[Chapter 122. Into the Unknown]
Searanox traced the etched, glowing runes with a steady finger, his touch light against the cold, dark metal of the dismantled golem. The newly acquired knowledge from his Arcane Artificer job illuminated their purpose in his mind like jagged bolts of lightning flickering across a previously pitch-black landscape. Most of the symbols now deciphered themselves into coherent, logical concepts—energy conduits that pulsed with an imagined, thrumming power, and amplification matrices that looked designed to multiply any magical input exponentially.
However, others remained stubbornly cryptic, their intricate patterns far too complex for his current level of understanding. Their shapes seemed to twist and coil in ways that defied standard geometric interpretation, hinting at a higher tier of magitech he wasn't yet privy to. One thing, however, became undeniably clear: the arm cannon was merely a subsystem. It was an offensive component entirely dependent on a much larger, more integrated structure to function. On its own, the cannon was little more than a heavy, useless hunk of metal and crystal; it needed a central processor and a massive energy reservoir to truly breathe life into it.
"If I modify the base design," he murmured, his voice sounding hoarse and gravelly in the silent chamber. He was thinking of his own drones, imagining them outfitted with scaled-down versions of these magitech cannons. "I could make it far more compact. I could sacrifice a portion of the raw output for portability, or perhaps go the other direction—create something even larger by mounting a heavy-duty variant on its own dedicated, automated platform."
He rose slowly from the foldable chair, his joints letting out a chorus of protests after days of sitting in the same rigid position. A slab of raw meat materialized in his hand, retrieved from his storage—remnants of some forgotten beast from a previous hunt. Its metallic, iron-rich scent immediately filled the stagnant air around him. He chewed methodically, the coppery taste of blood familiar and grounding as he considered the endless possibilities within this timeless space.
His thoughts drifted without a fixed focus, meandering through various configurations and potential applications while his cargo drones continued their work, methodically dismantling the remaining armored plates of the golem. As he reached out to finally retrieve the Medium Magitech Core from the center of the golem's chest cavity, feeling its residual warmth radiating through his fingers like a dying coal, Searanox covered a heavy yawn with the back of his hand. The sheer, mental exhaustion of the last few days had finally caught up with him, his vision blurring slightly at the edges.
"Maybe after I take a nap," he grumbled to the empty room. "The world isn't going anywhere."
Without further hesitation, he stretched out directly on the polished black stone of the node floor. The cool surface seeped through his tactical clothes, providing a welcome, numbing relief to his aching muscles. Sleep claimed him almost instantly, his mind finally shutting down after four days of painstaking rune work and technical analysis. The complex patterns and blueprints that had been dancing behind his eyelids finally faded into a merciful, dreamless darkness.
He woke hours later to the dim, rhythmic golden glow of the veins pulsing through the stone floor beneath him. The light was steady and hypnotic, a heartbeat for the node itself. After stretching the stiffness from his limbs with a series of loud, satisfying cracks, he sat up, his eyes falling immediately on the waiting core.
Searanox plucked the Medium Magitech Core from its housing, the amber sphere feeling warm and strangely vibrant against his palm. As the connection was severed, the golem's remaining lights flickered once, then twice, casting long, dancing shadows across the polished black stone floor before dying completely. A soft, final sigh of escaping pressurized air followed the power loss, and the once-formidable guardian became nothing more than an inert, empty husk of scrap metal.
[System Notification]
─ Congratulations! Node Guardian has been defeated.
─ Approve use of Lodestone to claim the Node.
─ [+800 Exp]
He retrieved another Lodestone from his storage ring, the stone feeling cool and heavy in his hand. Placing it carefully on the central raised platform, he watched as it began to spin—slowly at first, then with increasing velocity. Its golden light intensified until it filled the entire chamber with a blinding, sun-like radiance. The pulsing golden veins in the floor responded in kind, their rhythm quickening to match the Lodestone's frantic energy.
A few seconds later, the world blurred, and he was violently ejected from the node space. He reappeared in the forest beside the original node stone with a jarring suddenness that made his head swim. Almost simultaneously, he heard a soft thud at his side and looked down at his feet. The fist-sized stone he had tossed upward just before entering the node sat lodged in the soft, damp earth, exactly where it would have landed if it had fallen naturally.
The forest around him remained completely unchanged. The shadows hadn't moved an inch, and the birdsong continued without interruption, as if he had never left.
"It was indeed just a few seconds of real-world time, then," he murmured, his voice now a low, satisfied rumble. It confirmed his earlier mathematical observations about the extreme time dilation. The outside world remained entirely unaware of the four days of intense study and labor he had just completed within the node's pocket dimension.
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A cargo drone hovered nearby, its yellow lenses fixed on him in a silent, expectant wait for his next command. Searanox sent it toward the tower with a sharp mental impulse, watching as the heavy machine ascended above the green canopy before disappearing toward the distant spire. Minutes passed before he confirmed it had reached the fortress, dropping its heavy load of dismantled golem parts behind the lower outerwall surrounding the atrium.
