Chapter 1052: Protective Measures
“Ha.” Rother said it low, almost to herself.
“What?” Sean looked at her. “What does that mean?”
“I’ll explain it to you common people.” The God’s Punishment Witch grinned and walked to one of the mottled columns, sweeping the dust from it with her palm. “The ruins of the underground civilization appear in many places across the mainland. Taquila spent a great deal of time studying them.” She studied the carved symbols. “But these are not their characters. They have nothing to do with the magic script the Union made. Think of what that means, given the history of the four kingdoms.”
Azima understood each word individually. Together they formed a shape she couldn’t quite grasp — though she felt some relief to see the same blankness on Marl’s face, and on Knaff’s.
Sean wore a thinking look.
“His Majesty once said that the four kingdoms were only scattered villages and small towns in the past — a small corner of the mainland, with no real history behind them. If this ruin wasn’t left by the underground civilization, then it means…” He paused. “There were people living here that we never knew about?”
“We can’t be certain.” Rother’s eyes brightened with the particular light of someone who finds a puzzle genuinely interesting. “No one knows whether the underground civilization could have branched into unknown tribes with their own languages. We have to go inside.”
“Lord Sean.” One of the soldiers, who had been examining the stone gate, called out. “There’s a tablet here. The words are in our script.”
Everyone moved toward it.
A block of granite lay half-hidden in the weeds, moss thick over every surface — except one side, which had been ground smooth by human hands, though so long ago that it was easy to miss entirely. The soldiers cleared it carefully. The words emerged letter by letter from under the growth.
This is a place cursed by Gods. You will die if you enter.
Knaff’s breath went out of him in a gasp.
“Is this the — the Temple of the Cursed?” He backed away. “I’ve heard of it. Just in the tavern, from other people, but—”
Sean and Rother exchanged a glance. “You know what this place is?”
“Only what the stories say.” Knaff’s eyes had not left the dark opening of the gate. “More than a century ago. A lord had his men setting the traps through the mountain, and a knight’s team was caught in heavy rain. Mountain rain comes fast and leaves fast, so they sheltered where they could find it, and they found — this.” He swallowed. “They said there were treasures inside. The knight took some. Later, the villagers who followed him — they all died. Slowly. One by one, over ten years. Even the knight. Their faces…” He cringed. “The skin peeled away. Left the flesh exposed. The lord had to forbid anyone from entering after that, to stop the curse from spreading.”
“Their faces rotted.” Rother arched an eyebrow. She walked over and set her arm on Knaff’s shoulder — the arm that was broader than his thigh. “And they died over ten years?”
Knaff went pale. “That’s what the tavern stories said. I swear every word of it. Ask anyone else if you doubt me — the stories come from somewhere.”
Rother released him, stepping away.
Azima considered this. If the deaths had come ten years later, the lord could not easily have arranged them — not the knight’s, certainly. A nobleman couldn’t simply be executed without cause, no matter how minor his family. And if the lord and knight had conspired to kill the villagers, they wouldn’t have needed to wait ten years.
Could it actually be a curse?
“Perhaps we should return to the town,” Marl suggested, “gather more information before deciding—”
“You said ‘perhaps we should’,” Rother observed pleasantly, “but that’s your decision to make. I’ve already made mine.” She turned to the dark gate. “Witch hunters and Judgement Warriors used to think they could kill us with curses too. I’d like to see what deities have arranged here.”
Sean stepped forward. “Not yet.” He raised a hand. “We don’t go in without precautions. His Majesty warned me.”
Rother tilted her head. “He foresaw this?”
“He described two possibilities.” Sean glanced back at Azima, then at the stone gate. “Either the source would be exposed on the surface — in which case we seal the site and report directly to Neverwinter. Or it would be underground, in a cave or something like one. The deeper, the more dangerous. He made me promise we would take measures.” He snapped his fingers.
Two soldiers unslung their packs and pulled out five white coats.
Rother crouched and spread one open on the ground, examining it. “These are just leather coats.”
“Not on their own.” Sean took one and stepped into it. The garment had no buttons, no separate pieces — a single sealed sleeve of treated leather shaped roughly like a person. He pulled it over himself in one smooth motion. When he straightened, only his face showed. Then he lifted a transparent mask fitted with a canister at the nose, pig-shaped and about the size of a fist, and settled it over his face.
His voice came out slightly flat through the material. “Five go in. The rest stay here.” He looked at Azima, then at Rother. “Besides the two of you — who else?”
Knaff had already drifted, without appearing to notice, several steps closer to the trees.
Marl Tokat cleared his throat and suggested they remain outside to coordinate with the soldiers.
“I won’t need one,” said Rother.
Sean frowned. “Are you certain?”
“God’s Punishment Warriors resist general plagues and poisons far better than common people can. Whatever killed those villagers a century ago clearly left a ten-year margin even for the unprotected. I don’t think it threatens our bodies.” She shrugged. “And the coat would slow me down. Dull my hearing. In an unknown space, that matters far more than whatever protection the leather provides. Keep the extra one for the soldiers outside — if something happens that requires a rescue, they’ll need it.”
It was a convincing argument. The God’s Punishment Warriors had trained their senses for centuries beyond common thresholds — Rother had estimated soil softness from footfall sounds during the climb up. A sealed suit would blindfold her in ways that had nothing to do with her eyes.
“But what if the curse is real?” Azima heard herself ask. “What if this was actually made by—”
Rother’s laugh cut her off — the same sharp, bright sound she’d made at the tablet. “Let’s set aside whether leather coats stop divine curses. Even if there are gods inside, I have no fear of them. Whatever they’ve arranged here — it would be hard to be worse than the millions of people who died on the Fertile Plains.”
A silence followed.
“We move,” said Sean.
Azima breathed in. She followed the king’s guard through the stone gate and into the dark.
Chapter 1052: Protective Measures
Translator: TransN Editor: TransN “Ha, interesting…” Rother said under her breath.
“What?” Sean looked at her. “What do you mean?”
“I’ll let you know, common people.” Rother grinned. “The ruins of the underground civilization can be seen in many places of the mainland, and Taquila certainly spent a lot of time studying them,” she said, walking up to the mottled column, and then swept the dust off it. “These symbols are not their characters and they have nothing to do with the magic characters the Union once made, either. Keeping in mind the history of the four kingdoms, isn’t that interesting?”
Azima was still confused. Although she understood every word Rother had said, she could not comprehend what the words exactly meant when she put them together. However, she felt relieved as she saw the same confusion on both Marl’s and Knaff’s faces.
Sean revealed a thoughtful look.
“His Majesty once said that in the past, the four kingdoms were only a collection of scattered villages and small towns, located in a small corner of the mainland, and had no real history. If this ruin wasn’t left by the civilizations during the Battle of Divine Will, then it means…”
Sean paused suddenly.
“There were people who used to live here and were unknown to us?”
“We’re not sure about that,” Rother said with great spirit. “No one knows whether the underground civilization could breed any new tribes and create new tongues. We have to enter the ruin to find more information.”
“Lord Sean, there seems to be a stone tablet here,” the soldier, who was examining the stone gate, suddenly shouted. “The words on it are written in our characters.”
Everyone immediately approached the tablet.
A block of granite rested in the weeds. The moss had grown all over it and only one side of the tablet had been sanded by men so that it was easy to be ignored. It took the soldiers a long time to clear it up before the engraved words could be easily made out.
“This is a place cursed by Gods. You’ll die if you enter.”
Knaff gasped as he saw the warning on the tablet.
“Is this the rumored… Temple of the Cursed?” He stepped back and stammered.
Sean and the God’s Punishment Witch glanced at each other. “You know what it is?”
