Saintess Summons Skeletons-Chapter 838 P - The well oiled machines

Pestle looked around as she cautiously crawled through the opening she had just carved through the thick door.

Glancing inside, she failed to notice any kind of obvious security system, the ruin was rather clean, a bit suspiciously so, the metallic walls reflected the red sheen of dim dot-like lights tracing a path along the floor.

Is like it just is cleaned… But not see danger. Is Nonia worry for nothing?

Pestle jumped down from her hole in the door, and immediately she felt something wrong.

Floor hollow?

Crouching down, she carved another round hole, through the floor. She carefully removed the cutout without making a sound, and looked under the floor. The floor was indeed hollow, in fact it was a simple metal sheet and under it was a complex network of gears, tubes and cables.

It all dead already. Pestle observed, as the various gears and tubes were all sliced through by the stone floor of the previous ruin after they got past the door.

Curious, she pulled out a tiny gear and nibbled on it.

It tasted decent but she couldn't quite tell what it was made of.

If danger it come from thing not break. Sliding and hopping her way through the pipes, Pestle made it to the closest faintly glowing red light. It like lightstone?

The light source turned out to be some kind of small opaque cube. A tiny claw dug open the cube only to reveal a thin cable inserted in the center of a thin glowing disk like a strange flat flower.

It just magic disk?! Is Klepra is make this?!

Why is make fake lightstone when lighstone is exist?!

Pestle couldn’t help but shake her skull in disappointment, she touched the cable, feeling mana movements inside.

Let see where mana come from.

Pestle followed the cable, which split into a different branch for each light, and into multiple paths at the first intersection of the corridor above. Pestle just followed the flow of mana in reverse, as long as she kept her hands on the cable it was easy to feel even with how saturated the air was.

Before long she started to hear the noise of gears turning and fluids flowing, which became clearer as she kept following the cable. After multiple turns, she reached the source, a room under which the multiple strange mechanisms were still working flawlessly. It was separated from the corridor’s underground by a thin wire mesh. Pestle stopped in her tracks. The cable she followed actually led to somewhere else, so she had a decision to make.

Letting go of the cable, she approached the mesh, it looked like a regular squared mesh, with a few thin cables running through it into the room, but when Pestle drew closer, she noticed something wrong with it.

Cube alarm?! A weak magic current flowed through the mesh like a right-angled snake, drawing unfamiliar enchantments made of squares and rectangles.

Pestle scratched her skull, walked to the solid metallic wall between the rest of the corridor and the room, and cut a hole through it.

Always is only protect door… What is you protect from? Insect?

Stepping into the room’s underground mechanics, Pestle landed on a large rotating gear, letting it carry her forward. Here some of the floor above her was actually clear glass, allowing her to look up.

Pestle froze, she was invisible but she still stopped moving. There was someone above, in the room full of incomprehensible machines. A human-looking figure in a full white gown, a hood covering its head, was deeper into the room, facing a smooth metallic table. Pestle could only see its back.

Pestle was confident that she would have felt anyone’s aura before she would ever see them directly, even in the strange environment of the forbidden layer, yet she had been completely oblivious to this person’s presence.

Completely immobile and silent, she stayed on the rotating gear, watching the strange figure. It moved ever so slightly, which made it look like it was alive, but seemed not to be doing anything.

A loud click disturbed the gentle noise of the rotating gears, which almost made Pestle jump, and a few wet sounds followed. Three ugly hand-shaped fishes fell from a hole in the ceiling directly on the table above the white figure, still struggling and flailing around.

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Pestle watched in shock as a dozen of strange mechanical limbs shot out from the figure’s hood, grabbing the fishes and dismantling them in record time. It was not butchering but truly a pure mechanical dismantlement in just a few seconds, the fishes were separated into scales, skin, guts, flesh, and bones, all dumped by the mechanical limbs into long tubes protruding out of a nearby machine, while their blue blood flowed down from the table into a floor drain. Pestle could see the blood flow down another transparent tube from where she was. After all that, the mechanical limbs folded back into the spotless white hood.

… Pesle think maybe Dark Epoch name very deserve. Why you is waste all the leg?!

Pestle sat on the rotating gear and waited. As she had guessed, a few minutes later, more fishes fell with a loud click. Under the cover of the loud noise from the fish and the figure’s mechanical limbs, Pestle flew through the underground, making it directly under the hooded person.