Once he confirmed through his mental link that the drone was empty and the cargo was secure, he dismissed it, returning it to his storage with a thought. In its place, an Intermediate Travel Drone materialized, its anti-gravity engines humming with a smooth, high-end vibration.
"Now then," he murmured to himself, adjusting his gear. "Let's see what is actually hiding in the southeast. It was clearly not the Tidal Terrace."
As Searanox mounted the drone, he spoke his thoughts into the wind. "If it's not there, then it's beyond it. Somewhere my drones haven't cover yet."
The drone ascended rapidly, carrying him away from the newly claimed node and toward the mysteries that awaited in the deep, southeastern reaches of the forest.
As the dense forest began to thin and the distant, roaring sound of rushing water reached his ears, Searanox dismissed the intermediate travel drone. Its humming form dissolved into motes of cyan light that faded quickly against the backdrop of the river's misty spray. His gaze settled on the dungeon entrance nestled between floating stones over the rocky riverbed—the Tidal Terrace. It looked like a dark blue maw hovering above the water, a portal that seemed to actively drink the light around it.
Instead of entering, he summoned eleven Basic Recon Drones. Their forms shimmered into existence with a soft, electronic hum, their small violet lenses acting like dozens of unblinking eyes searching the shifting shadows.
Six of the drones shot off toward the south, while the remaining five banked east, spreading into a long, sweeping formation that cut through the canopy like silver needles. Each drone maintained a strict five-kilometer distance from its neighbor—a calculated, tactical compromise between sensor coverage and scouting speed. It was a grid that still left vast expanses of unexplored territory between the drones, and the gaps nagged at his analytical mind. Each blind spot was a potential hiding place for whatever had drawn the guidance scroll's attention, but it was currently the most efficient way to sweep a massive area in the shortest amount of time.
A Basic Travel Drone materialized beneath him. Its energy field lifted him into the air with barely a whisper, its frame significantly more utilitarian and less comfortable than its intermediate counterpart. He began to drift southeast at a steady, rhythmic pace as the recon drones took up their fixed positions. Their signals pinged back to his consciousness like rhythmic echoes in a vast, empty chamber.
The basic variant's top speed was only forty kilometers per hour, noticeably slower than the intermediate's sixty. It was a trade-off he had deliberately made for this mission.
The choice was a matter of sustainability over raw speed. The intermediate recon drones cost twice as much to maintain in terms of energy, which would drastically cut his total uptime and force him to constantly monitor his TP reserves. With eleven basic variants, however, he could sustain the search pattern indefinitely. Their lower maintenance cost was a massive strategic advantage in a prolonged hunt. Only his own travel drone would draw significantly from his reserves, and even that was a manageable cost. Once he reached the maximum telemetry range of the recon drones, he could simply land, set up a perimeter, and let them continue their sweep while his points regenerated.
At least, that had been the plan.
Now, however, he hovered directly over the center of a massive, sprawling lake. Its distant shores vanished into the horizon in every direction, the water a clear, brilliant blue under the midday sun. The sheer scale of the body of water defied comprehension. It was a sudden, massive geographical anomaly that simply did not exist in any of his pre-System memories of the region.
`So much for that plan. Whatever I'm looking for wouldn't be sitting at the bottom of some random lake.` Searanox thought with a flicker of annoyance.
His travel drone carried him across the sixty-kilometer expanse of water, the journey stretching much longer than he had anticipated due to the basic drone's reduced speed. The water below was unnaturally still, acting like a mirror for the sky above.
"That is one big-ass lake. To my knowledge, there was no lake like this in central Germany... not even close," he murmured to himself. The drone skimmed just a few meters over the surface, its wake barely disturbing the glass-like water. "Did the System completely change the layout of the land, or did it just drop an entire sea in the middle of the continent?"
The question hung unanswered in the air—another unsettling reminder of just how much of their physical world had been rewritten by the new reality.
The slower speed of the basic travel drone made the crossing feel like an eternity. However, as he finally approached the far shore, the answer to his search became glaringly obvious. He no longer needed the recon drones to tell him what lay to the southeast.
The terrain on this side of the lake was mostly flat, punctuated by occasional rolling hills covered in an unnaturally uniform, vibrant green grass. Beyond the hills, the land stretched endlessly toward the horizon. And there, rising from the distant plains, were structures—angular, grey, and imposing. Their forms were far too regular and geometric to be anything but constructed.
Searanox landed the drone on the rocky, desolate shore, dismissing all of his scouts with a single thought. His tech points were already halfway depleted from maintaining the expansive search pattern for the last several hours. He decided he would wait until they fully regenerated before making his final approach. One could never truly know what lay in wait in a place like this, especially when the System deemed it 'something of interest.'
The sight of those distant, silent structures sent a cold, creeping dread through him—a feeling far more unsettling than any dungeon he had cleared so far.
In this new world, monsters were a known variable. But where there are buildings, people are never far away. And in Searanox's experience, people were far more dangerous than any beast.