Victory

"2 o'clock."

"Water trident, split."

Aaron fired a two-metre-long trident made completely out of water from a magic circle that had formed from the palm of his hands.

Once the trident had gone 4 metres out, the three prongs at the top suddenly broke off and locked down three different areas. Together with the main body of the trident, four projectiles were now in the air, heading towards the direction Asher had called out.

Bang.

"Kree!"

With a low explosive sound, the projectiles struck gold as all four managed to land on the target. The explosive sound was the result of the excess force of the projectiles penetrating past the target to hit the wall. As a result, both target and projectiles got pinned to the wall.

"Got it." Luther said as he stared in the direction of the explosion.

"Let's find out what that is." Asher said as he walked closer to it.

Luther and Aaron immediately reacted with Luther moving ahead of Asher while Aaron walked right beside him.

"It's already dead." Asher couldn't help but say.

Even then, Luther remained quiet. Asher sighed at this but didn't bother to say anything else.

The guide also followed after the trio to see what had tried to assault them.

"It's dead."

Luther confirmed after he approached the creature and touched it multiple times all over, in a bid to find a heartbeat.

The black creature was lying motionless on the floor with the magic spell having already dissipated a short while ago. Four ping-pong (table tennis) ball-sized holes were on its chest, leaking out a weird purple liquid. Above the corpse, on the wall, were also four holes of the same size with a trail of purple liquid flowing down all the way to the creature's corpse.

"Looks familiar?"

Luther asked Aaron after getting a good look at the creature.

"You've never seen anything like it, and you expect me to have?" Aaron's face twitched.

Meanwhile, Asher kept a calm look as he approached it and placed a hand on its chest.

'It doesn't have a heart.' Asher grimaced.

While it wasn't uncommon, it was weird for one to find a creature without a heart, but one that had no heart and still possessed bodily fluids reminiscent of blood was strange.

'I feel like I should know what this is.'

Asher couldn't help but furrow his brows. However, he had already been trying his best to recall any related detail in the past few minutes but nothing had clicked yet.

'If I could get a pause for a while, it should take me 10 minutes to do so, but at this rate, it might take me 30.' Asher sighed inwardly.

If he was much stronger than he was now, it would be easier for him to browse through the memories in his soul and find what he needed.

"What do we do about it?" Aaron asked.

Luther also turned his attention towards Asher.

While they had the option of moving on and leaving the creature's corpse be, having such a strange creature living within the mine controlled by the family gave them the feeling like there was a sword of Damocles[1] close by; an unprecedented danger. They both felt the need to send the corpse back up and report this finding to the duke.

"You could take it back up now or wait till we are done here. However, going by the second option, there's a chance that it might not remain here when we are prepared to leave." Asher replied.

Luther and Aaron glanced at each other before coming to a decision.

Aaron walked closer to the corpse and took a talisman from his pocket before plastering it on the corpse.

Zhiing.

A dull yellow barrier appeared over the corpse, encasing it within.

"We will come back for it." Luther answered.

After seeing the danger within the mine, Luther and Aaron wanted to retreat with Asher to prevent anything untoward from happening to him. But without Asher's permission, they could not do such. In that case, they could only try their best to protect. However, having one of them return to the surface while the other was left behind was not advantageous to their decision, so they could only leave the corpse behind and stay together for the moment. Using a barrier talisman to keep it from going missing was the best they could come up with.

"Let's go."

The group now continued on their journey, but this time round, they proceeded more cautiously. At the same time, they began to question Asher's motives in their heads. All Asher had told the guide and Randel was that he wanted to inspect the mine whereas, although he told a similar thing to Aaron and Luther, he mentioned that his inspection was more on bizarre occurrences. As for the reason why he was doing so, they knew nothing about it.

To be honest, Asher didn't know what exactly he was looking for either. His grandfather's last words were to not sell the mine no matter the circumstance of the family. But this would mean that there had to be something important within the mine that led to the old man making such a drastic decision.

It should be known that the royals had wanted the mine even during the time Leuven Arnhaunt was alive. Leuven wasn't a naive or dumb leader and this could be seen in how he was able to rise through the ranks till he became known as a 'War God', developed Red Maple province from a border province to a developed area, after which Darius took over, and was able to lead the Arnhaunt family into great heights. It would be a lie to say that such a man could not read the political situation at the time and realize that the royals wanted the Vermont mine. If he knew all of this and still made the decision that the future generations were to not relinquish possession of it, then there had to be something exceedingly special about the mine that surpassed the fear of possible extermination by the royals. Without Leuven mentioning what it was, Asher decided to find out about it. Even though Darius had already investigated the mine personally, Asher believed that he could do a better job at it.

Without any creature stalking them, the group easily went past the 50 metres mark and officially entered the true unexplored region. Just as they did so, they felt the environment change. For the Guardian mages in the group, they noticed that the temperature and ambience had changed. Apart from that, Luther and Aaron -the group's elites- had also detected an odd sensation on their bodies, reminiscent of a type of pressure. Although this force was minute, they had still noted it as it wasn't present before. For Asher, he sensed more than the change in ambience and bizarre pressure. There was also a change in mana concentration levels in the atmosphere.

It should be recalled that mana was ever-existing in the world, and was present in all places in various concentrations. Magic crystal mines formed in auspicious places that had a high concentration of mana and had fulfilled a few conditions. The mana would then condense to form magic crystals and as the magic crystal vein gets bigger, the mana in the air within the area would decrease till the vein matured. However, when one was extremely close to the vein, especially a matured one, they would notice that the concentration of mana in the air was high. That is, within 30-100 metres of the vein, the mana concentration would be much higher than farther out. This was because raw magic crystals gave off mana and this coalesced around the crystals to form a special invisible fog of mana that acted as a protective layer to prevent more mana from leaking out. Within a mine, this layer of 'fog' is much larger hence the reason why it occupies a region of 30-100 metres around the magic crystal vein, depending on the size of the vein.

When the group had entered the mine, mana concentration was at least double that of the outside. This was because tunnel number 5 contained Ope crystals, which happened to be one of the best available magic crystals known, meaning it possessed a higher concentration of mana than the rest and so had a much thicker fog, albeit still invisible. Nonetheless, when they entered the true unexplored region, Asher noticed that this concentration had subtly increased once more. This could only mean that within this unexplored region, there was some type of magic crystals more valuable than Ope crystals that had caused the concentration of mana levels to increase, albeit subtly. The question though, was how did the predecessors not know of this, especially Darius, Asher's father.