Still not feel aura.

The floor tiles above weren’t enchanted in any way, and it seemed there was no security system anywhere, making Pestle wonder why she was even being so careful. Nevertheless, she proceeded to wait again until the next loud noise to pierce a tiny hole up with a claw, directly under the person’s long white robes.

Iron skelton?!

Sofia very disappoint.

Not look very danger…

Pestle stayed there for a few more fish drop cycles, watching the mechanics of the strange robot above her. She carved a larger hole in the floor, and analyzed the Iron Skeleton’s mana flow, slowly figuring out where the energy came from, and how the thing worked, until she felt ready to strike.

More fishes fell, Pestle shot up through the floor, and in one swift motion, grabbed the thing’s energy core nestled deep within its ‘chest’, while slicing through several bundles of cables.

The thing froze. A surge of liquid mana flowed back from the mechanical limbs, trying to activate an emergency mechanism, but the cables were already sliced and in Pestle’s mouth. She greedily devoured the delicious flow of liquid mana, and the machine fell silent, frozen where it stood.

Danger is kill. Pestle thought, nodding to herself as she tossed the energy core, a tiny black marble, directly into her mouth.

She did not linger too much, letting herself fall back underground, she roamed around the room, exploring into its walls, which were quite similar to the underground, but with fewer gears and a lot more tubes. When she felt that there really was no alarm system anywhere, she entered the room again, wanting to understand what was going on with the dismantled fish.

She followed the machines and their tubes, until she found the end of the production line. There were two tubes, slowly dripping different liquids. One produced the same liquid mana she had just gobbled up, which dripped down into an underground tube, while the other produced faintly glowing blue water, sent upwards with some air bubbles through a transparent cable that pierced the ceiling.

Shiny water is FISH?!

Fish swim in fish.

Klepra world…

A bit disgusted by her findings, Pestle left this room behind, and decided to follow the liquid mana collection system that seemed to go further underground.

Sisty thousand year of leg!

Following the tube down a narrow shaft for almost thirty meters, Pestle’s way down was stopped by another enchanted wire mesh. Flying in place, she looked down through the mesh without touching it. Right under her was a huge tank of concentrated liquid mana, it was almost full, and had a capacity of easily a hundred thousand liters. Its mere presence made the already thick mana in the air feel almost like a sludge. The tank stood in a corner of a vast-looking open area, although Pestle couldn’t see very far into it, and tubes coming out of it supplied a few machines. The place was very noisy, and even in the small section of the space Pestle could see, there were already a handful of white-robed figures walking around making light mechanical sounds. 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

This difficult.

They were difficult to spot, but there were tiny mechanical spiders hiding in corners of this room. Pestle had finally found a real alarm system, and it wasn’t one she could easily avoid. To make things worse, upon closer inspection, the walls here were also lined with gold patterns, and clearly had some mana flowing through, which would likely also trigger an alarm if Pestle tried to dig around.

After a bit of thinking, she flew back up the shaft, and broke into the machine producing the liquid mana. She stood on the edge of the narrow collection tube, the opening was about as large as a pencil, even for a Fairy it wasn’t something she could fit inside of.

For a living Fairy, that is. Pestle laid down over the tube, lining up her mana core with the opening, and let the magic holding her bones together fall apart. The tiny mana core dropped into the tube.

Maintaining herself ‘alive’ as just a mana core wasn’t exactly easy, but with the abundant mana around in the forbidden layer, it was more than possible. How could the alarms possibly detect this mana fluctuation going through a tube intended to collect liquid mana?

Pestle’s mana heart dropped into the liquid mana tank, directly sinking to the bottom.

It was pure bliss.

Pestle even forgot why she was here, her mind completely overwhelmed by the infinite mana rush plugging the endless hunger in her soul.

She never even thought to regrow her bones, only greedily draining the tank. The dark epoch scientists would have cried tears of blood at the eating speed of this midenicite glutton. It wasn’t until the liquid mana level was so low that it could no longer feed the different tubes connected to the tank that something changed.

A loud blaring sound echoed through the dark epoch ruins.

In the remaining kiddy pool of liquid mana, Pestle’s midenicite bones hastily reformed.

ACK! Pesle is discover!