NOVEL NEXT Chapter 47
47 Graveyard
The graveyard was north of Thorn City. If it was based on scale, it was more like a satellite city than a cemetery.
Towering walls surrounded the entire cemetery. Spaced twenty meters apart on the walls were Placating the Undead and Life Barrier spell runes engraved by the Holy Spirits Church and the Rose Palace’s Mage Hall.
Fortunately, Thorn City produced abundant Elementium Silver. If it were any other major city on the continent, even the Empire’s capital, Platinum City, and the famously wealthy Tulle City wouldn’t be able to afford such extravagance.
As the Blackwater Swamp believed in ancestor worship, people firmly believed that the souls of the dead needed their bones to exist. Therefore, most of the dead in Thorn City had been sent to this graveyard for burial for millennia.
The corpses had accumulated over the years, and the number of dead buried inside had probably reached an incalculable number.
The large number of corpses posed an extreme danger to this world where necromancy existed. Therefore, the graveyard was usually closed and heavily guarded, prohibiting outsiders from entering.
Only on the Soul Return Festival on the 4th of the Rain Moon and the 15th of the Fog Moon would the gravekeepers here open the gates and allow residents to enter the cemetery to pay respects to their ancestors.
“The Holy Sepulchre you mentioned is built under the graveyard?” Cass looked at the towering city wall and asked.
“It should be said that the cemetery is built above the Holy Sepulchre. The Holy Sepulchre’s history is much older than the graveyard. It existed long before the Bronze Age.”
As Nizemar replied, she untied a bundle of ropes from her waist.
“Back then, the Blackwater people believed that the catacomb was the entrance to the Netherworld, the place where Vera-or Death-was reborn. Therefore, the ruler of that time chose this place as a graveyard, hoping that he could be reborn after death. It was also at that time that the idea of the living serving the dead appeared. Later on, it gradually evolved into the ancestral worship custom unique to the Blackwater Province.”
As Nizemar spoke, she threw the grappling rope up. After tugging at the rope a few times to test its sturdiness, she turned around and said to Cass,
“Alright, I’ll climb up and take a look. I’ll signal you to follow me when there’s no problem.”
With that said, she nimbly climbed up the rope like a cat.
Although the other party was wearing light leather armor, she was a lady after all. Cass found it embarrassing to stand below and stare at her.
Therefore, he turned to look at Liz, who had been sitting on his shoulder sulking.
“Uh… What’s wrong?” Cass asked.
“Nothing.”
Seeing Cass turn his head, Liz immediately turned her head away and snorted with her nose raised.
Cass guessed that she was still angry about what had happened, so he deliberated and said,
“Isn’t her suggestion quite good? If you can retrieve your Life Scale Powder early, there’s no need for you to be on tenterhooks every day about what happens to me. Of course, as for compensation…”
“Do you think I want compensation or something from you?!”
Liz suddenly turned around and grabbed Cass’s ear.
Cass felt as if his ears had been twisted twice by her.
“Do you want to be a Spellblade that badly? Do you want to continue fighting elsewhere so badly? Didn’t you say that you would retire after getting your vengeance? Can’t you think of yourself more?” Liz pinched Cass’s ear and said with a flushed face.
“But… I don’t know what else I can do other than fight.”
Cass fell silent for a moment before answering.
His words deflated Liz. She let go of Cass’s ear, propped up her hands, and looked up at Cass’s face in disappointment.
“Then, have you never considered helping me tend my garden?”
Cass was just about to answer when Nizemar’s voice sounded from the city wall.
“It’s safe. You can come up now.”
…
While climbing the rope, Cass felt another burst of pain from the wound in his abdomen. When he reached the city wall, he lifted his clothes and checked. A faint blood mark seeped out of the bandage.
“There’s nothing we can do about it. It’s normal for the wound to open up while climbing before it’s healed.”
Cass said helplessly when he saw Nizemar and Liz look over.
“There’s no time to wait for you to completely recover. My informant in the Rose Palace told me that the duke’s big move is in the next few days. We have to get Judgment 4 as soon as possible to have a chance of winning,” Nizemar replied.
Liz sighed silently when she saw this. Sparkling scale powder began to appear around her wings again.
