Unsealing Emptiness

Chapter 286: The Wolf’s Cage.

“This is interesting,” Ozul muttered as he started to formulate his next plan.

‘I didn’t expect to find something like this...’ he thought inside his mind before slowly descending to the ground.

One could tell that he was being careful in his movements.

As he landed on the ground, he simply closed his eyes to scan the temple in front of him from inside out. There were no obvious entrances to the mountain which looked like a temple.

A few seconds later, he opened his eyes while staring at the ground with an unreadable face.

“This is troublesome, but I can use this to my advantage...” Ozul muttered before he suddenly sat down on the grass in a meditative position.

The duo was too far away by then to question him why he sat down on the ground instead of exploring the ruins.

.....

As Ozul sat down with crossed legs, he contemplated how long it would take for Darcia to find him. He was confident that she was coming after him, but he didn’t know when.

‘I guess I will just wait a few days,’ Ozul decided to give Darcia a few days of time to find him.

If she didn’t find him till then, he would just have to assume that she wasn’t planning to deal with him any time sooner.

After all, she was a Rank-10 Mage who had lived for hundreds of years. She should have no problem in finding his location if she was really trying to.

‘But it would be for the best if she did find me here,’ Ozul thought before he unstrapped the Spatial Pouch from his waist and took out a small crystal-like ball that had an extremely concentrated form of Mana contained inside.

“I almost forgot about this,” Ozul muttered as he proudly remembered the time he hadn’t forgotten to take out the Mana Core of someone that could actually help him a little.

It was the time when he had killed Luthien’s father as Old Gu was keeping him busy by having a ‘friendly’ conversation with him.

Before he struggled to stand up at that time, he had efficiently extracted that half-step Rank-10 Mage’s Mana Core since that could definitely improve his strength, even if only by a small margin.

After that, he had completely forgotten about its existence as he got busy in training Raven and Blaze.

Even now, he might have not remembered about it if he hadn’t mentally started to go through everything that could assist him in this situation.

But instead of consuming the Mana Core to absorb it immediately, Ozul put it back inside his Spatial Ring, “... I can only hope that it works.”

——-

Meanwhile, above an unknown part of these unexplored Lands, a blurry shadow flew at a lightning speed towards a certain direction high in the air.

If it was any Mage below Rank-9, they wouldn’t have even noticed the blurry shadow because of how fast it was.

This was undoubtedly Darcia who could only search in random directions as she didn’t find any trail that Ozul might have left behind.

Although one might have simply given up when they didn’t even have the general directions of their location in these vast lands, it didn’t bother Darcia who could easily cross the whole continent in a matter of just a couple of days.

“Just you wait, you brat...” Darcia spoke with sharp eyes that examined the terrain below her in search of Ozul or any signs that could lead her to him.

She also kept her other senses to the maximum so she might catch their Mana signature even if she mistakenly missed them.

A whole day had passed and she hadn’t found anything as of yet.

Just then, she noticed something from the corner of her eyes that brought out a cackling laugh from her, “Kehehe... you sure are amateur.”

She noticed the concentration of the Beasts at a certain spot and it particularly caught her eyes because of the straight line formed by numerous more spots where the Beasts were unusually concentrated.

If one was careful enough, they would notice that all those spots were forming a line beyond that point.

Anyone with even a little bit of experience about the Beasts would know that when their corpses were left in the middle of the forest, it would attract all the other Beasts in the surrounding areas.

And if that happened anywhere near an area with a concentrated amount of Beasts, they would all swarm the location and begin to tear each other apart to gain the rights over the food which was highly concentrated in Mana.

In a few cases when the Beasts mostly had similar strength to each other, the fights or the battle royales of carnage might even last for weeks if not months!

The numerous spots of Beasts fighting each other in high concentration were exactly because of that.

And it wasn’t hard for Darcia to understand what was happening since she was one of the oldest people alive on the continent together with the other Rank-10 Mages.

Such a thing would rarely happen naturally since the Beasts who had killed their prey would never leave their corpse behind for others to feast on. Not to mention, there were tens of such spots that Darcia could see from high up in the air.

It wasn’t hard to notice that someone had passed by this place, killing whichever Beast attacked them.

Darcia was just amused at the fact that Ozul would make such an amateur mistake of leaving the corpses there for other Beasts to fight for, causing such a huge ruckus in his wake.

Unknown to her, Ozul was naturally not so naive. Even if he was, the group of Rank-8 Mages following him certainly knew about the consequences of leaving the Beasts’ corpses as Tatsuo, the temporary leader of the Rogue Crew had even mentioned it to him once.

He was the only one who could sometimes put his opinion before Ozul in the whole Rogue Crew. Others didn’t dare to speak up in his presence.

However, it was Ozul himself who had refrained them to clean up the corpses, for reasons that the Rogue Crew weren’t allowed to know.

If only Darcia knew that it was precisely because of her that Ozul had left the trail behind him, she would have been furious at his arrogance.

Without wasting another minute, she started to follow the spots where the Beasts were in high concentration, mindlessly killing each other even when they had enough intelligence to rival humans at their current strength.

Sometimes, she would have to stop at certain spots to confirm that she was on the right track since these spots varied in distance from each other. There were even times when she wouldn’t see another spot concentrated with swarming Beasts for a couple of miles since there were no Beasts nearby to begin with.

But for a Rank-10 Mage, all of this was a child’s play.

. . .

Three days passed before Darcia reached the plains before which she had stopped finding any more of those spots concentrated with Beasts.

Though she could already make out the general direction in which Ozul would have went in if she followed the straight line pattern of those spots.

But she stopped at these plains when she looked around, feeling that this place was a little familiar.

“When have I been here before?” She muttered as a certain feeling grew inside of her.

After a while, she shook her head and flew in the straight line. But the familiar feeling inside of jer grew ever so slightly as she traveled further in.

Some hours later, Darcia reached a forest where she found a couple of places where the ground was littered with battle scars.

Following these scenes, she approached the end of the forest where a certain mountain range appeared in her vision.

Darcia immediately halted in the middle of the air as her eyes widened with shock and realization.

“T-that!” her fingers subconsciously pointed towards the mountain range.

No one would have believed that there could be something that could cause even a Rank-10 Mage to stutter with fear.

Just in the next few seconds, Darcia quickly composed herself and took a deep breath as she eyed the distant snow peaks that seemingly touched the sky.

“The Wolf’s Cage...” Darcia muttered, scoffing at how shameless they had been to name this place a cage, “Tch... How could some mountains even hold ‘that’ down.”

“Why out of all places did that brat have to come here!?” She clenched her fist in annoyance.

This was the last place she wanted Ozul to be in because of the presence of a certain being residing here.

“Urgh! What if that boy just went ahead and got himself killed already!?” Darcia realized that the possibility of something like that happening was quite high.

And if he was really dead, all of her efforts up until now would be in vain!

She would then have to make do with whatever she could with the severed arm she had in her possession right now.

Right when she was contemplating whether she should continue to advance straight into The Wolf’s Cage or just leave while believing that Ozul was probably already dead, she remembered something which made her pause.

“Kehehe! How could I forget?” Her demeanor suddenly took a completely different turn as she cackled like an old witch.

‘Now that I have the ultimate weapon with me, I don’t have to worry about ‘that’!’ Darcia reminded herself while caressing the Spatial Ring which she had stored the cannon in.