Page 412

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

-----

-Where.. are you from...- Sitting down next to the statue smaller than my paw, I stared at the clump of stone with an indescribably scrutinous gaze.

Somehow, even though my memories as Bahamut had no recollection of the dragon, something about it scratched the deepest recesses of my mind.

It was the faintest familiarity, an almost impossible-to-catch sensation tied to a memory that wasn't logged in my mind, and just like a computer searching for a file that didn't exist, I couldn't put my tongue on it. -Who.. are you...-

However, even though I recognized that the familiarity was coming from somewhere in my soul, not only could I not pinpoint it, I didn't even know where to begin when it came to forcibly surfacing such a memory.

-From my experience, the only ways are stimulating the memories with something I recognize, falling into a dragon sleep, or dying.

..- And considering the latter options were completely out the window, I was forced to try and find something else in the room that could ring the bell louder than the statue.

But as one would expect, that proved to be far easier said than done.

Going back to looking around the room, I tried my best to find things that were more unique than the prayer plaques, whether they were statues, essentially fossilized pieces of fabric, or artifacts I thought could have had messages in them.

But to no avail.

Compared to a statue of the dragon, nothing else could even remotely scratch that missing part of my mind again.

However, it wasn't a totally fruitless effort.

After spending a little over two days deciphering more texts, I managed to get to a point where I could at least partially read everything in the room, and in the process, found quite a few interesting anomalies regarding the consistency of their contents, and the state of their preservation.

The thing was, from the most recent texts back until I was reading the prayer plaques from the earliest days of Bahamut's rule, most of the prayers metaphorically thanked their god for things like the 'blessing and enrichment of mana', which, being left to interpretation, I assumed regarded the mana well.

The plaques' remarkable preservation only went to reinforce that.

However, the deeper I dug into the phrasing, the more unusual it became, until eventually, I stumbled across a massive gap in the timeline, a time period of at least thirty or forty millennia where not a single prayer plaque was dropped by the well, and with it, the contents of the prayers changed completely.

Compared to the younger texts, the contents of the older plaques were far more explicit, praying directly to a god that supposedly resided 'here' as if speaking directly with them, not relying on euphemisms or figurative speech that was up to interpretation.

However, at the same time, the mention of mana I could possibly relate to being from the well ceased completely, with the mention of the god's presence as the only exception. -But that doesn't make any sense.. even the old plaques are preserved nearly perfectly...-

As I continued to read though, the thought that maybe this place wasn't really a mana well was something I simply couldn't shake from my mind. -It's almost like this place just didn't exist before that time skip around Bahamut's rise...-

But mana wells don't just appear like that. -As far as I know, mana wells rise up out of the ground similar to dungeons... Could these older plaques be from before the well reached the surface?-

The thing was, while each era of plaques had its own trends and consistencies, the older texts constantly spoke of this place being where the titanic dragon they were worshipping lived, very similar to the Tree of Prayer with me, with it being regularly mentioned that the god's presence was too much for younger dragons.

-That could be explained by the well just not having surfaced yet. ..-

After all, such a colossal volume of mana being pushed up through the ground could easily be misunderstood by primitive dragons as the presence of a dragon the size of a mountain range, a god.

-It'd also explain why none of the older plaques thanked anyone for the mana.

- Since if they believed the mana belonged to a god, they wouldn't dare take it.

-How likely are primitive dragons to mistake regular mana for an aura though.

..- Although it was indeed understandable how a human could make the mistake, a dragon was an entirely different being.

-Even if they were that primitive...- Aura had drastically different properties from normal mana to the extent that one could tell the difference completely instinctually.

So, in order to fix my curiosity once and for all, I decided to try digging into the ground like I did the ceiling, but instead of taking several shallow samples, I took one super deep one.

-Depending on how deep the black mythril goes compared to the walls, I might be able to tell if the well came up from the ground. ..-

And that did seem to be the case.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

As I dug deeper and deeper, far from the wall of the mana pool, the black mythril not only never ended, it's strength didn't weaken at all, clearly indicating that the well came up from underground.

However, after going down about three hundred meters, the mana levels I was finding underground started growing immensely, to the point that I couldn't continue using space magic or my aura to dig much further because of the interference.

-I must be hitting an offshoot of the tunnel connecting to the magma cavern. ..-

It was something that truly didn't surprise me, after all, such a huge volume of mana would inevitably eat away a pretty vast cave system.

