“Gulp.”
A clear sound of swallowing came from Theia’s throat.
She stood on that natural stone bridge, which was only wide enough for a few people to walk side by side.
Looking down at the bottomless darkness.
With her extraordinary vision, she still couldn’t see the end of the abyss.
There was only a void that swallowed everything.
Lin Gui gave her a gentle tug from behind.
“Don’t look. Be careful not to fall.”
Theia quickly retracted her gaze and nodded, her heart still pounding with lingering fear.
She nudged Lin Gui and Eve toward the train.
“You two should get back inside the carriage.”
“The path down there is too narrow; it’s not safe.”
Aside from the warriors pushing the train, Percel and Freya who were maintaining the bubbles, and the scouts, assassins, and goblin chief scouting ahead, everyone else boarded the train as instructed.
Before entering the carriage, Lin Gui couldn’t help but ask the scholar once more:
“How deep is this abyss, exactly?”
Eli the scholar paused for a moment before speaking slowly:
“You... wouldn’t want to know the answer.”
Lin Gui fell silent.
He understood that this depth was absolutely an unimaginable, terrifying figure.
The team slowly stepped onto that narrow undersea peak ridge that spanned the Silent Abyss.
The lively chatter from the journey came to a sudden halt.
A deathly silence fell over the inside and outside of the train.
The atmosphere grew oppressively heavy.
Only the heavy footsteps of the warriors and the sound of subtle friction echoed through the area.
Lin Gui, Theia, and Eve returned to their cramped carriage.
All three of them felt a bit heavy-hearted.
The thought that the train was currently traveling above a bottomless chasm was daunting. Any slight accident could plunge them into eternal damnation.
Theia sat on a wooden crate with her knees pulled to her chest, unusually quiet.
Eve had her eyes closed, her fingertips unconsciously fidgeting with the corner of her clothes.
Lin Gui leaned against the carriage wall, his gaze fixed on the blurred darkness outside through a crack.
“The North Wind caravan... it’s really not easy for them,” Theia lamented in a low voice.
“To transport goods, they have to cross such a terrifying place every time.”
She looked up at Lin Gui.
“Why don’t they choose a safer route?”
Lin Gui retracted his gaze and explained:
“From the Royal Capital to Shield City, there indeed is more than one path.”
“I remember seeing another transport team led by a dwarf Legendary leader at the Transport Guild.”
“They were taking a different route.”
“That path requires going north through the entirety of Twilight Fortress and bypassing Giant's Canyon.”
“But the distance is long, and it takes about three months to arrive.”
He paused for a moment.
“As for Captain Freya’s team, the estimated arrival time shown at the Guild was...”
“One and a half months.”
“The time is shortened by exactly half,” Lin Gui said softly as he looked at the boundless darkness outside.
“If the delivery efficiency is twice as fast, the reward for the commission is naturally higher.”
Theia’s expression turned odd.
“But Captain Freya is a Legendary mage.”
“Would she really be short on money?”
Lin Gui hesitated for a moment and let out a helpless sigh.
“She might actually be the one who needs money the most.”
Theia grew even more confused.
Beside them, Eve chuckled softly and explained:
“A mage is the profession that consumes the most resources.”
“Unlike warriors or rangers who primarily temper their own physiques, the types and applications of magic are far too broad.”
“For a mage’s magical knowledge system... most of it requires a vast amount of magic materials just to begin learning and eventually master it.”
“And those materials... most come from the wilderness. For example, body parts of High Rank demons, enchanted minerals, magical plants, and so on...”
Eve paused.
“And in this current Dark Age, gathering in the wilderness is extremely high-risk, causing prices to soar to unfathomable levels.”
“Therefore, most mages have to pay an exaggeratedly larger amount of money and resources than other professions of the same rank just to improve their strength.”
“As for a Legendary mage...” Eve smiled and said, “that is an existence a single city-state might not even be able to support.”
Theia suddenly realized.
“No wonder I used to get so many strange commissions when I was an adventurer. Like specifying a certain type of demon’s horn or a particular magical plant. So they were all posted by mages.”
