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TL: ALT
Chapter 35 – Day 34 of Living in the Demonic Land
“Wake up…”
Cher pulled on my clothes and woke me up.
“Huh? What’s wrong?”
“Makyo, you’re awake!”
“Ouch… what? Is it healed?”
I tried to stand up, protecting my broken ankle, but there was no pain.
“It seems the healing spell worked.”
It seems Jennifer healed me.
“Thank you.”
Light shone down from just above the bottom of the old well.
It seems the storm from yesterday has passed. I don’t hear the footsteps of the giant monster either.
“Over here! Over here!”
Even after I woke up, Cher pulled on my clothes.
“What’s wrong?”
After forcing me to stand up, Cher left me there. She ran off into the depths of the well, where there was no light. There seems to be a passageway at the bottom of the dry well.
“Over here!”
“I heard you. What is this well? Is there a hidden underground river?”
Jennifer offered me her shoulder, but I said, “I’m fine,” and went on my own. I walked in the direction of Cher’s voice.
“There’s a light.”
In front of Cher, I see a dim green light. It doesn’t look like the light from a magic stone lantern, and it seems to be some kind of glowing moss or plant.
“It’s beautiful~.”
“…..!”
There were glowing mushrooms growing out of the walls all along the passage. Cher was impressed as she looked at the glowing mushrooms, which were the size of liquor bottles. Jennifer was scared and didn’t speak.
“Don’t touch them. If you get numb, I’ll leave you here.”
With that, Cher suddenly moved away from the mushrooms and came closer to me. Didn’t she think it was dangerous? Maybe the demon race isn’t very good at risk management.
As we passed the glowing mushrooms, we suddenly came out into a large room.
“An underground lake…”
A dark lake stretched out in front of me. The light from the glowing mushroom only reached about three meters in front of me, but when I spoke, my voice echoed. It was eerie as I felt something stirring in the darkness.
“Makyo!”
Cher picked up a stone or something and showed it to me.
It was a stone that looked exactly like the doughnut-shaped stone with a lightning pattern on the bottom of the lake near my house.
“I think it’s the same rock. What do you think it is?”
“I don’t know, but it was held by a skeleton.”
“A skeleton?”
In the direction Cher was pointing, the skeleton of a robed person was sitting cross-legged as if in meditation.
“Maybe it’s a monk.”
“A monk?”
“No, it’s nothing… but it looks like he’s still hiding something in his robe.”
“Eek, it’s scary! It’s cursed!”
Cher grabbed my arm and pulled me along. I wonder if the demon race is weirdly religious.
I pulled the robe off the bones, searched the pockets, and found a booklet called “Traveler’s Handbook” that novice adventurers read. The paper was of poor quality, and there was a small black mold growing on it.
“This is an adventurer’s ‘travel guide’, right? I have one too. But it looks like an old design.”
Jennifer, who looked like a priest, prayed to the skeleton before asking me.
“Yes, I’ve seen one before.”
The contents are not much different from the booklet I was given when I joined the Adventurer’s Guild. However, it says, “Don’t lose the key to the dungeon,” with an illustration referring to the stone with the lightning pattern.
“Is that stone the key to the dungeon?”
“Dungeon? Have you been there?”
Cher asked.
Of course, I’ve never been to a dungeon in my entire depraved life.
“No. Do you think I’m that serious about being an adventurer?”
“Huh? Are you an adventurer?”
It seems Cher didn’t think I was an adventurer, to begin with.
“I’ve been there. I spent many days going deeper and deeper into the dungeon, defeating monsters along the way. In the capital city, we were the party of adventurers who had gone deepest into the dungeon. But we didn’t need such stones,” Jennifer said.
“Hee~, where was the dungeon?”
“Oh, it was a dungeon near the capital.”
“There’s a dungeon near the capital? This country is more dangerous than I thought.”
People from the countryside don’t know about the situation in the capital.
“Well, there are advantages to the dungeon, and there are many adventurers in the capital.”
I don’t know if Jennifer’s story is true, but I want to go to the dungeon near the capital as an adventurer.
I’m not accepting adventurer requests right now, but I feel like I’m doing something like managing a demonic land, and I’m adventuring more than I ever have in my life.
“Hmm? There’s something written on the last page.”
There was something scribbled on the back page.
It was written in an old script and was hard to read, but it said this.
“The dungeon has been stolen by the magic beast, it’s over.”
I read it and turned around to look at the underground lake.
Can a dungeon be stolen? If the person in the robe was the dungeon master, and if that huge monster could steal a dungeon…
“No way, that’s not true!”
“What’s wrong?”
“Can a dungeon be stolen?”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s impossible.”
The two of them looked at the skeleton with pitiful eyes.
“I know, right?”
I was strangely curious, so I put the booklet in my breast pocket.
“We have nothing more to do here. Let’s go.”
“Yeah.”
And so we decided to go back the way we came.
As we were leaving, I turned around one last time and shouted, “Hey!” in the direction of the underground lake.
My voice echoed, and I was reminded of how big this place was. If it weren’t for the water, I began to think that there might have been a dungeon here.
“Stealing a dungeon… How on earth would you do that…?”
I thought as I touched the stone in my hand that had a lightning pattern on it.
“Makyo, hurry!”
“Yes, yes.”
I followed Cher while supporting my injured leg.
Cher’s physical abilities had been strengthened by living in the demonic land, and she easily threw me out of the well and onto the ground.
The sky was clear.
It was as if yesterday’s storm had been a lie.
There was not even a hint of the giant magical beast.
However, when I walked towards my home cave, it was very different from the forest that was there yesterday. The trees had fallen, and there were monster corpses and blood everywhere. In the pond that I thought were the footprints of the monsters, the monsters and plants were crushed. The place that used to be a forest has become the bottom of the pond, and the river has risen, and the water plants at the bottom have begun to dry up.
Rumbling!
A landslide occurred, and boulders as tall as a man rolled past us.
“Watch out!”
The terrain had changed too much for us to move around, and it took us a long time.
We also encountered monsters, but many of them were crouching and not moving. I guess it’s because if they move, something might fall on them, or the ground might shake.
Growling.
Cher’s stomach rumbled.
“Come to think of it, we haven’t eaten since yesterday.”
There was dead monster meat everywhere, and there were also monsters that didn’t move, but I didn’t feel like eating them.
“Oh, you can eat this.”
Jennifer said as she picked up some strong-smelling leaves that the forest rat didn’t want.
“Do people in the capital only eat this kind of herb?”
“When there are a lot of people, there are a lot of smells!”
“Better than nothing, I guess.”
In the end, we broke open the cam fruit that was chewing on the herbs and the monster’s corpse and ate it. The river had changed course, and it was muddy, but we had no choice but to drink it.
“At least if we can make it home, even if it’s in ruins, we’ll be able to make it somehow.”
“Yeah.”
“We need to get some firewood. It’s damp, so it’ll be hard to make a fire.”
The sun will be setting soon. It looks like we’ll have to camp in the forest tonight.
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