Chapter 73: Chapter 73: Echoes of the Maiden

The silence within the Root Way was never truly empty. It was a layered, living quiet, composed of the faint, rhythmic hiss of water droplets hitting soft moss, the tectonic groan of ancient roots shifting a fraction of a millimeter every hour, and, of course, the melancholic melody drifting from the digital music box in Dayat’s hand.

The song “Orange” by 7!! played softly, its acoustic guitar strings and clear vocals cutting through the stagnant, humid air beneath the Terragard Mountains.

“Chiisana kata wo narabete aruita… Nanimonai michi de waraiai nagara…”

The crystalline voice sang of twilight memories and a farewell that was both sweet and agonizing. To Dayat, this song was a portable fragment of home. The lyrics—meaning “We walked with our small shoulders lined up… laughing together on an empty road”—felt hauntingly appropriate for their current situation. They were four beings of vastly different origins, crawling through the dark, bioluminescent arteries of a world that didn’t quite know what to make of them.

“The song… it feels heavy, Big Bro,” Kancil whispered.

The boy walked directly behind Dayat, his right hand occasionally brushing the grip of the Glock 17 at his waistband. He wasn’t afraid; his instincts had simply sharpened into a state of permanent alertness. “I don’t understand the words, but the melody makes me feel like I’ve lost something I haven’t even found yet.”

“That’s called art, Kancil. You don’t need to pass a language proficiency test to feel the weight of an emotion,” Dayat replied shortly, his eyes fixed on the path ahead.

At the rear of their formation, Lunethra moved with an elegance that defied the rugged terrain. However, her usually serene face was etched with a growing unease. As an ancient Elf with a high sensitivity to Mana, she could feel the atmosphere shifting, thickening into something unnatural. The LED headlamps they wore projected sharp, blue-white beams that sliced through the thin subterranean mist, but even that high-intensity light seemed to be swallowed by an encroaching, absolute darkness.

“Dayat, pause the sound for a moment,” Lunethra said suddenly. Her voice was a low, urgent whisper.

Dayat pressed the button. The J-pop melody vanished, replaced by a silence so thick it felt physical. “What is it, Lun? You sense a predator?”

“Not a predator,” Lunethra stepped forward, bypassing Kancil until she stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Dayat. She closed her eyes, her ears twitching. “The Mana in this sector… it’s dead. Usually, every inch of the Root Way is saturated with the rhythmic pulse of Riha and Arda. But ahead? It feels as if a localized black hole is inhaling every scrap of natural energy. This is no longer a natural cavern.”

Dayat adjusted his headlamp, aiming the beam forward. About twenty meters ahead, the chaotic, organic sprawl of the World-Tree roots changed. The roots were no longer growing freely; they were forced to wrap around something massive, something governed by perfect, unnatural geometry.

A gargantuan cylindrical structure lay tilted in the dirt, partially consumed by earth and the vice-like grip of petrified roots. The material wasn’t stone, nor was it the crude, hammered iron of the Dwarves. Its surface was a matte silver-gray, smooth and possessed of a dull luster that reminded Dayat of high-performance composite concrete or aged titanium panels.

“This… wasn’t made by human hands or Dwarven hammers,” Dayat muttered. He approached the structure, his hand trembling as he touched the freezing surface. “This is functional architecture. It looks like… a bunker.”

Suddenly, Dola’s footsteps halted. Her robotic chassis locked in place, her posture turning rigid. Her electric-blue eyes began to flicker erratically, cycling from sapphire to a bruised, deep purple, then back to blue. The high-pitched whine of her internal cooling fans surged in volume.

“Dola? Hey, talk to me!” Dayat turned, his heart hammering against his ribs.

Dola didn’t respond. Her head tilted to the left in a series of sharp, mechanical jerks. Her jaw unhinged, but what emerged wasn’t a human voice. It was a staccato stream of numbers spoken in a flat, rapid-fire drone.

“01001101… 01000001… 01001001… 01000100… 01000101… 01001110…”

“Dola! Stop!” Dayat lunged forward, wrapping his arms around her.

Dola’s body was vibrating with a violent frequency, as if high-voltage electrical currents were jumping beneath her synthetic skin. Dayat could feel the resonance vibrating through his own chest. Strangely, her skin wasn’t hot; it was perfectly nominal, but her internal systems were clearly undergoing a catastrophic logic failure. Dola gripped Dayat’s tactical jacket with a strength that made the fabric groan, her fingers leaving permanent indentations.

“Pain… Master… data density… exceeding capacity… forced synchronization…” Dola moaned between her strings of binary code.

