Fat Worm

Flying around the room spacious, Gerald noticed writing above the doors.

"Oh? Phoenix Research Chambers?" He read the bigger words and scratched his head, "What do they mean by 'Research Chambers'? Did they dissect Phoenixes inside?"

Then, looking closer, and found some more golden words written on the door itself: "From death trough flames, to life again, the heavens will make, an eternal man!"

"The heck? Is it some sort of poem?"

Rumble!

Just as he finished saying that though, the ground shook and the doors that didn't move for millennia, slowly opened by themselves.

"Fuck! It was a key to open the door!"

Then, as you would expect from a sealed room, stale air came out and made Gerald's face turn pale.

"Ugh, I can't breathe…" He waved his hand and a gush of wind entered the room, expelling the bad air as it mixed it with the one outside.

Inside the room was quite roomy, with only a few raised stone tables and what appeared to be a sarcophagus at a first glance.

"It's empty?"

The place seemed to have been cleared out before it was abandoned so not much remained. There were a few stone shelves with fist-sized half-circular holes, seemingly designed to hold something round. They were empty, though.

"Or maybe not! What is this?" Gerald found a few spherical white balls on one of the shelves. They were about the size of an ostrich egg and perfectly round and sparkled in the light like a diamond.

Gerald tried knocking on it, but it felt like a common piece of rock when he did so. Trying to pour Mana inside, or extract it out also didn't seem to have any significant effect.

He tried to chip a piece off and hit it with the handle of his sword, but similarly to the stone that made the room, it didn't seem possible to damage it. Even throwing it on the ground and shooting it with a cannon didn't do a thing.

"Eh… I really don't know what to do with these 'eggs'…"

Unable to figure out what they were or how to use them, Gerald simply stored them in his pouch, determined to study them later. Then his attention was attracted by the sarcophagus-looking thing in the middle of the room. The stone slab on top had two palm imprints on the surface and they were similarly covered with golden lines.

It was clearly made for a purpose, so Gerald placed his hands inside. As soon as he did so, he felt some sort of magic mechanism deeper inside the stone. This feeling came straight to his mind and was extremely unusual to him.

It was the first time something like this happened, but he got used to it quickly. Poking around what he felt, he quickly noticed that the mechanism was extremely complex, so much so that he didn't even know where to start looking.

But there was one more thing. The mechanism seemed to be in a bad shape. It appeared weak and deteriorated, fragile, almost like millennia-old wood, ready to turn to dust at the slightest touch.

He tried sending some of his Mana inside, and he felt it react with the thing inside, but then he got blocked from probing any further as if he crashed into a wall.

But then, just pushing slightly harder, the wall crumbled and the mechanism broke, producing a clicking sound from inside the stone.

The slab he was holding split in half and moved to the side, lifting up another piece of stone with a few things on it.

He saw three beautiful golden necklaces with tiny blue lines running through them. They were somehow similar to the golden lines running across the stone outside.

"Wha- Just three measly pieces of jewelry?! What a scam!"

Gerald picked up the necklaces, only for two of them to crack apart from being moved, and the last one lost the gem that was inside. It simply fell out and turned to dust.

"The heck?" He looked at the broken pieces of gold in his hands with disbelief. A handful of scrap gold and a broken necklace? This is bullshit!'

But, no matter how much he cursed, the treasure stayed broken.

"Ah, whatever! At least I can trade it for a few gold coins…" Feeling heartbroken, Gerald stored the loot in his pouch.

Then, just before going away, he noticed tiny words written on the stone surface. Moving his face close to the stone, he pulled the floating light closer so he could read.

"My greatest treasure and my life's work, a Phoenix Necklace! Created as a single-use life-preserving magic treasure, it is made from a mithril-gold alloy, forged in the heart of a volcano…"

Gerald read the entire story of the creation of this artifact in the olden days and its use. He also got to know a bit about the history of this place. "So this is a volcano? That would explain why the Phoenix Temple is buried underneath layers of rock."

"But then again…" He took out the necklace that was still whole, "It's currently broken… Where the hell am I going to get the core of a Phoenix, or whatever it needs, to fix it?"

