What lay upon their eyes was a huge stone structure, overgrown by the vegetation. It looked like a pyramid built from two stone platforms, which were made out of blocks each the size of around ten cubic meters. The sides of these platforms were only slightly bent and the upper one seemed to be about a quarter part smaller than the one below. The whole pyramid occupied an enormous area and its overall height was well over six hundred meters.

The second platform contained several smaller structures -- most likely houses. The mirror path lead to the middle of one of the pyramid’s sides, where a long flight of stairs led to the top.

An ancient aura filled the air and even at their first glance, they could tell that it was unimaginably old.

“Something like this...” Alinor exclaimed, but could not finish his line of thoughts.

“The Wilderness supposed to be and has been unpopulated, so there shouldn’t have been any civilization living here,” Quin said, still staring at the structure in front of his eyes.

“A civilization?” Sao asked puzzled.

“Yeah, what else could have built something like this?” Quin answered. “Just look at the size of this thing, even if Ranfel’s nations were to unite we’d find it hard to build something like this. Besides, just take a look at those stones, all of them are exactly the same size. Two, three or even a couple of stones like that, I could imagine, but thousands or millions of them?”

Sao simply nodded, not giving voice to more questions.

“It’s just, magnificent. I could only compare it to the Sundering Flames,” Leyn said.

“Why is it here and why haven’t anyone found this before?” Aline questioned. “With a height like this it should be even visible from far away.”

“Yeah, furthermore shouldn’t have been these parts of the Wilderness already mapped?” Quin asked, turning to Leyn for answer.

It took her for a few moments to realize, why Quin was asking her. She took the map from her pocket and showed it to them. “Yes, it should’ve been. You can clearly see that inside the danger zone we currently are, there are nothing implying of what we’re seeing now.”

They looked at map for a time, and then back to the pyramid. They all had various thoughts regarding the matter, but none of them found any answer to their previous questions.

“Alright, I say that we should check this out. I don’t think that standing here and just staring at it would lead to anywhere,” Quin said laughing.

The others agreed and they started to approach it, albeit careful for any threats. They finally scaled the stairs to top -- they decided to check the second floor first -- after a long time. Looking around they saw that their guess had been right, as the top was crowded with different buildings.

They were all built in the same style, and looked quite similar. Each of them had a base in the form of a square and their walls were made out of smooth stone bricks, which were painted in some kind of color, but that had been long faded away. Other than this there was no decoration to be found and their flat roofs, which were created out of some kind of partly transparent crystalline material, extend beyond the base of the houses by a meter on each sides.

“This might have been even a town,” Alinor said.

“Yeah, it clearly looks like one, let’s try to check the insides of the buildings, maybe we can find more clues,” Quin suggested.

They entered several houses, however they have not found anything useful, only the remaining stone furniture. After a few hours passed they decided to not waste their time on checking every buildings they came across but only ones which seemed to be more unique.

Even with this method they have spent a long time searching for clues -- and for Dreon. It was not until they reached the part of the town which was about in its center, that they have finally found something.

It was a high but somewhat slim tower, which in contrast to the other buildings had preserved its color, which was dark black.

“What’s this on the wall?” Leyn asked, looking at the wall inside the tower, which had some kind of carving on it. “It encompasses the entire surface of the wall.”

“Now that’s a good question,” Alinor answered, having no idea either.

Quin inspected the carving carefully for a couple of moments, until he had at least some kind of guess.

“To me it looks like some kind of logographic writing, but give me some time, maybe I’ll be able to discover something,” he said.

“Logographic writing? What’s that?” Lin asked.

“Well, what you can see on the walls is a text, made out logographic characters. Our books are written with various characters as well but in contrast to our alphabet these characters represent a word not just a sound like ‘A’ or ‘B’,” Quin answered and then got back to inspect the carved walls.

Hmm, there are a few characters, which look quite familiar, but where have I seen them? he wondered and continued on. That character! I’ve definitely seen that! But where? Damn it! He did not seem to remember it, no matter how hard he tried, so he decided to try to meditate for a bit and clear his mind, maybe that way the memories would come back.

Another hour passed while he was meditating, but then he suddenly jumped up and ran to one side of the wall.

“Yeah, I was right, I’ve seen that already in the library!” he exclaimed with excitement.

“Hey Quin, what are you talking about?” Alinor asked.