“Hey, faerie over there, don’t do that again.”
But before she could scatter the scale powder at Cass, Nizemar stopped her.
“Although a faerie’s vitality is much stronger than a human’s, you shouldn’t waste it like this.”
As Nizemar spoke, her hand lit up with a faint green light.
“You’ve saved him from the brink of death twice. That isn’t trivial even for a faerie.”
With that said, she pressed her hand on the wound at Cass’s abdomen.
Hand of Healing, Expert-level life magic.
Although it only temporarily stopped the bleeding from Cass’s ruptured wound, it still made him feel much better.
After doing all of this, Nizemar turned to look at Liz and said, “You don’t have much life force left. Don’t waste it in such a place.”
“Who… Who’s wasting it on him? I’m just afraid that his wound will be too deep and he will suddenly die. When that happens, I won’t be able to recover all my scale powder.”
Liz raised her voice.
“Shh…”
Cass gestured for her to keep quiet.
A team called the Gravekeepers was perpetually stationed near the graveyard to prevent large-scale reanimations. It wouldn’t be good if they discovered them and treated them as necromancers who had snuck in to steal corpses.
Liz covered her mouth in acknowledgment.
Looking at the temple in the middle of the graveyard, Cass whispered, “Are you sure that weapon is under that temple?”
Nizemar nodded and replied, “I’m very sure. We learned of Judgment 4’s whereabouts ten years ago. Furthermore, we proposed to Duke Simon back then, but he found all kinds of reasons to reject us.”
As Nizemar spoke, she straightened the triangular hat on her head. The white feathers on the hat swayed slightly under the night wind.
“If it weren’t for the fact that his relationship with the Empire’s royal family deteriorated rapidly and that a few batches of intelligence personnel sent by the royal family were assassinated by magic chanters suspected of using Moon Realm power, we might have continued the back and forth with him…”
As she spoke, she walked down the wall’s stairs with Cass and Liz following behind her.
Endless tombstones stood erected in the graveyard, one after another.
The dead here were laid so densely that the living didn’t even have a place to rest their feet. They could only step on tombstones for advancement.
Cass accidentally cracked another tombstone loudly and couldn’t help but complain.
“Speaking of which, can’t we take the main road? Must we step on the heads of the dead here…”
He was a local of the Blackwater Province, so he found it disturbing to disrupt the dead’s peace.
“There will be a guard patrol on the road at night. It will be troublesome if we’re discovered,”
Nizemar, who was walking in front, replied without turning her head.
Compared to Cass’s tall and burly figure and the heavy weapon on his back, Nizemar leaped up and down nimbly like a cat on many graves. She was so agile that it was as if she was strolling at home.
“Really? I don’t see any light on the main road over there. They won’t patrol without lights, right?”
Cass looked in the direction of the road and asked. Upon hearing that, Nizemar stopped on a cross-shaped tombstone and turned to look over.
“Moreover, not only is there no light on the main road, but there’s also no light from the camp at the entrance. Do they switch off the lights at this hour?”
Cass pointed at the entrance of the graveyard.
At this moment, they were very close to the temple in the middle of the graveyard.
“It’s a little strange, but there’s no time to care. Let’s…”
It was also at this moment that a black blast quickly spread from the temple to every corner of the graveyard.
However, other than a gust of wind that wasn’t too strong or weak, the fluctuation didn’t affect the three of them at all.
“What was that? I sensed a magical power within, but why didn’t it affect us at all?” Liz asked in shock.
As for Nizemar, she looked at the temple in the middle of the graveyard with a serious expression and said, “That’s…”
Unfortunately, before she could finish speaking, the ground began to tremble violently.
An earthquake?
This was the first thought that came to Cass’s mind, but cruel reality told him that the ground’s tremors weren’t as simple as an earthquake.
It was much more terrifying than an earthquake.
The tombstone under Nizemar’s feet suddenly shattered, and a half-rotted arm grabbed her leg.
At the same time, hundreds of millions of incomplete or complete, rotting, or bone-white hands tore through their coffins and soil in the graveyard, reaching out from the ground.
It stretched as far as the eye could see.