A Phoenix was a mythical beast made of fire, allegedly, and if even the king of Myrtana could only get a few drops of its blood each year, what were the chances of him getting his hands on a Phoenix Core? Optimistically? Currently around 0%.

"Yeah, well… Fuck!" He stored the necklace away and angrily left the room after confirming there was nothing left inside.

The second closed door also didn't move, but this one had the writing on it damaged beyond recognition as if someone clawed at it to remove it. Without any idea of how to open it, Gerald went to the third door from where the heat was coming from.

He sat down and meditated for a few minutes after drinking a potion to recover his Mana to the peak. Then he cast his Stone Body and went inside.

The heat slowly increased as he descended the stairs. The rock around him started to have a brighter red tint, but it wasn't because of the rock's pigment. It was the scorching heat that made his skin and throat turn dry and burned his lungs as he breathed in. Only the rudimentary protection magic kept his flesh from burning up.

Then suddenly his advancement was stopped by an icy wind that rushed across his face. A field of dark-red thorny flowers bloomed in the cavern, sucking away all the heat in their surroundings and creating a weirdly cold environment.

"Oh, my god! Ice Phoenix Magma Flowers?! No way!" Gerald exclaimed after getting a closer look.

These were considered extremely unique and rare ingredients for potions of a Divine Rank! If a 'mortal' consumed them they would first be frozen to death, before blowing up in a spectacular fiery explosion. A single one could level a small town, and there were hundreds of them here.

"What is going on?"

As he was in the middle of his thoughts, he heard a rustle from a corner of the room. Turning around he saw a mountain-like mass of flesh, warming itself on a red-hot rocky surface.

The fleshy mountain had an appearance of a fat worm, with bodily juices spilling out of it. Cracked pieces of chitin exoskeleton laid on the ground everywhere and fiery-red veins pulsated under the surface of its skin.

Gerald used his Magic Eyes and saw a surging Mana flowing through the being. Its insides looked like those of a completely different being, twitching and squirming around, getting changed, and twisted by magic.

"There should be a Queen in this nest, right? Did this worm eat the Minecrawler Queen?" Gerald scratched his head.

But then suddenly his eyes enlarged and he looked at the massive armor plates on the ground.

"Holy shit! This is the Minecrawler Queen! She is going through some sort of metamorphosis, and that's her fleshy cocoon!"

Gerald watched in horror as the clues connected in his head. The giant worm was at least twice the size of the Minecrawler King, meaning that she was probably much, much stronger than him!

"No wonder there were no eggs anywhere! She was probably in this state for months already, maybe even years! If she finishes this metamorphosis, she's going to be a huge problem!"

Gerald looked around to see if there was anything that he could use to kill it, but everything around here was reinforced with magic, and using Earth spells was impossible.

Similarly using Water was out of the question. The air here was almost too hot/cold to breathe, without any moisture in it whatsoever.

Woosh!

After gathering his wits, Gerald sent a massive Wind Spear at the worm, but it only made a small hole in the disgustingly fat fleshy cocoon.

"It's not effective at all… Let's try fire then…"

Fwoosh!

Flaming tongues licked the cocoon and the surface started to sizzle slightly, but then a thick mucus gushed through the skin and covered the worm, guarding it against the flames completely. Gerald felt his stomach turning and his face changed to a tinge of green at the disgusting sight.

"Ugh, of course, it's resistant to flames… It's living in a freaking volcano!"

Not knowing what to do, he turned his attention to Magma Flowers. According to the Blood Codex, the plant needed extreme heat to grow and stored a concentrated 'Fire Essence' inside its body, whatever that meant.

All that Gerald saw inside it was a massive amount of Mana of a Fire Element, although it was weirdly inactive.

"I don't think I want to know what would happen if I disturbed it by mistake… Fire doesn't help me in this situation anyway."

The being inside the cocoon seemed to have detected his presence and his intent to harm it and it started to be much more active.

"Well, shit! Now I got this squirming worm on my ass as well…"

He opened his pouch and looked at what he had inside. "Broodmother's poison? Nope, it's too little for a beast of this size… Swords? If I can even cut through the first layer of that shit without throwing up it would already be a miracle. Mace? No. Hmm, I don't actually have that many things I could use to kill it… God damn it!"