Despite the distance, the brick flew in a perfectly straight line, crashing against the barely-visible pink bricks.

I guess that works…

The hole in the wall was relatively small, and looked pitch black to the others, but Sofia’s dark vision could easily peer into the cliffside ruins.

“Don’t see much, it looks like there are some old ceramic vases? You shattered most of them. There are a lot of fishes swarming below too, attracted to the sound or vibrations I imagine.”

“About what I expected,” Sonia idly said, as Pareth prepared himself for the long jump. The precision needed to land the half-kilometer jump into a small wall was a bit of a level above the last jump, but he perfectly made it once again, knocking down more of the pink bricks as he crashed into the dusty ruin with a loud noise. He had finished shattering all the antiques that had survived Sonia’s brick toss, he quickly looked around before giving the signal to the others, and disappearing from view.

Sofia landed first, Bookie and Crowie under her arms, and Sonia arrived after with Pestle perched inside of one of her multiple quivers.

Pareth was already exploring another room, while Sofia looked around the one they had just arrived in. The shattered ceramics had spilled multiple small piles of golden squares, which Sofia guessed were coins, and she quickly spotted several gem-studded necklaces hanging on tiny silvery hooks built in the walls.

“You weren’t kidding,” Sofia said, pushing away some of the gold coins with her boots, revealing more of them underneath, “it’s already like this in the first room.”

“Not always like that,” Sonia pointed out, “And honestly all of this is worthless if there aren’t any magical items. We can’t quite carry all that useless clutter back up, can we? But this is a good place to search for good things. Also these ruins tend to attract monsters that like shiny things, and the jewels are often cursed. But it’s pretty easy to avoid the bad ones.”

“Cursed mana is usually rather obvious. And I might have a way to bring the gold back up, actually…”

In the short time the two chatted, Bookie, Crowie and Pestle were already covered in dozens of necklaces and random rings.

“Is we not follow Prett?”