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Early Morning - Mid Winter : Elafos Family Estate, Eikasía | Eastern Bahamut

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-W..why.. here...- Looking down over the edge of the facility, into the pit of mana-lit magma, my mind raced.

Given that the facility was right under the Draconic Continent, it only made sense if the Acardi had bored up from deep underground, or more likely the mantle, to construct it, however, that possibility raised more questions than answers.

With the ability to traverse the planet through Delphi's mantle, it made no sense to build anything here at all, let alone what I suspected was a series of what was possibly the most advanced facilities on the planet.

-It's not like this would be a small project either, even for the Acardi. ..-

From both an efficiency perspective, and a logical perspective, boring through so much earth just to put your most advanced facilities under your enemy's nose didn't make any sense. -If they just wanted to hide it, they would have just put it somewhere in or near the mantle...-

Yet there it was, with the top of the bored tunnel being a mere five kilometers below the surface.

-There has to be another reason...- But even as I pushed my aura as far into the magma as possible, I couldn't even begin to guess.

-Based on the cables in the walls, there must be more facilities down below.

. and there also seems to be another cavern the Acardi dug out not too far down that I can't follow with my aura.

..- Thinking I could maybe figure something out with a bit of exploration, I wanted to jump down into the magma and swim around so badly it was honestly excruciating.

But it would have to wait.

"What a fascinating structure..." Finally reaching the facility, Keras' eyes glowed, inspecting the rune-like engravings on its side while doing everything he could to try and cope with the mix of heat and mana pushing through my barriers.

But while he was clearly struggling to deal with it, his curiosity seemed to push him through it.

Until he started reaching his limit, that is.

"It's a shame that this will probably be the only time I get to inspect this so closely..." After several minutes, he was literally steaming, attempting to use water magic to condense what little moisture escaped in his breath to sweat-like beads to keep his scales cool.

That meant nothing when his scales glowed like hot iron though. *tssssss*

-Geez...- Knowing I wouldn't be able to go explore the magma until he was done, I tried to slow my racing thoughts with some idle conversation.

"You know, spending time in here is really good for your body.

If you stay in here long enough, you'll eventually be able to venture down here on your own. "

Snapping out of his focus for a moment, an unusually forced smile came to his face. "I understand that, but at this point in my life, I need to spend my time wisely."

-Hm...- Looking him up and down, my gaze turned a bit judgemental. "Are you worried about your dragon sleep?"

He nodded without the slightest hesitation.

"After hearing that Myles Kalfas survived his sleep, my wife and I had a flicker of hope, but the deeper I dug into it, the more I found that it just came down to fate.

" From essentially spending his entire life in an incredibly mana-dense environment, to being sent into a dragon sleep in the middle of a life-or-death battle, Myles had quite literally the perfect entrance into his sleep.

Yet even still, without Dagr's influence, he never would have survived, and Keras likely knew that.

However, that was also what made me find our conversation so amusing. "Why is it that you don't ask me for help? I'm sure you already know that I have the power to do that."

"Haha," Letting out a discomforted laugh, his gaze turned to me before his forced smile vanished entirely. "You know just as well as me that I don't deserve such mercy."

Looking down at his cloudy soul, swirling with anxiety and uncertainty, I shrugged my wings.

"You'd be surprised how fast death can sober someone up.

" Being the biggest distributor of alcohol on the entire continent, Keras was one of the most well-connected dragons alive, having connections to nearly everyone with influence, whether they were commoners or the richest of the rich.

But, just like similarly powerful positions in the government, having such connections came with responsibility that needed to be acknowledged.

And while Keras learned that with time, it wasn't before he made enough mistakes that he was already caught in the trap.

"Like Madam Monachikós has likely already told you, when I was still building up my personal brand and expanding my connections to take the seat of family patriarch after my father, I did more than just glance into the dark alleyways of politics.

.. Even though I thought I heeded my Father's advice, the moment I took a step into the alley, I got trapped. "

Looking down at his glowing scales again, he cringed before continuing in a rushed manner.

"Anyway, to try and keep things short, Madam Monachikós has given me an offer to clean the blood off my paws, and I accepted, but the bad deeds have already been done. I have bathed in too much blood for just cleaning the taste out of my mouth to be enough."

"I see..." -What a troublesome predicament...- He was a man who wished to redeem himself but believed he was unable to because he knew the weight of his sins just as much as he knew the inevitability of death. -But.. he might be too useful for me to surrender him to time.-

Looking deep into his eyes, my mind raced. -He has connections, experience with Acardi technology, and has even begun trying to learn and document physics...- In many ways, he nearly perfectly filled a seat I was eagerly looking to fill.

But, half a day wasn't enough time to bestow upon someone something like that.

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So, giving him a cold look over, I spoke firmly. "If you satisfy Hera with your work and wish for a chance to clean the rest of the blood off yourself, I will give you that opportunity." Lowering my eyes to the soul in his chest, I continued. "Even if it takes you a thousand years."

Understanding that I meant I would help him through his dragon sleep to give him a chance at redeeming himself, his eyes shot open.

"Show that you are worthy of redemption, and the opportunity might just land in front of you."

Getting a bit flustered, he hastily turned away from the facility and lowered his head to the ground. "I will do my best!"

-Good.- Greedily smiling, I raised my snout. "Then I look forward to seeing your progress."

