The Dragon of Dreams

Chapter 413: A Breathing Mountain Range

Mid Morning - Mid Winter : Elafos Family Estate, Eikasía | Eastern Bahamut

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-With so much insanely high-density mana… Isn’t this the perfect place to study enriched mana?- *Vwoooooom* Looking out over the massive, nearly three-kilometer-wide lake of mana, the constant, unending hum of overpressured mana clashing with my aura filled the room, and a slightly crazed smile spread across my face.

Being well over thirty kilometers underground and encased in what was essentially a massive geode made of one of the strongest materials on the planet, it was the perfect place to conduct experiments that would be cataclysmic on the surface. -Even if I set off a bunch of antimatter in here...- Rather than blowing through the black mythril, the expanding gasses would just force themselves through the pool of mana and into the magma cavern.

-But I can't do anything too crazy just yet...- Quickly stopping myself from getting overzealous, I scanned the room, still finding well over fifty thousand different ancient artifacts I had yet to even glance at. -At the very least, I need to skim through the rest of that...-

The issue was I couldn't understand most of it. With many of the plaques of text grossly predating even my oldest recognizable memories on Delphi, I needed to sit down and essentially decipher an entire language.

But while most people would have taken it as an impossible task, I wasn't actually too worried about it.

Not because I was some expert in linguistics, but rather because I had tens of thousands of other plaques I could use as the steps of a staircase descending back in time. -A lot of these plaques are much more recent.. probably from just before Hera's era...- And while it took a bit of effort, I could somewhat comfortably read them. -Then from that point on, it looks like the plaques age pretty steadily...- With the unknown aspects of the language changing in a similar steady fashion.

In other words, while I couldn't even guess where to start deciphering the oldest plaques, if I deciphered the small unknown sections of the more recent texts and worked my way back one step at a time, by the time I reached the oldest plaques, they wouldn't be completely unfamiliar. "Hooh..." -It'll be a bit time-consuming though...-

But time was something I had a fair bit of at the moment, even if I had to make sure I was able to take it.

After creating a marker for the room in the void, I returned to the surface to check in on Hera and Krystallo.

By then, it hadn't been more than a handful of hours since I left for the main estate with Keras, but in that time, Krystallo had been having a blast.

According to Hera, while Krystallo went into the training a bit arrogant, after she got laid out by a dragon around Mother's age, she had a burst of motivation to properly learn more foundational things like footwork and more efficient leverage when it comes to combat. "Hmhm~, you should've been here to see the look on her face when she got pulled off her feet and thrown to the ground."

Enjoying being able to take my mind off the things I found underground for a moment, a warm, almost fatherly smile quickly spread across my face. "Haha, it's a shame I missed it, but..." Looking out into the massive field where she was getting a lesson from one of the night captains with several other young dragons, simply radiating excitement, my chest warmed. "I'm just glad to see she's enjoying it."

Hera, nodding in agreement, quickly warmed her expression as well before letting out a sigh and leaning into me. *Pat*

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In an instant, it was like all the tension in her body just left, completely relaxing and laying her head on my neck while watching as Krystallo's tail wagged out in the field.

It was oddly.. nice...

"So, what's up with you?" Speaking barely above a whisper, her gaze finally turned up to me. "You seem tense..."

"Haah..." Letting out a sigh, my wings and tail quickly relaxed. "I just found more than I bargained for underground."

"Oh?"

Nodding as she leaned into me a bit more, I pulled a small black mythril sheet out from under my wing and showed it to her. "Below the Acardi facility Keras showed me, I found an old mana well that was buried." Having had some time to reorganize my thoughts by then, this time not blinded by anger, I had started questioning the theories I came up with underground. "I'm thinking it was buried by Bahamut, but the more I think about it, the less sense it makes."

"Hmm..." Trying to read the plaque, her expression darkened. "Is this.. old draconic?"

"I believe so."

"Wow... If it is, this must predate Bahamut..." Grabbing the metal plate from me, she more closely inspected it while speaking somewhat idly. "Are you suspicious because the well is too old to have been buried by Bahamut?"

"No," I was quick to shake my head. "Some of the plaques down there have text from probably only ten thousand years before you were born. It was a well that was most certainly buried while Bahamut was around."

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"I see..." Mumbling, she moved her eyes from me to the plate. "So what makes you suspicious?"

