Chapter 1203 A Week Later, The Mysterious Ruins
-----
It has been a week since my fight against the Deep One's vessel. The whole fight that happened in the suburbs, which caused a few disasters, and the appearance of a dragon fighting a giant kraken in the ocean were already quite widespread around the city, sadly.
However, we were able to easily hide our identities, as I utilized my slimes distributed around to summon Teleportation Tile Spirits and teleported the orphanage into a random, less populated location, making it very hard for the knights and guards to find us now.
Of course, I took responsibility for what happened. Benladra and Kate said they tried to hold back, but they still ended destroying a few houses, and some people were harmed as well, although nobody died, thankfully. I took my time to summon several tiny spirts to help the people.
I summoned thousands of Small Rank 5 [Carpenter Spirits] that were able to repair the damage in the streets and reconstruct whole houses in a single night, mostly unnoticed as they were invisible to the naked eye.
And I also created Rank 5 [Food Distribution Spirits], [Healing Spirits], and [Memory Spirits], which distributed food to everyone they could find, mysteriously leaving food inside houses, that healed any wounded or diseased, and that slowly erased the memories of what had happened to most of the population within the suburbs.
Thanks to the wonderful Spirit Creation Unique Skill, I was able to stabilize everything after a week of work with them. And now the people here seems to be living a bit better. I've also been taking care of thugs and bandit gangs with the aid of my allies, who work as anonymous vigilantes, and of course, slimes and spirits. 𝘣𝘦𝑑𝘯𝘰𝘷𝘦𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝑚
The squads of knights and guards haven't simply sat idle though, the Queen is probably furious about this, and so her Sea God or whatever, so they had been trying to locate us for a while. But it is quite easy to trick them into going in circles using [Illusion Spirits] and [Dream Spirits].
However, ultimately I'll have to confront her. I want the Shards back. Nonetheless, for our own sake and the orphanage's sake, alongside the entire town, I've decided to sit down and investigate while letting things cool down for a bit.
I have gathered with my allies after everyone did their scouting the first day, and we shared everything we knew, making new conclusions altogether, while figuring out many new things as well. Apparently Ruby tried to peer into the Deep One's soul but was attacked right away, although she managed to escape, she even was able to leave him with a curse, which she said will slowly weaken him each passing day.
Thanks to what she discovered, we had a conversation with her and her mother, figuring out a truth we had not realized until now, it seemed that our dear Vampire Venerable's power to trap souls and minds inside of his own soul within an endless prison of darkness was a power he did not originally held.
Indeed, it was a power this bastard acquired from an outside source, a being he called the "Deep One" as well. We quickly began to talk more as the conversation developed, but we couldn't figure out more than just that, as we lacked clues. We didn't really knew if that Deep One was the same guy as the one living in this island, or if that was a different being.
For all we know, Deep Ones could be an entire race of entities and not just a single individual. However, I am fairly sure there is only one of them here. We've been investigating from various other sources through the week, and today we finally held a small meeting with everyone to discuss things. We didn't wanted to involve the nuns nor the kids, so they were mostly excluded from this.
"It has been a week of arduous work. I had only planned to make a quick and short visit of this place but well, a week has already gone by…" I sighed. "But let's begin with this meeting already. Hector, has your team found anything new?"
"Yeah, we went on our second expedition to the swamps yesterday. We found a second set of ruins near a small lake. It was filled with strange words and statues of sea monsters… We also found this…" Hector showed me several drawings that his wife, Miminga had made. She was amazing at drawing and was able to easily replicate whatever her eyes saw. She really wanted to join him so she ended going with them yesterday.
I glanced at the papers with the drawings and was left speechless. This language was… something I somehow could read, even though I had never been able to learn any language here. The System's automatic translation system was not the cause either. It felt as if it was a language within my very bloodline.
And aside from these words, there was something else attached to them, several marks, or drawings of sea creatures… They were four in total, and were rather interesting, black in color, and who seemed to be connected to an element of magic.
There was a small octopus with eight short tentacles and a big purple eye, a big fish with menacing sharp teeth and pink scales, a furious sea serpent with blue gills, and lastly, what looked like a big shark with tentacles.
"That fish with sharp fangs…!" Benladann pointed out. "Doesn't that look like…?"
"Yeah, it looks like Rose's Stigma!" Miranda said in surprise.
"What… Why?" Rakasha wondered. "That Stigma is not just her innate magic? It is connected with these ancient ruins somehow?"
"If that's the case, there must be another three other Stigma users in this country, all three of them could represent another of these sea monsters!" Ruby said.
"Yeah, I have figured out as much… Though this text here, that I can somehow read… It kind of confirms it."
-----