Chapter 64 - The Valley of Kings (1)

Laurence retreated from the encampment. There was a lot that he had to think about, a lot that he had learned from within the Lupe campsite, but nothing that he could put his fingers on. Apart from the information about the layout of the camp, the number of people and the small amount of information pertaining to Lupe operations, he was still drawing a blank on two things.

First was the keys that the Lupe had been talking about. They could have been the kidnapped Book practitioners, but just as likely they could have been something unknown to Laurence. He knew he could have been overthinking things, but the more he thought about the more worried he became about the things he had no idea about. Nowhere that he, nor anyone else, looked stated the ritual to free the bindings on the Fallen Morning. There was nothing that could point them in the right direction. Whatever secret the Lupe had unearthed was discovered through centuries of work. Their paltry time searching was simply not enough to even think of the way that the clans had sealed the Fallen Morning, let alone a way for them to break the seal.

The other issue Laurence was having was that he recognised the Lupe within the main tent, but could not place him. He had seen many in his time climbing Babel but this one in particular he had definitely seen before. The issue was he had no way to tell whether a person was an Immortal before Yun became a Heaven ranker. He just did not have a sense of scale. It meant that while the Lupe could have been an Adjudicator for the floors of the tower, he could have also been a random Lupe that was floating around Spirit while he was growing. He could have been anyone.

Laurence was still mulling over it when he finally got back to the camp. He pulled off his cloak and appeared in front of Yun, Louisa and Jim, shocking them off their feet.

“Where in the name of everything holy did you come from?” Jim gasped, before standing up and looking at the cape Laurence had pulled off. “Is this...?” He trailed off. Jim had been there when Laurence had first designed the cloak. It had been with Jim's help that Laurence haf come up with the idea of the cloak in the first place.

“Yes. It's the cloak of ignorance”.

“What does the cloak of ignorance do?” Louisa asked.

“It's the inversion of the power of control from the Book of Order. Wearing this cape people just... kinda ignore the fact that you exist. I never had a material with enough spirituality that could be used as fabric for it before, so it was impossible for me to make until recently. I think it turned out quite well honestly”.

“What did you find?” Yun said, cutting across the discussion about Laurence's cloak.

“It's worse than we thought,” Laurence replied, his face dropping slightly at Yun steering the conversation from his cloak back to more pertinent matters. “I think there are double what we originally thought there were soldier-wise”.

“You're kidding me. Two-thousand Saints?” Jim’s eyes were like saucers. “How the hell are we supposed to deal with that?”

“That's not the end of it. Whatever they had to get from capturing the Book Saints exploring the tower, they got. They were referring to them as keys in the missives being passed through Lupe upper management. They’re likely in their final stages of releasing the seal”.

“So we're not too late?” said Louisa. She fluttered back to her seat and wrapped around Yun before gripping his jacket tight.

“Not too late, no. Though I have no idea how in the hell we are going to deal with this”. Laurence frowned while he looked out over the terrifying ants-nest below them. “Is there any word from Winoa?”

“None,” said Jim. “I thought we would have heard back from her by now. Especially as we’re relaying her this mess we've inserted ourselves into”.

“So what do we do from here? We can’t exactly just wait around for her. We have to do something to stop them,” Louisa growled. “I can’t stand being cooped up in a cave while we wait for the Lupe to bring back some sort of ancient monstrosity. There has to be something we can do!”

“I’m going to have a walk around,” Laurence said. “Perhaps that will clear my mind and give me an idea of how to mess with the troops down there”. He stood, walked out of their hole and began a short journey against the edge of the valley. As he walked he would occasionally send out his truesense into the rock to check for any decent materials within the environment. It was something that he knew he should have been doing for far longer than he had been, but he had never really been bothered by it. Occasionally he would send out his truesense in various directions in new regions, but generally once he had an idea of how the land lay. Now he was doing it to see if there was any way to cause the valley to collapse.

His mind would dive into the rock shelf and probe around, for structural weaknesses or drastic shifts in material, but after about ten minutes of doing so he realised that the rock within the ground was all of one material. It had been formed this way. He delved closer to the rock and began to look at it intimately. Inside the rock itself were thousands of glyphs flowing along like water amongst the molecules of the rocks. They were separate yet intertwined with every single piece of the stone.

Laurence sat down and began reading the glyphs, trying to reign in some semblance of understanding of how the seal worked. The more he read the more shocked he became. Not only was this a masterpiece of ingenuity, it was horrifyingly complex. Chain after chain of interlinked glyphs made up the rules of this seal. After an hour he had finally worked out the rudimentary concepts behind the seal and he could not help but be horrified. His musings were right about the nature of the Lupe keys, but the fact that those keys even existed as an option terrified him. The Fallen Morning had truly terrified the clans of old.

He ran back to his friends and sat down out of sight. Taking out a small bottle he drank the entire thing of its contents before putting it away and looking at the three who had quietly waited for him to be able to speak.

“What got your goat,” said Jim, frowning deeply at the state Laurence was in.

“I know what the keys are. I found out”.

“How,” said Louisa. “You said that the Lupe manifests didn’t tell you”.

“They didn’t. I had a look at the land. It’s one massive seal, which seems to culminate at those six blocks in the middle of the valley. The key they were talking about is the mana reservoir of a Saint of one of the Books”.

“Wait, so they needed one for each of the books? Is that why there are six?” Louisa’s face dropped. “Does that mean that you might have...” She trailed off, not willing to speak about what could have happened.

“Indeed. I might have ended up a sacrifice to the return of the Fallen Morning. It’s not a pleasant idea”.

“So what do we do now?” said Jim, “I’ve got no idea about our next couple of steps but surely this should push the clans into moving. They are being targeted by the Lupe and if this doesn’t work for the first time then they will keep targeting the clans”.

“I was planning to tell Winoa now. This should light a fire under those people, and perhaps they’ll finally give us some help... Though in the meantime I have an idea of how to inconvenience the Lupe below us”. Laurence smirked as he pulled several vials out of his storage ring.


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