Chapter 139: Mysterious World

After being unconscious for an unknown amount of time, Xiao Lin started to groggily get up. He looked around him and saw a blood red world. Under his feet was red ground and above him was a deep red sun.

Where was this?

Xiao Lin tried hard to figure it out, but the last memory he had was of him unleashing the giant golden dragon when he was faced with that torrent of power. After that, he seemed to make out something opening in the middle of that blood moon, as if a door had opened. Finally, he was sucked inside by an extremely strong force before falling unconscious.

That meant that he was in the world behind the door on the blood moon. Was it still Planet Norma?

Xiao Lin realized he was in a huge courtyard, and next to him was a tall and majestic palace. In the distance were rows of magnificent structures that exerted a familiar feeling.

Xiao Lin suddenly realized that he was clearly in the castle district of New Washington. Next to him was the palace he worked at every day, but upon closer inspection, there were some very obvious differences.

The courtyard was not as desolate as before, and the palace was not as rundown. There were all sorts of flowers and trees around him and he could smell a faint but clear fragrance.

It looked like a very nice courtyard, but under the blood red sunlight, it looked very different. It enforced a strong feeling of rejection and made Xiao Lin feel very unsettled.

Was he still in New Washington? Where was everyone else?

Xiao Lin looked around the courtyard and could not find anyone. After leaving the courtyard, he was sure that even though the place looked similar to New Washington, it definitely was not the same place.

The buildings there did not have any hint of modernization. New Washington might have preserved a lot of the old buildings, but the new buildings had a very modern western style. The buildings looked very unique. At the very least, he knew they were not styles from any era back on Earth.

Because of that, he suddenly felt lost. The roads in the palace district were winding and complicated. The buildings all looked more or less the same. Why did they design it all those years ago to be like a maze?

Xiao Lin started to get dizzy from wandering around, so he decided to enter a palace to rest inside. He was curious as well. Having not had the chance to do so in New Washington, this was the best time for him to see what the ancient Thunder Kingdom’s legacy was like.

His curiosity did not last long. When he got to the nearest palace, he pushed open the gold doors and the sight in front of him almost made him run away immediately.

The blood red sunlight shone into the large palace and in front of him was a horde of skeletons!

However, the skeletons were very quiet, as if they were in a deep slumber. They did not react to Xiao Lin entering at all, which allowed him to calm down before slowly closing the door. He looked around the other palaces nearby, and what made him jump in fright was that the inside of every palace was the same!

Those skeletons were dead, just quietly standing there. They were different from the skeletal soldiers they had encountered earlier. Those skeletons did not have a green flame behind their eye sockets, and their skeletal bodies had a faint golden glow. Compared to the white skeletons from earlier, those skeletons all seemed to have endured countless years.

After checking a few palaces, Xiao Lin felt extremely strange. If every one of these palaces were like that, then the amount of skeletons present must have been staggering. He decided to leave as fast as he could.

It was like a maze, but luckily the castle district was not too big. After an hour, Xiao Lin managed to leave, but the sight outside the castle district shocked him even more.

It was a completely foreign city. He could not find any similarities to New Washington. Walking slowly on the empty streets, he realized that he did not know where he was at all, nor did he know what his next step was.

It was when he stopped in front of a stone statue that he started having a strange expression on his face. He was very familiar with the statue, since he saw it every day when he went back to the inn. It was the statue of Asabanor, but this one was in pristine condition. Even the pedestal had no signs of decay. However, the statue was not at an inn, but at a large and vast plaza.

The unsettling feeling in Xiao Lin’s heart grew even more intense as a crazy thought formed in his head. He might actually have left New Washington. He might not be in the New Washington of 210 N.C., but rather at the Thunder Kingdom capital that Judge Academy attacked hundreds of years ago!

As he walked from house to house within the city, he was even more certain of the fact. The houses in the city were not packed with skeletons like the castle, but even stranger. There were mills in some of the buildings, but what was placed in the mills were bones.

The mills seemed to operate by themselves. Without any external force, the bones inside were being slowly ground to dust, and flowed along recesses on the sides, which were connected to a building farther away.

Xiao Lin found it incredibly weird, and he curiously followed the recesses to the other building. There was an incredibly large furnace inside and the bone dust was being mixed with ores of various metals, combining them before they were poured into the hot furnace. The inside of the furnace started to boil, and scorching hot air shot out, suddenly increasing the temperature within the building. Xiao Lin was forced to retreat, choosing to investigate another area for now.

In the neighbouring room, there were objects that had already been smelted. They were still piles of bones, but the difference was that those bones were now like the ones he saw earlier, carrying a faint golden glow. Xiao Lin tried touching them. The surface was still scorching hot but it was abnormally hard.

Xiao Lin’s eyes widened. It was like a production line, obviously made to create skeletons for necromancy. Those skeletons that had been mixed with metals would obviously create even more powerful skeletal soldiers.

Who was making these special, stronger skeletons?

What was the point of making them?

After cracking his head over it, Xiao Lin seemed to have an answer. He could not believe it as he uttered a name. “Asabanor!”