Chapter 782

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation  Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

Everyone else was talking about wizards, mysterious realms, magic and ghosts. No one noticed what Lily was doing: the others knew that it was normal for the husky maiden to run around like a curious bunny. No one would blink an eye even if she suddenly decided to dig a hole and bury herself in it. Lily was now standing beside the stage, wide-eyed as she listened to the sounds of the other dimension. She did so until the sound slowly became distorted, as though there was radio interference. This caused her to snap out from her stupor.

Lily’s ears flickered as she tried to listen to the voices again. But it vanished and the faint shadows before her eyes were fading like water ripples. She lifted her Frostfire Claws in the air trying to catch them, but it turned out they were mere phantoms.

Hao Ren noticed her. He asked from afar, “Lily, what are you doing?”

“I just heard someone talking!” Lily immediately darted towards Hao Ren and told them what she had heard and seen.

Nangong Sanba’s brows pulled together. “Message from the ghosts?”

“Didn’t you say the spirits here are very weak, and they have jumbled as much that they couldn’t be separated from each other?” Hao Ren slid Nangong Sanba a glance. “What’s the matter?”

Nangong Sanba looked at Lily curiously and sprinkled some powder into the air. “The spirits here is indeed very weak; you can see it for yourself—”

Before his voice trailed off, the powder that he had just sprinkled was suspended in the air by magic and spreading like a mist around them in a faint fluorescent glow. Under the illumination of the glowing powder, some faint shadows gradually emerged, but disappeared after a few seconds.

“Those are the spirits that are entrenched in the town,” Nangong Sanba said, arching the corner of his mouth. “As you can see, there are so vague.”

“I don’t know you,” Lily’s ears shook a little and said, “but cold see them pretty clearly.”

Hao Ren looked at the husky maiden in surprise, thinking what a special ability she got there! She could even see faint ghosts that the demon hunters could not. Nangong Wuyue was no less awed. She asked Vivian, “Does werewolf has wraith-perceiving ability?”

“No, they don’t,” Vivian replied. Her expression looked strange as if she was in some kind of deep thought. “But it’s true that the dogs ward off evil spirits. Doesn’t the Chinese says pets have supernatural vision; they could see spirits?”

Everyone: “…..”

Vivian was dead serious when she said that. Lily did not know how to refute it. Next to her, Turcan had wanted say “that’s not scientific” but he bit back. His sudden self-awareness told him that as a fantasy creature, he was neither more scientific.

Hao Ren motioned with his hands to brush this conversation aside as he was looking thoughtfully at the empty little square. “It seems ghosts might be in town. I have also heard some voices when I first got here but not as clearly as Lily did. So why not you keep an eye on the spirits, Lily? Tell me if you hear or see anything. Maybe those spirits could tell us something about the town.”

“You got it!” Lily replied, holding her head high. “Just now I heard they were talking something about the seigneur. This town should have been a land of some seigneur. Is this information useful?”

“Land of the seigneur?” Vivian frowned. “It doesn’t reveal much. In that era, almost all the land belonged to the seigneurs.”

Lily snorted regretfully and turned to walk in front of them. Her eyes was emanating a golden glow as she kept seeing the invisible shadows roaming and disappeared again in the lost town. In the visions of other people, the path in the town was shrouded in a layer of grey mist, but Lily could see translucent shadows were flashing across her eyes from occasionally.

It was a pity that most of the shadows are very, very thin. They were not even wraith, just an echo of dying souls reverberating in the air, but the real souls had already left.

Hao Ren took out the MDT, which was showing some readings of the spirits. This gadget was not specifically used to detect the wraiths; he could not rely on its radar alone to communicate with the ghosts, so he tucked away the MDT.

They came before an abandoned house. Nangong Sanba checked the street sign in front of the house. “Domir… Was there such a town in history?”

“No,” Turcan replied. “We have checked; neither the name ‘Domir’ nor record of any human towns in this area exist. It’s not sure whether it was because of magic or simply the length of time, this place has been completely wiped off from history.”

Vivian thought for a while and said, “Probably it was time. Only people like Odin and Zeus were capable of casting spell that could tamper with history on a large scale in Mythology Period. I don’t think a human wizard had such ability. Europe was in turbulence hundreds of years ago. It wasn’t unusual for remote, small town like this being buried in history. Moreover, it has completely disappeared from the map, there’s no way to investigate.”

Nangong Wuyue was crawling at the back of the team. She felt something strange, rolled her tail up and checked what it was. “Do you guys notice there’s ashes everywhere in this town?”

“Ashes?” Hao Ren looked down at his feet and found himself stepping on a layer of greyish black powder. He did not really notice it before this. “This is…”

“Like the ashes of burned wood.” Nangong Wuyue picked up a little ashes and squeezed it with her fingers. “It’s everywhere, right from the entrance of the town until here.”