But I still took one last, far more shallow sample for good measure, pulling it up out of the small hole and glossing over it before tossing it onto the pile with all the other black mythril plugs I pulled from the hole. *Fwip-Thunk*

But the sound instantly stopped in my tracks. -What the?- Compared to the metallic ping the other chunks of mythril I tossed into the pile gave, the shorter piece sounded more like a hunk of wood. -Is it because it's smaller?-

Not buying such a lousy excuse, I hastily picked it back up and looked through it more closely with my aura, checking the chemical composition from top to bottom.

And sure enough, while the top portion was normal, ludicrously strengthened surface-level rock from the original mana well, the lower part was not so similar.

Although incredibly damaged, and extremely porous, almost like lava rock, I couldn't convince myself that that's what it was.

Unlike lava rock, rather than bubbles making the rock porous, it was a web-like series of tiny pathways, each identical to one another in dimension and shape.

And it just so happened that it was a shape I recognized.

-Is this.. bone..?- Although it certainly wasn't a perfect fit, the tapered cone-like shapes that were empty within the bone looked almost identical to cells I found in my own bones.

-If that is the case and the mana just dissolved them.

. then does that mean I stumbled across a fossil? -

It was a complete shot in the dark, and considering the well once resided on the surface, it wouldn't be too surprising. Fossils were rather common on the surface.

However, the section of bone I got was almost half a meter thick, implying it was from something fairly large, likely at least my size, so I ended up getting curious.

-With how thick the mana in the hole has gotten down there, it's probably only a few meters from the edge of the chamber of mana under it.

..- Looking over at the flowing surface of mana, I tilted my head.

-I wonder if part of the fossil is exposed. ..-

Thinking that it could possibly be a creature mistaken as the 'god' that prayers mentioned, I was eager to check it out, so, not quite thinking about how I would actually see anything when I was in the cavern, I slowly eased into the well and did what I could to follow the wall down.

However, after descending about two hundred meters, just past the depth of my last core sample, the passage opened up into an absolutely massive space like a water well leading into an aquifer.

-Woah...- It turned out the well was somehow even larger than I thought.

-Just how much mana is in this place...-

*Woosh* Flapping my wings to ease my way onto the ceiling, I turned toward where I took samples of rock and used my wings, paws, and tail to feel my surroundings, steadily creating an image of my surroundings as I progressed.

Obviously it didn't tell me much at first, but the longer I moved, and the more I traced an image in my head, the more something about it felt odd.

.. The ceiling was extremely rough and almost porous, but every now and then, there would be a huge, smooth bump, and then it would return to being rough for a while before repeating. -What an odd formation...-

In my head, it felt almost like I was walking over dunes or hardened ripples of silt, but as I passed over more and more bumps, I found a rather concerning amount of consistency between them, from the length of the rough patches to the width, height, and even angle of the bumps, everything was almost completely identical.

-There's.. no way...- At most, there was a few centimeters of variance.

But while I did what I could to keep my mind from coming up with anything too insane, as I finally walked up one of the bumps and found myself right below the area I took my rock samples, an idea I was trying to suppress snuck through.

-Is this.. a ribcage..?-

Not believing it, I quickly turned and started walking along the bump.

If the lumps really were ribs, then I'd eventually find a vertebrae, but even as I passed the highest point of the cavern and started making my way down the wall, there was nothing.

-Hah,- It made me want to laugh to shake off the anxiety welling in my stomach.

-Who am I kidding, this cavern is way too big to be something like a skeleton. ..-

After all, I, a dragon well over a hundred meters tall, felt like I was walking the perimeter of a huge colosseum as I made my way down the wall.

However, just as I neared the middle of the wall, the hump I had followed across the roof and down the wall abruptly ended, and intersected with a different, much larger formation.

One that, after feeling around for a moment and walking across it, only to find another hump stretching from the other side, made my entire body tense, and sent a chill down my spine.

It was a vertebrae the size of me...

I was inside of a creature's chest cavity...

-Then that means...- The plaques in the room were right. The inconsistencies I found were actually consistent, and the mana well wasn't actually a mana well.

It never was.

-All this mana.. came from this creature...- Almost instantly, the series of lines I had drawn in my mind from tracing the cavern filled out, and I found myself in the middle of an unimaginably colossal skeleton.

What was sunk into the ground wasn't a mana well, it was a grave.

The grave of a being who was once the true god of the dragons.

The real Bahamut.

Read up to 5 chapters ahead of schedule, and get early access to artwork on My Patreon!

(In case Embedded Link doesn't work: /TDOD )

-------------

Also, please feel free to check out our discord for all updates related to TDOD releases! https://discord.gg/Dv7G5bQD4v

All are welcome!

---

Also if you are looking for a new story, check out my new novel! The System's Harvester

On RR and SH