“Oh, yeah, sorry,” he answered while laughing. “Do you see this character? This one, which resembles a bit of a skull with a horn?” He pointed on the wall at the character.

“Of course we see that,” Aline replied.

“Alright, so I saw this character already in a book. It was about an artifact found several hundreds years ago in the Wilderness by the Heavenly Crane Empire. It was an enormous shield and its surface was filled with carvings just like this. Although the writing on it was unknown to anyone, fortunately it was a Spirit Artifact, which meant that the user could connect their spirit to it and use it like it was their own limb. It turned out that in truth for some reason the carvings on the shield contained the names of its abilities, thus they could decipher the whole thing,” he explained.

“You’ve told me you loved to go to the library and read, but sometimes you look like a walking encyclopedia,” Aline said with a warm smile on her face and the others nodded with agreement.

“Haha, it’s nothing special,” Quin said a bit embarrassed. “Anyways give me a few minutes and maybe now I can really find something useful.” He read through the carvings again for some time and then after he summarized his thoughts he said, “Alright, there was not much I understood but there are a few keywords or phrases which recur frequently.

“So the character I showed you before means ‘end’, and it’s nearly always next to two other one’s: ‘world’ and ‘eater’. I guess it’s some kind of myth that’s written onto the wall and is about some kind of world-eater demon, which ends -- probably -- the world itself, or about the end of that world-eater demon.

“It also mentions a ‘Black Sun’, about which I’m not so sure, maybe it’s some kind of solar eclipse? After that there’s a character I don’t know of, and then it’s followed by the character of ‘path’ and ‘open’. Sorry guys, I hoped I’ll come up with something useful, but that’s all I could read.” He sighed.

“Don’t worry, it’s still more than what we could’ve done!” Alinor encouraged him.

“Could that mean something like that with the Black Sun or solar eclipse a path opens?” Aline asked.

“That sounds right, but what kind of path is it talking about? Ah, if only I knew more characters.” He sighed dejectedly. “Anyways, I don’t think there’s much meaning to stay here and guess its meaning, not only did we get no useful information, I also don’t see any sign of Dreon.”

“Why don’t we check the lower floor first then?” Leyn asked.

“Lower floor? Where?” All of them look a bit shocked as they did not see anything leading downstairs.

“Oh, it’s just carefully camouflaged... I nearly fell into it before, anyways, look here,” she answered a bit embarrassed and showed them a corner of the room which was filled with various types of junks. After clearing that away, what received them was a narrow staircase leading down.

They descended to the lower floor, which looked very similar to the upper one, being filled with carved texts. The biggest difference was that certain characters on the wall glowed brightly for a few seconds and then faded away.

“Man, this place just gets weirder and weirder... Maybe we should just turn around and leave this whole town behind?” Sao suggested.

“What are you talking about? We’re looking for Dreon! If you’re that afraid, go and ran away, alone!” Alinor said with anger clear in his tone.

“Alright, just forget I said anything...” Sao shook his head and tried to calm himself, without much success.

“What’s that in the middle?” Aline asked pointing at a cauldron-looking thing at the very center of the room and started walking toward it. The cauldron was only the size of a human’s head but was very sinister looking: it was painted pitch black; nothing they have seen so far could even compare to its darkness. Besides, the only decoration it had was a crimson colored, terrifying snake-like creature, which seemed to be made out of blood itself.

Just as Aline touched it, the entire room started to flash in black and red lights and a cracking noise could be heard from the cauldron.

“What’s tha-,” Aline tried to ask but in the middle of his question she suddenly disappeared without a hint. The others did not have any time to be surprised as one after the other vanished in the span of no more than a single breath.

At the end Quin was the only one still standing in the room. Shit! What’s going on?! My head, why does it hurt like hell? His whole head felt like it was on the verge of exploding. Is it some kind of spell? There’s no way I’ll just let it succeed like that! He started to circulate his Lightning Qi right away, as fast as he could manage, and then merged with his element. Lightning covered all of his body and instead of blood it was lightning what flew in his veins, however it was still not enough. He could not move even an inch and neither could he cast any kinds of spells, as his concentration was completely reserved by resisting the hostile spell.

After around half a minute he finally could not keep up and blacked out. When he came he had a terrible headache, but more importantly all he could see was the pitch-black darkness surrounding him.