Quickly wrapping up our conversation with a rather satisfied feeling, Keras finally voiced that he had reached his limit with the heat and decided to leave, going on to dedicate himself to the tasks Hera had assigned him rather than continuing to indulge in any more 'unworthy pleasures'.

Although it was impossible to tell if a momentary shift in motivations was enough to get a promising dragon back on track in the long term, it was a sight that left me more pleased than disappointed.

-I quite like him...- Whether it was his craze about technology, or the urge to redeem himself, he was promising enough for me to consider him as something akin to an apostle candidate. -But I can't get ahead of myself...-

As Keras finally made it to the airlock, I undid my barriers around him and stood up, finally letting the turbine of curiosity rip before turning my attention toward the magma with a wide smile.

*Tap-Creak-FLASH* Hopping off the facility, I changed my form to its full size before promptly slamming through the almost non-Newtonian surface of the magma. *WoooOOOSH-THWASH*

"Hooh..." Quickly getting acclimated to the heat, I flooded the magma with my aura, painting the flat walls and sharp corners before quickly finding the artificial-looking hole in the side of the room not too far below.

*blub-blub* -Hm... Since I still can't see the next facility, I should check this before I go down any deeper. ..-

After all, without my aura being able to make out anything inside it, the tunnel could very well lead to another facility.

However, as I swam into it, forcing my way through the crushingly dense magma, I started noticing the mana growing denser and denser, interfeing with my aura more and more.

Until eventually, the Acardi-made tunnel turned upward, and I found myself swimming through nothing but pure liquid mana, completely blotting out my aura to a point that I bumped my nose into the walls of the cave more than once. -Holy shit...-

But as I swam upward, the cavern seemed to grow wider and wider. Being able to spread my wings completely and still not touch anything, it was a truly monumental volume of mana, by far more than I had ever seen in one place.

But like everything, it wasn't infinite.

*Blub-SPLASH* Eventually bursting through the surface of the ocean of mana, I found myself in an absolutely colossal, circular room completely coated in black mythril, with ambient mana so dense that the molecules in the air I exhaled were broken down into nothing but hydrogen.

But, while absolutely horrifying, like anywhere else with such insanely high mana levels, the entire place glowed and glimmered.

-Woah...- With the void-like background of black mythril, it almost felt like I wasn't in an enclosed space at all, and was rather floating in a sea of mana amongst the stars, but the more I looked around, trying to make out the room's finer details with the glow of mana, the more I ended up noticing shapes and formations that couldn't have formed naturally. -What.. is all that..?-

Finally swimming toward the embankment, I climbed up out of the pool of mana before using some light magic to flood the room with light beyond the normal visual wavelengths so I could see the form and texture of things, disregarding the void-like black mythril coating everything.

But that just exposed something I'm not sure I was ready to see.

All around the central pool of mana, I found broken statues, artifacts, fossilized flowers, and even intricate carvings and plaques so damaged they were hard to make out.

Being nearly thirty kilometers underground, this was a place that never should have been able to see sunlight, let alone life, yet everything I saw there told me otherwise. -What the hell...-

More cautiously continuing into the room, I slowly made my way up to one of the many broken metal plaques scattered on the ground and tried to read the engravings, only to be presented with an absolutely ancient, unreadable dialect of draconic my memories as Bahamut and Nott understood as 'primitive draconic', a language long predating both Bahamut, and my arrival to Delphi as Nott. -No way...-

Having been preserved by the unfathomably high mana levels, it was like I was cracking open an ancient time capsule. Everywhere I looked, there were artifacts that predated the entirety of draconic civilization.

But while I thought everything in there would be similarly prehistoric, after looking into more of the details of items, I found my fascination begin to twist into confusion.

The more artifacts I inspected, the more I found that the eras they originated from fluctuated, with some having easily recognizable text not much different from Hera's era while others depicted what could only be described as the draconic equivalent of cave paintings. -What the hell?-

Thinking that maybe there used to be a path from the surface leading to this place, I turned my attention to the walls and ceiling, looking for anything that could have been an old, capped pathway, but to no avail. -That can't be right though...-

It wasn't like nearly thirty kilometers of rock and sediment could come out of nowhere after all.

So, to try and use another method of finding an entrance, I used my space mana to cut out sections of rock from different places, starting on the ground and working my way up the wall, looking through the various layers in hopes of finding variations in their layers.

And sure enough, while the ground and walls appeared to still be layers of dirt, strengthened to mythril over time, the ceiling was made entirely of bedrock that almost perfectly matched the surrounding bedrock.

The entire mana well was buried... -The Acardi built here because they knew Bahamut wouldn't ever dig it back up.

..- And with an essentially endless supply of mana and heat, they no longer had limits.

With more energy than they could even utilize with the heat and mana, they could do whatever they wanted, in a place that would never be discovered, while their enemy actively worked to hide whatever anomalies they created.

After all, who would let their own crimes see the daylight after going through so much effort to bury it.

*Thump* Sitting down, my claws curled with reignited anger, digging scratches into the black mythril ground that had remained untouched for countless millennia.

But as I sat there in the suffocating bubble of mana, struggling to suppress my anger aimed at Bahamut, I had an idea come to mind that rather quickly pulled my attention away from it...

Because while Bahamut committed atrocities that words could not describe, there was no need for me to dwell on the past...

Especially if dwelling on it meant I had to pass up on such a magnificent opportunity. -With so much insanely high-density mana… Isn’t this the perfect place to study enriched mana?-

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