“I just heard it from other people. It happened more than a century ago…” Knaff stared at the black hole and swallowed. “The lord of this area had ordered his men to set up a lot of traps in the Cage Mountain to prevent the Wolfheart people from crossing the mountain. It was said that a team led by a knight came across a heavy rain when they were performing a mission. The rain in the mountain was variable and transient. The knight commanded his men to find shelters and they discovered a strange temple by accident.”
“Oh?” Rother said, raising her eyebrow. “Did they find any treatures in the temple? And the greedy people who stole the treasures were cursed by deities and died a terrible death in the end.”
“You’ve heard that too?” Knaff was surprised.
Rother laughed out. “The nature of common people seems to have stagnated. They’ve played this kind of trick centuries ago and it still worked. I bet it was the lord who started the rumor. He must have wanted the treasures for
himself. The poor villagers were just used to prove the existence of the curse and were slaughtered secretly.”
“But… they didn’t die right away.”
“What…?” Rother frowned.
The guide cringed and said warily, “They died one by one ten years after the incident, even the knight. It was said they all died painfully. The skin on their faces was peeled off, leaving the rotten flesh exposed. They looked hideous and horrifying. That’s what the curse stems from. The lord had to forbid everyone to enter that place to stop the spread of misfortune in his land, so no one knows its actual location.”
“Are you sure?” Rother walked over to Knaff and put her arm on the guide’s shoulder.
Knaff paled as he looked at the arm that was thicker than his thigh. “I heard all of them in the tavern. I swear I tell no lies. My lord, you can ask someone else if you don’t believe me. If there’s anything wrong, then the rumors must be wrong.”
In Azima’s opinion, if the people died so long after the incident, it was unlikely they were killed by the lord. Moreover, it would make sense if the knight and the lord plotted together to murder the villagers, but it was unreasonable to see the knight killed as well. The nobles could not be executed without trial, no matter how insignificant their families were.
Could it really be… the deities’ curse?
“Ugh, why don’t we… return to the town first and then decide what we’re going to do after we collect more information?” the liaison Marl Tokat suggested.
“Decide what we’re going to do next?” Knaff looked at Sean in disbelief. “Was the Temple of the Cursed your aim from the very beginning?”
“No, they happen to overlap.” Rother let go of Knaff. “What about you? Since you’re King Roland’s trusted guard, I believe you won’t chicken out, will you?”
“Of course not,” Sean replied calmly. “Our priority is to finish the task given by His Majesty. Now the target is just before us. Certainly, we won’t retreat.”
“Good. Let’s enter and meet the so-called ‘deities’,” Rother said with a hideous smile.
“But we can’t enter with no precaution.” Sean shook his head. “In fact, His Majesty warned us to be careful of the danger we would possibly encounter in the source.”
“Did he… even foresee this?”
“Yes.” Sean looked over his shoulder at Azima and said, “That night, after you left, His Majesty told me something in private. He said there might be two possibilities we would run into. One is that the source is exposed on the surface, and in that case, we don’t have to do anything but seal the place and return to Neverwinter where we can directly report it to him. The other is that the source is located in an underground cave. The deeper the cave is, the more dangerous it will be. So we need to take protective measures beforehand. It may be inappropriate to call this place a cave, but the temple is in line with all its characteristics.”
With that said, he snapped his fingers at the soldier. “Bring up the thing.”
Two soldiers unloaded their packages and pulled out five white coats.
Rother squatted down and spread the clothes out curiously. “These’re just plain leather coats.”
“They won’t be if used with the masks.” Sean picked up one and slipped himself into it. Azima could only use the word “slip” to describe Sean’s movement, for the coat was one-piece designed without even a button and was more like a sack that was cut in human shape than a garment. Now Sean
only had his face exposed and all of his limbs were hidden in the coat, which made him look very weird.
Subsequently, he put on a transparent mask to protect his face. A fist-sized can was fixed on the mask, shaped like a pig’s nose.
“Five in and the rest stays,” Sean said through the mask. “In addition to Miss Azima and Lady Rother, who else wants to come?”