Kallinger was alone in the room.
The elf mage didn't tell you "you can't go there", probably he knew that it was useless to tell him, and the more he said he wouldn't let him go, the more he wanted to go.
Kallinger, of course, would not sit still. He sat in the house for a while, drank some water, took off his cloak, and walked towards the door in a more relaxed state.
He didn't push the door directly to go out, but first found a small iron box from his pocket, and applied the ointment inside to his exposed skin.
This ointment is a disruptor against the construct. Apply it to a living creature, covering only most of the exposed skin, and when it is in effect, the construct will turn a blind eye to the living creature.
In this way, all the golems in the tower will not be able to find Kalinger. As long as he was careful and avoided the mage himself.
In fact, it's okay to avoid it. Anyway, the sorcerer could only write letters to swear, and he didn't even have the courage to speak loudly in person.
Kalinger dodges out the door and up the spiral staircase. He wanted to sit on the floating disc, but the floating disc wouldn't listen to him.
Instead of going down, he first explored a few floors up. The area above was also very empty, basically a storeroom where sundries were piled up, so he left after simply looking at it.
He went all the way down the stairs, staying on the sixth, seventh and eighth floors for a while.
There are two relatively large rooms on the sixth floor, which contain various tool tables, various miscellaneous parts, and unused golems, as well as half-disassembled and repaired golems. The seventh and eighth floors are large libraries, with rows of bookshelves everywhere, floating some small floating dishes that can be called at any time, and there are some furniture such as tables, chairs and sofas. This layer looks the most human, at least not so cold.
Kalinger tried to find some useful information on these two layers, but after searching for a while, he decided to give up. There are too many books, and many of them are arcane texts that he can't understand.
He went down to the ninth floor again. The room on this floor also looks like a research room, with a lot of bottles and jars. There was blood on the floor of one room. There are several stone platforms in the largest room on this floor, on which lie some wolf-like creatures, their limbs are fixed by iron chains, their chests are opened, and they are obviously dead.
There are also two dead monsters in cages in the corner of the room. The cage is made of metal, and spell runes are carved into the bars.
The details of the two monsters are different, but the general style is the same: both have distorted limbs, red eyes, part of the hair is missing, and the other part is of a different color, teeth and claws grow abnormally, and exposed bone spurs protrude from the back and anti-joints.
It is a deeply infected body from another world, or it should be called a transformed body. Or to put it more simply, they have completely turned into creatures of the abyss.
It appears that this room is an autopsy room. It's really hard for a mage to have to catch this kind of thing back. I don't know if the mage's experiment is going well or not, and whether he has made valuable progress.
It's a bit strange to say... Under normal circumstances, mages would definitely lock the laboratory, but Kalinger didn't pick a single lock, and he swaggered into every room. The reason why he can walk freely is because—these rooms have no doors at all.
Except for the fifth floor, which seemed to be the living area, most of the rooms had no doors, just openings in the stone walls.
As a mage's tower, this place is too crude, and the owner of the tower obviously doesn't care about the living environment, and everything seems to be perfunctory.
Starting from the tenth floor, the corridors and rooms became very empty and simple again, without lighting, without furniture, without any decoration suitable for living or research, and it was a completely idle space.
When he reached the thirteenth floor, Kalinger couldn't go any further. From here, the spiral staircase broke off. Judging from the fracture marks, it should have collapsed many years ago and has not been repaired.
In the process of exploring all the way, Kalinger saw many golems, but did not meet the mage himself. This shows that the mage probably went to a deeper place. The mage can manipulate the floating disc, and can also use floating spells, so there is no need to walk up the stairs.
Kalinger stood on the platform of the thirteenth floor and looked down. The bottom was dark and bottomless. The depth of the Falling Moon Tower has obviously exceeded the height of the mountain.
===========================
Mage Rime walks down the sloped ramp.
The slopes are naturally exposed soil and vegetation, which looks like a part of a normal hill, but it is not.
There was nothing here but the ramp, no trees, no distant views, no sky, no light. In other directions other than the ramp, there is a dark and empty void.
Rime has no light source in his hand. Here, he can walk without lighting.
The angle of the ramp becomes more and more gradual, and finally, the rime walks onto the flat ground. The soil and vegetation disappeared, and from here on, it was a smooth and flat gray stone field.