Lunethra stood frozen a few paces away, witnessing the scene with a complex swirl of emotions. A sharp, alien pang of isolation pierced her heart. There, in the heart of a darkness that rejected all magic, a man with an anomalous soul was holding a dying machine that acted like a suffering woman. They were bound by something Lunethra could never touch—a secret code, a binary destiny that transcended her understanding of the spirit world. She felt like an uninvited ghost at an intimate, technical funeral.

“Kancil, get the industrial torch from my pack! The big one!” Dayat yelled, never releasing his hold on Dola.

Kancil scrambled to obey, digging into the MOLLE straps of Dayat’s bag. Dayat closed his eyes for a microsecond, manifesting the necessary power.

ZRRRRAAAP!

A Pelican Industrial Flashlight appeared in Dayat’s hand—a heavy-duty beast used in deep-sea oil rigs. Its 10,000-lumen beam exploded into the darkness, bright enough to blind any organic eye. Dayat swept the light across the structure’s hull.

The brilliance revealed the truth. On the surface of the smooth silver panels were engravings that were deep, sharp, and calculated. They weren’t reliefs of gods, heroes, or mythic beasts. The engravings consisted of thousands upon thousands of 1s and 0s, arranged in perfect, interlocking square blocks.

“Numbers… this is code. This is source-code,” Dayat whispered.

As a layman who only used computers for office work and gaming back on Earth, Dayat was functionally illiterate in the face of programming languages. He knew it was binary, he knew it was how machines spoke to their souls, but he had no capacity to decrypt it. To him, it was a terrifyingly complex relic of a lost era.

“I’m not an IT guy, Dola… I don’t understand this,” Dayat whispered into her ear, trying to anchor her. “Forget the code. Just focus on my voice. Breathe, even if you don’t have to.”

Dola’s tremors began to subside. Her eyes returned to a stable, glowing sapphire. She leaned her head against Dayat’s shoulder, her synthetic breath coming in heavy, simulated hitches. “Passive synchronization complete, Dayat. Forgive me. This structure is emitting a low-frequency broadcast that forced my protocols to initiate a data-handshake.”

“What is this structure, truly?” Lunethra asked, finally finding the courage to approach. She stared at the binary blocks with visible dread. “It feels like a graveyard for the soul. Cold. Heartless.”

“It’s machine language, Lun,” Dayat said, slowly releasing Dola, ensuring she could stand on her own. “In my world, all technology is built on these numbers. But why… why are they here? Buried under the roots of the World-Tree?”

Dayat pulled out a Tactical Tablet—his latest minor manifestation—to photograph the strings of code. Though he couldn’t read them now, he knew Dola would need this data once she recovered her full processing power.

They followed the curve of the cylinder until they found a sliding hatch that was already partially ajar. The gap was wide enough for one person to squeeze through. From the interior, a scent of ozone and bone-dry air wafted out, a jarring contrast to the humid, organic rot of the Root Way.

“Big Bro, look! Spiders… but they aren’t moving,” Kancil pointed at the floor near the entrance.

Dayat aimed the industrial torch downward. Lying on the metal floor were several small constructs the size of dinner plates. They were shaped like spiders, but their bodies were made of brass-alloy that had rusted into a dull green. Their legs were stiff, and their primary “head” lens was shattered and dark.

“Scout-Spiders,” Dola identified, her voice returning to its clinical, flat tone. “Ancient generation autonomous reconnaissance units. Kinetic energy reserves depleted millennia ago. They were the original sentinels of this facility.”

“This place… it’s a temple, isn’t it?” Lunethra asked hesitantly.

Dayat looked at the open hatch. Above the door was a single line of binary code, larger and bolder than the rest. Dola read it internally, but she chose not to translate it for Dayat. Not yet.

“The Maiden’s Cradle.”

“Do we go in?” Kancil asked, his voice filled with an excitement that outstripped his fear. To a boy who had spent his life in the gutters of Bakasa, this clean, metallic tomb looked like a treasure hunter’s paradise.

“We don’t have a choice. The Root Way is blocked by this thing,” Dayat said, his hand checking the Silver Thorn on his back. The legendary blade of Adamantite remained inert, a piece of ancient metal that held no resonance with the technology before it. To Dayat, it was still just a high-density material waiting to be repurposed.

They stepped into the darkness of the “temple.” Inside, emergency lights in the ceiling, dimmed by age, began to flicker rhythmically, as if sensing the arrival of guests they had been waiting ten thousand years to receive.

The sound of Dayat’s tactical boots on the metallic floor echoed, creating a rhythmic clank… clank… Dayat reached down and lowered the volume on his music box. The song “Orange” had transitioned into another melancholic lofi track, providing a surreal soundtrack for their exploration of this technological tomb.

Dayat did not know that at the end of this hallway, he might finally find the answer to who Dola really was, and why a world filled with magic hid a heart of cold steel beneath its roots.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep