259 259 Relic
Wolfe wasn’t particularly excited about going into that enclosed room to retrieve the treasure, so he immediately tried using [Levitate] to bring the crystal out to him.
The magic seemed to simply glide over the crystal, so Wolfe tried a different target. There were a few pieces of jewelry sitting on the floor, not attached to anything, so he tried lifting them instead.
That wasn’t a problem, and they lifted without incident, so Wolfe carefully set his backpack down and made his way to the building.
If worst came to worst, he could use the [Transfer] function of the Familiar Bond to bring himself to Stephanie, who was safely outside of the affected area. Unlike the original inhabitants, he wouldn’t be stuck inside a barrier that would kill him on contact.
As he passed through the location where the barriers were, Wolfe held his breath and prayed that they wouldn’t activate again while he was inside. It might not do anything, but it made him feel better about coming into this tomb to collect a prize.
If he couldn’t bring the barrier back online, he would have to properly bury everyone here as well. He wouldn’t leave them to the elements and the curious onlookers who would loot their bodies clean in search of magical items.
Carefully, Wolfe placed a hand on the softly glowing golden crystal sitting on the time-worn wooden table, and a flood of information entered his brain.
[Welcome, Magi, to the last stand of the Lumix Family. If someone is receiving this, then the purge failed, and there are still Magi above Rank One in the world.
While we hold this mountain villa against the vagaries of the uncivilized species, the Saints have gone to the top of the world to cast the final spell to end the war.
All contact with the rest of the civilized world has been lost, and as far as we know, there are no more living Magi other than ourselves and the Saints. Forgive us for what we will do, but with a million soldiers bearing down on us, even the twenty of us are no longer their match.
So, we have left this stone containing the means of vengeance or reconciliation for the survivors of the next generation, if there should be one.
Take what you will. We don’t need it anymore.
May you return to the sea of souls only when your time is ripe and your grandchildren are grown.]
Once the notice was finished, a single spell entered Wolfe’s mind.
[Cataclysm] –reshapes the Elemental Flows of the caster’s surroundings into a random or predetermined configuration. The longer the spell is maintained, the greater the change and the larger the radius.
Along with the description came a detailed usage method for the spell. If he focused on the fire element alone, a sufficiently powerful Magi, or more likely a large group of them, could bathe the entire world in hellfire, burning everything to ash and turning the surface entirely to molten rock.
Likewise, using only water could flood or freeze everything.
It appeared that the Saints had cast the spell to randomly reassign everything, flooding some areas, creating massive mountain ranges in others, and moving the continents all over the planet.
The knowledge contained showed Wolfe what the world used to look like, a simple but detailed globe that bore only the most passing of resemblance to the map of the world as he knew it now.
The ‘Top of the World’ was a single volcano on the eastern side of this continent, and the mountain range was only a quarter of the size that it was now, with his current location formerly being the furthest eastern point of the mountain range that now extended most of the way across the continent from west to east.
It did have some useful information on it. There were a small handful of names with skulls next to them. Since this was one of them, Wolfe assumed that they were the last stands of various families.
He searched the map for the Noxus name, passing over the Chronos, Asgar, Lumix, Sylvestra and Myrrdin Families markers before he located it in the middle of what he recognized as the lost continent.
The ancestral home of the Noxus Family, or at least the marked location of their last stand, was now at the bottom of the ocean.
He focused on it for a moment, hoping that there would be something else, some clue as to how he could find more remnants of his ancestors, but the only note attached to the marker was a simple obituary.
[Here fell the last Archmage of Noxus, the Keeper of Eternity, and last of the Magi Kings. Through their sacrifice, the sea of souls will remain accessible for every generation until the end of time.]
Wolfe wondered what the Lumix Family members would think if they knew that the Witches used that fact to summon the dead Magi back as Demons to work as their Familiars, but put the thought aside for the moment and pocketed the stone before moving to the skeletal bodies to see what they had.
The crystal had said to take what he wanted, but almost everything had been destroyed by time. Wolfe could see that there were spells embroidered into the robes, and a few stone talismans had survived, but most of the leather and cloth had rotted away over the centuries.
So, he collected what he could and carefully folded the few sets of robes that weren’t destroyed by time, then looked around the room for a suitable location to bury the dead.
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[No problem, boss.] She agreed, then quickly created a simple stone coffin for Wolfe to place the remains, as well as all of the damaged magical items and one fully functional duplicate item that he recognized as a door key for the main house, into.
Once everything was loaded and the room was empty, she merged a lid onto the top, sealing the sarcophagus from time and weather, and Wolfe stepped back out to where he had left her sitting inside his backpack.
They sat and watched the location for a few minutes, trying to digest the new information that Wolfe had gained and the realization that all of that piled Null Stone had likely been gathered from the ruins of the Villa and what was left lying around was just the bit that the locals had deemed to be too much trouble to gather.
This truly had been an insanely fierce battle, and the anti-magic firepower that had been brought against this single villa was more than the total of what Wolfe had found and destroyed during the entire offensive against Sylvan this winter.
“Let’s get out of here.” Wolfe sighed, then paused as he felt a creeping sense of danger.
The Curse that Stephanie unravelled wasn’t completely gone, and it was trying to sink back into the ruins of that building again.
Wolfe applied a bit of mana to activate the barrier that the Lumix Family had set, burning the inscription into his memory for later use, though he couldn’t use all of the Elements that it was made of without using [Elemental Affinity] to give him the most basic of affinity for them, so he wouldn’t be able to create it properly, only activate it.
It used most of his mana to bring the spell online that way, but it came to life and held the Curse at bay again, locking the Tomb of the Lumix Family in a permanent stasis, guarded by both Magi and Witch Magic that would keep anyone from entering for the foreseeable future.