With the ups and downs of his steps, the edge of the robe fluttered slightly, occasionally exposing his feet without shoes and socks. Where the pale soles walked, a dark footprint was faintly left, which seemed to be caused by water vapor, and also seemed to be wet blood.
The traces were only exposed to the air for a moment, and then slowly disappeared.
Finally, he came to a crystalline wall perpendicular to the ground.
The overall crystal is dim off-white, the shallow layer near the surface is more transparent, and the inside is extremely turbid, like a pool of sewage frozen into a huge ice body.
Rime sticks his left hand to the crystal surface. Gradually, the inside of the crystal became darker and darker, as if something was churning, getting closer and closer to the surface.
But no matter how much the thing struggled, it was trapped just below the surface, unable to reach the outside.
The entire space was extremely silent, but the rime could hear a sharp and uncomfortable roar. He frowned, bent down slightly, and resisted the tinnitus for a few seconds.
After a while, he raised his head and looked high up in the crystal wall.
The end of the rock wall protrudes into the darkness, leading to another space. In the direction where the rime was looking, a silver pulse of light slowly poured into the crystal, sinking down until it sank to the same height as the ground.
Through the thick and turbid crystal, the rime cannot see the scene inside it at this moment, nor can it see the specific shape of the light vein.
But, in fact, he didn't need to look, he already knew what it was.
The darkness inside the crystal surged again, the breath gradually stabilized, and turned towards the silver object.
Rime sighed deeply, supported the crystal wall with both hands, and pressed his forehead against it. He leaned on the huge and dirty iceberg, with his eyes closed, and his hands wandered and searched on the crystal surface.
His fingertips drew several paths, and vibrations came from inside the crystal in response to him.
Wu Ri opened his eyes suddenly: "There is another one under the mountain? How could it be..."
He stood up immediately and backed away, back to the ramp he had come from. He tried his best to walk faster, but his footsteps were wobbly, as if he would fall at any moment.
Back at the top of the ramp, the dirt floor turns into hand-carved stone steps. The surrounding darkness gradually faded away, revealing the wall next to the stairs.
Looking down from here, there are only endless spiral stairs below, and there are no dirt ramps and crystalline rock walls.
Rime stood on the broken stone platform, touched the stone wall with one hand, and drew a pattern in the air with the other to summon the floating disc on standby.
The floating disc quickly appeared from a low place and took him up steadily.
When it reached about fifteen or six floors, the floating disc stopped.
Wu Ri looked at the wall with a look of embarrassment.
"Mr. Hunter, may I ask... what are you doing?"
There was a figure hanging on the wall in front of him. Of course the bounty hunter Kallinger.
Previously, Kalinger installed a fixed mechanism on the remaining ladder on the thirteenth floor, connected it with a rope, tied himself up, put on the nail hook tool for climbing, and tried to descend a little bit deeper into the tower.
Kalinger turned his head, showing a sad expression: "I can't sleep."
Wu Ri said: "I have tranquilizers."
Kalinger said: "That's not necessary. We bounty hunters are all like this. I often suffer from insomnia and nightmares. I'm used to it. If you do more exercise before going to bed, you can sleep more peacefully."
After saying this lie that neither of them believed, Kalinger continued to hang on the wall, looking back at Rime, whose lips moved, opened, and closed again...
Kalinger read the movement of his lips, which was obviously a curse word swallowed hard.
Rime manipulates the floating disc to slowly approach the wall. "Come on," he said with a tired face, "I beg you, don't bother."
Kalinger jumped onto the floating disc: "Okay, I understand, I admit defeat. Even if I descend smoothly, I'm afraid I won't be able to see what's under the tower."
Wu Ri sighed: "It's good that you know."
"I just saw it too. Because I found that although you are obviously very upset, you are not in a hurry. You know that I can't go down at all, and I can't see any secrets when I go down. The things below are shielded by magic or something Are you protecting me?"
Rime just continued to sigh and shake his head without answering.
The floating disc rises slowly. Kalinger tilted his head to observe the rime, the elf's complexion was very bad, it seemed not only because of anger, but also because of extreme fatigue. He looked rather weak.
So Kalinger stopped teasing him. Kalinger also understands that this rime is obviously very stubborn, not the type who is willing to cooperate without talking too much.
It doesn't matter, bounty hunters have always been good at acting alone, and the assistance of others has never been important.
The floating disc returned to the fifth floor, and Kalinge returned to the room obediently, watching the elf leave with a smile on his face.