The carriage swayed slightly with the footsteps of the warriors below.
Discussing such practical topics above a bottomless abyss actually eased the tense atmosphere a little.
Lin Gui nodded silently.
He recalled the hardships of his own magical studies. The construction of every spell model and the precise control of mana each time was backed by a mountain of resources.
If it weren’t for the system directly granting him magic and proficiency, he estimated he would still be miserably struggling at the Adventurer’s Guild, relying on commissions just to earn money for materials.
Just as Lin Gui was feeling sentimental, a sudden, unnatural squirming came from the inner pocket of his mage robes.
Before he could react, the broken glass bead actually surged out of his pocket on its own and hovered in mid-air.
The surface of the bead flashed violently with a piercing red light.
It began to slam around madly within the narrow carriage.
One moment, it was like an invisible hand had slapped it against the ceiling; the next, it slammed hard into the carriage wall, making muffled “thudding” sounds as it followed an erratic and unpredictable trajectory.
It looked exactly like a shrimp thrown into boiling water, filled with the fear and madness of impending death.
Lin Gui instinctively stood up to catch it.
But as a mage, his movements weren’t agile enough, and he was even more clumsy in the swaying carriage.
He missed several times in a row, his posture quite awkward.
The bead traced chaotic arcs in the air.
Seeing this, Eve also stood up to help corner it. As a result, in the narrow space, she and Lin Gui collided head-on.
With an “Ouch,” the two of them tripped together and fell into a heap.
The bead seemed to have found an opening and suddenly swiveled, turning into a red streak that shot straight for the closed window!
A fair palm shot out like a flash of lightning, precisely snapping shut in mid-air.
Theia gripped the bead, which was still vibrating violently and burning hot in her palm, her face filled with shock.
“What on earth is this? It can fly on its own?”
Lin Gui quickly scrambled up from Eve’s side and stumbled over, snatching the bead back from Theia’s hand.
The gray light in his eyes flared as his Eyes of the Netherworld instantly activated.
Before he could even speak a word of questioning, the merman's soul’s face—distorted and deformed by extreme terror—occupied his entire field of vision.
“Run! Run quickly!!”
Its scream pierced directly into Lin Gui’s mind, carrying a bone-chilling tremble.
Its illusory fingers pointed frantically toward the endless dark abyss beneath them.
“It! It’s right down there! It’s awake! It’s awake!”
The edges of the soul body fluctuated violently, as if it might dissipate at any moment.
“I don’t want to sink forever... I don’t want to be pinned down in this eternal abyss...”
“Just run! Immediately! Right now! Don’t even look back!”
Lin Gui snapped his head toward the window.
The vision from his Eyes of the Netherworld penetrated the carriage window.
In that instant, the blood in his entire body seemed to freeze.
Outside the window, it was no longer a pure darkness that swallowed all light.
The seawater throughout the entire Silent Abyss... had come “alive.”
It was an indescribable, viscous “red.”
It wasn’t the scarlet of blood, nor was it the fiery red of flames. It was a deeper, more ancient, more soul-shivering dark red.
It was as if countless malevolent eyes had simultaneously opened at the bottom of the abyss. Or as if some unimaginably vast creature was slowly stretching its bloodshot body on the seabed.
This eerie red light didn’t come from a light source. It saturated every drop of seawater and permeated the boundless abyss, dyeing the once-black deathly silence into a boiling blood stew.
The once clear outlines of the stone bridge and rocks became blurred and distorted in this omnipresent dark red, as if the entire abyss were slowly squirming under some kind of power.
Lin Gui could even “see” that the red light contained countless tiny threads, like nerve-like networks, that squirmed slowly and emitted a nauseating malice as well as an ancient, icy hunger.
“Do you see it now... do you see it?!”
The merman's soul shrieked in his mind, its voice broken and ragged.
“It’s awake... it’s watching us...”
“Every... single... soul... that steps into its domain...”
Rate on N.U.