Hao Ren looked around thoughtfully. He did not see obvious signs of fire. So where did the ashes come from?

There was no record of Domir in history. No one could tell when and how it disappeared, and how it looked like before the destruction. Judging from the enclosed condition and the entrenched spirits here, the place should be intact until it was pulled into the dimension, and the ashes only appeared after the mysterious realm was locked away, Hao Ren so thought.

Unless the town had a custom of scattering ashes. Hao Ren pondered for a while and dismissed this theory, which was less probable.

Lily held her Flamejoy that doubled as a torch in front of the pack. She focused her vision and saw more spirits appearing in the air. There were so many of them that it looked so abnormal. It was so crowded together that they were overlapping, almost walked into and on top of each other. The little town could never accommodate such a large population. Lily became suspicious. She observed carefully, and finally discovered the secret: these ghosts were shadows of each other.”

She could not see them clearly but judging from the outlines and shapes, some of the wandering ghosts were actually one. They were generally walking along the same path and direction, the difference was just the timing. A group of seemingly different shadows would always walk into the same door, and that was a giveaway that they were actually one.

She told her puzzling findings to Nangong Sanba who then told the others. Suddenly, a thought across Vivian’s mind. “Perhaps these spirits are not of human at all.”

Hao Ren did not get it. “You mean…”

“Perhaps it is the memory of this town, or perhaps the resonance of a more powerful soul. In short, they are not ghosts, but something that is projected by another force, so that explains the repetition and their same trajectory and action,” Vivian said as she surrounded herself with a faint blood mist. “I was already suspicious just now. If all the residents of the town had become ghosts, there should be a wraith-energy field here. But there’s none except for a little change in temperature and the wandering spirits.”

Hao Ren was a little ignorant in this field. He asked Kasandra who later told him that when a large number of ghosts (or similar wraiths) gathered they would form an energy field. The more their number, the stronger the energy field. When the number of ghosts exceeded a hundred it was enough for humans to perceive the energy field. This energy field could cause hallucinations and even death.

At least wraiths of human were capable of doing this.

The MDT agreed with Kassandra. But its explanation was simpler: the superposition of electromagnetic field.

Hao Ren gave it a little more imagination. But that only gave him goose bumps.

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation  Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

Hao Ren peeked out from the window and found that the SUV was driving across a wasteland. The road was rugged. Even with the SUV’s superb suspension, the ride was still quite bumpy. Except for more desolation, the surroundings did not change much.

Hessiana asked Turcan drove the vehicle up to a higher ground and let everyone get off. She said this was the destination.

“Nothing unusual here,” Hao Ren said as he looked around the barren terrain, broken stones and patches of snow remaining in the cracks in the rock. The Arctic wind blew all day long. There were no signs of life here except a handful of low-lying, tenacious plants persevered in the cracks on the leeward sides of the boulders.

Hessiana looked up at the sky. “Wait,” she said.

The sun was slowly setting. As it set closer to the horizon, two huge shadows gradually extended from behind them. Hao Ren turned his head and found that two huge boulders sitting close together on a small mound not far away were casting the shadows that looked like a tuning fork. Looks like the gap between the two shadows was pointing towards the direction of the river.

“We found the way of accessing the ‘mysterious realm’ in another manuscript,” Kassandra explained. “Every month, there are seven-day window when you can enter the mysterious realm. During this period, the sun will shine on the two boulders on the riverbank and cast a shadow that acts as a pointer. The position of the ‘gate’ is always changing relative to the position of the sun. When the path appears, you still need a bell made by the wizard to disturb the water surface in order to open the ‘gate’. Of course, Master has already got the bell.”

“Wizards like to do these weird and incomprehensible things. Back then, they were competing with each other to hide their own hermitage in the most complicated way. Their method became weirder by the day. Sometimes, even the wizards found themselves having to spend hours figuring their way back,” said Vivian. “They did this to evade the pursuit of the demon hunters, but soon they turned it into a sport in disguise, where wizards secretly competing with each other to create the best and most creative secret realm. I knew a guy got himself killed by the demon hunters on the way home because he couldn’t find the door back home.”

Nangong Wuyue looked at Vivian sideways. “How did you get to know so many people?”

Lily rolled her eyes. “You might as well ask her why the people she knew all ended up dying…”

At this time, the sun has set to the position where the shadow of the boulders had reached the river. Hessiana took the lead. “Let’s go, the path has appeared.”

They follow path to the riverbank, but Hessiana kept going. The strange thing happened, she stepped her foot on the water and walked on the surface right to the middle of the river.

The weather was cold but not cold enough to freeze the river surface. There was thin layer of ice formed on the river edge but it was not known whether this was because of the weather or the influence of supernatural forces.