=============================
The night passed smoothly. Early the next morning, Kalinger woke up and saw no rime, only two spherical quadruped golems waiting for him.
This time, the golems neither delivered curse messages nor played curse messages, they just quietly sent Kalinger out of the gate.
From the inside of the Falling Moon Tower, the gate is an ordinary double-opening arch. Once Kalinger walked out of the door and turned around, there was only a flat rock wall behind him. Even if he stepped forward to touch the rock wall and inspected it carefully, he could not find any trace of a door.
"You didn't even send me off yourself. Are you so angry?" Kalinger shrugged disappointedly.
When going down the mountain, Kalinger was still ready to fight, always paying attention to the movement around him. Even though the sky is bright now, it is still very dark in the mountains and forests that cover the sky and the sun.
This time Kalinger encountered no monsters. When he reached the halfway up the mountain, he saw those dense warning objects again, but he never heard a single strange cry.
Kalinger deliberately groped in the forest for a while. By the time he got back to the foot of the mountain, the sun had already risen high.
He left the mountain road and just walked to the field ridge when he found a group of people blocked in front of him, headed by the resident bard and the shopkeeper. These people squeezed together, and no one dared to get closer to the direction of the mountain road.
Seeing Kalinger's figure, the female shopkeeper yelled in surprise. The cry was like a password, and the black crowd suddenly burst into cheers, rushing towards Kalinger.
Kalinger was so frightened that he took a few steps back, but was finally surrounded by the crowd.
The poet rushed forward excitedly and tried to embrace, but Kalinger moved away sensitively. So the poet held his hand firmly instead: "You came back alive? I thought you would die in the mountains!"
—Do you want me to live or do you want me to die? Kalinger returned a stiff smile.
The female shopkeeper looked at Kalinger and asked: "Are you injured? Where is the injury? There is a doctor in our village! She may not have woken up yet, so I'll send someone to call her!"
—I'm heartbroken. Yesterday an elf said he would take me down the mountain, but in the end he didn't come.
An old man who didn't show up yesterday patted Kallinger's arm: "It's good that you come back, don't be discouraged if you can't kill the demon, it's a demon, we ordinary people can't deal with it, we don't blame you..."
Kalinger said: "I met a few monsters and killed them all. Today I will come back to rest first, and I will continue to kill them at night."
The crowd was silent for a few seconds, and then all kinds of yelling and shouting broke out. The old man even had tears in his eyes just now, shouting that Heishu Village was finally saved.
At this time, a seven or eight-year-old girl approached and pulled Kalinge's cloak.
Kalinger looked down. He had seen this child yesterday, the timid child in the doorway of a woman when he first arrived in the village to ask for directions.
The girl asked softly, "Did you see the elf?"
Kalinger replied honestly: "I see." Considering that he fumbled along the way and his hands were not clean, he didn't touch the child's head.
"The elf is alone on the mountain, is he afraid?"
This cute question made Kalinger stunned. Hearing them mention the elves, other people's attention was also attracted. Some people asked if the elves were still angry with them, some asked if the elves could come down the mountain, some asked if the demons had imprisoned the elves, and some asked Kalinger Will it go up the mountain again, can you help them transfer some things to the elves.
Kalinger asked them what they wanted to send, some said they wanted to send a letter, and some said they wanted to give back a chronicle of Black Tree Village. The resident bard said that he wanted to send some fruit and wine to express his gratitude. After all, the elves saved his uncle, the sheriff of the village.
In fact, when he was going down the mountain, Kalinger thought about one more thing: Why didn't the elf named Rime leave the mountain
Wu Ri's mentor is gone, and there is no one of his kind nearby, so what's the point of him staying here
Even if there are dangerous things deep in the mountain, it should not be the responsibility of Wu Rime alone. He can leave completely. Even if he wants to be serious and responsible, he can recruit some adventurers and bounty hunters to handle these matters. Why did he stick to a dilapidated ruin that was not suitable for living
Kalinger even thought that maybe the theory of "demon" was created by the mage himself, and there might be some kind of conspiracy in it.
This is indeed one of many possibilities.
However, now looking at the stupid and naive villagers in Heishu Village, Kalinge can vaguely guess another possibility.
Kalinger only cares about things within the scope of work, and knows that he is not a kind and soft person. But he also admitted that there are such people in the world.
TBC