"It's depth." Feeling the gentle caress of the breeze while a fresh, almost foresty scent met my nose, I looked up at the horizon. "You remember how in Bahamut's archive, he documented all the wells he buried, saying how hard they were to actually bury?" As she nodded, I turned to look at her. "Not only is this well not among those he documented, it was buried five times deeper than the deepest he sank."

Sitting at six kilometers down, the deepest well he documented burying was stated as a challenge unlike anything he had ever faced.

-And yet this one is five times deeper than that...- Falling into thought, my expression turned troubled. "It's also disgustingly huge. To the point that it can't be compared to those he documented." Although it didn't quite register when I first got there, the well was an accumulation of mana that even my well under the tree of prayer couldn't possibly compare to. "The surface alone was almost three kilometers across."

"Holy shit..." Falling into thought as well, Hera's gaze fell to the ground. "Something like that would definitely have legends or rumors about it, especially if it only predates me by a dozen millennia..."

-That's true...-

"But I somehow can't think of any..." Finally breaking out of her thoughts, she looked me in the eyes for a moment with a completely steady gaze. "Do you want to run to the library to see if you can find anything? I can watch over Krystallo in the meantime."

Shaking my head, I looked back up at Krystallo. "I'm going to take a few days to try and learn the old languages on the plaques down there, and see if they can give me any insight."

"Hah," Her expression eased in an instant. "You know, if you were anyone else, I'd interpret 'a few days' as a handful of months." Deciding to set her likely still turbulent thoughts aside, she rested her head back on me. "Just save me some mana down there, okay?"

"Haha," Feeling my chest warm up again, I let out a light chuckle before gently curling my tail around hers. "I will, don't worry." Leaning over and pressing my snout into hers as she closed her eyes and raised it, her smile widened, and an almost euphoric peacefulness overtook my mind. -I promise to turn this mana well into an elixir we can both eat like gluttons...-

But that would unfortunately take some time.

After enjoying the morning a bit more with Hera and clearing my head, I returned to the subterranean room through the void and got to reading, taking things slow and one step at a time, backtracking whenever I found an error, and moving forward whenever I was fairly confident what I was reading was right.

However, things progressed much, much faster than I initially expected.

As I forced myself to read everything in the room at face value, regardless of whether I understood it or not, I found that nearly every plaque had one, identical string of words at the end.

'Praise Bahamut'.

Whether the plaques were from his time period or not, they all contained the phrase, an anomaly so egregious that it made me question if I was even reading the more recent texts properly.

However, because of the spacing between some of the letters on older plaques, I forced myself to look at it differently, breaking the name into a set of words, and in turn, a phrase.

Until I got finally got something along the lines of, 'Praise (the) God of the Strong'.

They were all indeed hailing a god, but rather than being the Bahamut I knew, it was something, or rather someone else.

But even as I dug deeper into the languages, it was hard to piece together any sort of image of that being. Almost all of the plaques were prayers, with some detailing things like how the person who made it wished for their daughter to be successful while others were of people begging for solace after losing a loved one.

All I knew was that they were praying to some kind of god that they believed resided in the well, and based on the carvings, they believed it was a dragon. -But the carvings are either too messy or oversimplified to tell what the dragon looks like...-

Based on what I was seeing, the thing they were praying to was more like a mountain range with wings. -Hm...- Popping my head up, I quickly got back to looking around the room. -Where was that broken statue I found...-

Eventually finding what looked like a random small pile of gravel, I walked over and pulled out a rather significant amount of my own mana to isolate myself from the mana in the room and began piecing the statue back together with my aura.

It took quite a lot longer than expected, but after about an hour of trial and error, I found myself sitting next to the tiny statue of a draconic species I had never seen before, that even my memories as Bahamut didn't find even remotely familiar.

Just like the plaques, its base read 'Praise Bahamut', however, unlike the appearance of the Bahamut I knew, the creator of the statue had carved mountains along its spine, rivers and valleys between its scales, and a forest of half-broken trees decorating its wings.

It was very clearly an artistical exaggeration, after all, a dragon that size would be almost a hundred kilometers long, a completely unprecedented and unfathomable size for any planet-surface-bound creature...

But rather than simply moving on after confirming that it wasn't actually Bahamut and going back to deciphering the older plaques, I sat there in silence, staring at the statue while feeling like something was on the tip of my tongue.

Somehow, the more I stared at it, the more the sight of it tickled the back of my mind, as if my brain was searching for something that didn't exist.

It was the faintest familiarity, an almost impossible-to-catch sensation tied to a memory that wasn't logged in my mind.

However, that was before I decided to try searching in a different place.

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