Turcan and Kassandra followed from behind Hessiana. By now, Lily figured that it might be magical environment of the mysterious realm, so she took up her courage and ran to keep up with them.

But she ran into the water.

Lily got the shock of her life and jumped out of the water frantically. She was soaked from the knee down. Hessiana glanced over her shoulder, asking curiously, “What are you doing?”

Lily staggered up the riverbank, embarrassed. “Isn’t the river surface walkable? Why I couldn’t do that?”

“Who told you that you?” Hessiana threw an inexplicable look. “We have magic helping us to walk on the water.”

Everyone: “…..”

Feeling embarrassed, Lily banged her head against Hao Ren’s arm. “It’s my fault, I was over imaginative. It’s my fault, I was over imaginative…”

“Guys, please wait on the riverbank.” Hessiana motioned with her hand and yanked out a quaint copper bell. When she had found the exact position, she gently rang the brass bell.

A thunderous sound came out of the bell!

That caught everyone by surprise. As the bell rang, a shockwave burst under Hessiana’s feet and ripples on the river spread. The ripples reached the water edge, onto the mud and then up the rocks on the riverbanks. The surroundings was rippling like water, pulsating in tandem with the rings of the bell!

Then the weird thing happened. Buildings and trees that did not exist before began to emerge on the wasteland. Swaying shadows that looked like houses rose up on the riverbanks while ghost-like figures emerged between these wavy shadows. Hao Ren began to hear voices engaging in trivial conversations in some ancient European language. Hao Ren instinctively switched on his translation plug-in. A few fragmented conversation drifted into his ears, it was about some seigneur.

Suddenly, the illusions disappeared, and the vision before Hao Ren’s eyes normalised.

Everyone looked around and found himself still standing by the river, at the same spot before the vision. Something not there before had now existed. Houses, streets, wooden towers; it was a small town built on the riverbank.

Hao Ren looked at the houses, they were very ancient, most of them were constructed of wood and stone, and wooden trestles that seemed like docks of fish boats extending out from the houses into the river. Most of the roads between houses were dirt roads, but there were some slated or pebbled roads. Black oil lamps were hanging from the lampposts on both sides of the roads.

The town seemed as old as hundreds of years—or even longer. It was as if a medieval town that came straight out of a movie.

Lily looked up at the sky and found the sky had changed. A thick layer of smoke of unknown thickness was now shrouding the town. The smoke seemed to have come from a fire that had been burning for days. The dim surroundings made the quiet structure look even spookier.

“Is this the mysterious realm?” Hao Ren appeared a little surprised. “I thought… I thought it was only a castle or something.”

Hessiana and her team returned to the shore. They laughed at Hao Ren’s naivety. “A witch’s lair doesn’t mean it has got to be small.”

“But this is just too big,” Hao Ren said, pouting his mouth at the surroundings. “This is simply out of scale with a hermit’s home.”

“I don’t know what happened back then. But it seems that the wizard had dragged the whole town into his enchantment,” Hessiana said, nodding. “We hadn’t had time to explore the town in the past. This is only my second time here. As Kassandra said, there is only a seven-day window. The last time I came, the window was closing; I managed to linger for a half an hour before it kicked me out. So be careful, my experience may not be of help.”

Nangong Sanba quietly took out his magic props from his toolbox. He placed Letta rune cards on the houses, poured some pungent-smelled magic oil on the ground and ignited them. Immediately, the magic oil burned. Despite the wind, the flame was steady. Under the illumination of the flame, some small shadows began to retreat.

Hessiana’s brows knit together and coughed when she smelled the burning magic oil. “What’s that?”

“It stabilises the spiritual dimension.” Nangong Sanba looked serious; his eyes glowed in white in the dark, as if his pupils had disappeared had disappeared from his eyes. “I see many spirits. I am afraid our presence has disturbed them.”

Lily immediately drew out her Frostfire Claws. “I’m not afraid of ghosts.”

Nangong Wuyue also raised her hand. “Me too. Elemental creature has no feeling towards the spirit.”

Hao Ren looked at the two in surprise, wondering when chicken duo had suddenly become so darling.

Nangong Sanba shook his head and said, “The spirits may not be a threat in themselves, and they keep the place stable. If they get out of control, the dimension might crumble. So I need to stabilise it.”

“It’s your call.” Hao Ren nodded and rubbed his arms instinctively. “After hearing what you said, I start to get goose bumps.”

Hessiana gave him a sideways glance. “People like you are still afraid of ghost?”

“Not that I’m scared. But imagine that there are hundreds of pairs of invisible eyes staring at you in the dark…”

“Stop it, Hao Ren!” Hessiana snapped. She started to rub her arms too. “I’ve got goose bumps.”