Sadly, even a full day of rest didn’t make matters more obvious. When I returned to the clearing the night after we defeated the dungeon, the hotel remained gone. I had no idea if that was a function of us defeating it, something akin to the lock-out we had experienced after repeatedly clearing the other dungeon, or if it was something else. Given that the entire clearing was covered in grass, with no indication of where the hotel used to be, I was tempted to simply treat the entire experience as a figment of my imagination but I wasn’t quite so far gone. There was knowledge to be gained here, I just needed to experiment a little.

A part of me was tempted to kidnap somebody from the farm, or anyone, really, so I could use their eyes to get a second look but decided against it. There was such a thing as inviting needless troubles and we had only recently gotten rid of the potential troubles that came with closely associating with people. No need to invite them in again, instead I decided on a few simple tests. There was no need that I needed people to test the dungeon, nothing said animals couldn’t enter one. Alex and Silva had proven that even if the two of them weren’t quite normal animals.

And so, just like we had done the night before, I caught a squirrel, maybe even the same one as before, and lobbed it into the clearing, keeping the location of the dungeon in mind. To my surprise, the squirrel either moved through the area the dungeon had been in or right past it. It was a little difficult to tell, with nothing but a sea of grass filling the clearing. But one thing was fairly certain now, the dungeon was, at least at the moment, not accessible to anyone. Otherwise, the squirrel would have reacted similarly to the one we used the other night and kept away from us and the hotel.

But that only opened up more questions. How did the entire thing with the vanishing dungeon work, had it happened because I used Darkness Magic to defeat the anomaly or because of the devastation? Was there something left to investigate, other than the grass?

Curious, and maybe a little reckless, I moved into the grassy area, slowly spreading out my senses as I searched for anything that might explain the events of the night. And the existence of that dungeon, though I wasn’t confident I’d understand anything that might explain those.

Dungeons had been studied extensively on Mundus but during my visits to the Mages’ Guild, I hadn’t been able to find a lot of conclusive information. Maybe because it was made secret by the powers that be, maybe because the spellcasters with enough insight into them kept their findings to themself, maybe because there was no information to be found. The only thing I could say conclusively was that the Grandmother had been able to take partial or complete control over a dungeon, namely the Barrow Den, and made use of it to imprison the souls of her enemies there. But the method, or anything beyond that fairly simple conclusion was unknown. Maybe if I managed to contact her, possibly using an improved or altered version of the ritual in the Grimoire or possibly some sort of adaption to the one used to speak with Hecate I could ask but so far, I hadn’t been able to make progress in that regard. Communicating across planar and dimensional boundaries was hard.

For now, I had to be content with what I might be able to find here. First, I’d need to find the exact location the dungeon had been located at. Sure, knowing that it was roughly the middle of the clearing was one thing but it wasn’t precise enough. Not if I wanted to find out everything, for that I’d have to push my focus to the extreme, thus narrowing the reach of my perception to avoid being overwhelmed.

Walking across the clearing, I decided to look for differences in the shadows, in the darkness all around me first. Given the sheer amount of power unleashed in the dungeon’s destruction, I was convinced that the event left some sort of trace. A scar of some sort, maybe an echo or something along those lines, especially as I had used Darkness Magic based on Astral Power to accomplish the destruction. If it had been caused by the same weird power governing the dungeon originally, I might be unable to detect anything, just like I had been unable to detect a lot about the dungeon in the first place, but with magic, I was somewhat confident. Sure, it was Darkness Magic and thus might have a concealment aspect, but even with that, I doubted everything could be hidden. The devastation had been on too large a scale, and too much power had been unleashed.

And yet, despite the events of the previous night, the grass was perfectly undisturbed. It was impossible, at least if the hotel had truly been here and not some sort of illusion or maybe hidden in some subspace pocket if there was such a thing.

Not convinced by what my senses told me, I started to slowly canvass the area, moving back and forth in a grid as I tried to find any clues in regard to the hotel. There had to be something but even when I glanced into the Shadows, there was nothing out of the ordinary.

My search continued fruitlessly, until I finally stumbled across something, quite literally. If I hadn’t been shifting my sight between the shadows and the world around me, I could easily have fallen but luckily, I noticed the thing before that happened.

It wasn’t anything huge, just a fairly small piece of deep purple crystal, maybe ten centimetres in length and four in diameter, and nicely smooth, as if it had been polished. Given the strange sensation I was feeling from it, I wasn’t about to just touch it, instead, I first used Inspect, hoping that I’d learn something of use.

Void Crystal

That was all the blue window told me, it was called a void crystal but what a void crystal was, I wasn’t sure. Maybe something similar to the Eternal Ice I had been exposed to before, only Darkness flavoured, or something else. Either way, the more I concentrated on it, the more I felt my focus slip away, the sensation giving me a bit of a headache.

But I had found something, just as I had hoped for, even if that something only opened up even more questions. Instead of trying to interact with the crystal using my magic, I used a bit of closh and completely mundane methods to pick it up, hoping that I wouldn’t accidentally trigger some sort of disaster.

Just remembering how volatile and dangerous the Eternal Ice had been was enough to make me incredibly wary of a possible Darkness equivalent, simply because the Darkness was far more unstable than Ice. Ice was all about stillness, eternity and preservation. I could easily imagine a glacier that looked exactly the same, even after a thousand years had passed, its foundation having only moved as much as the continent the glacier rested on. On the other hand, Darkness was almost the opposite, always changing, always in flux and always hungry to devour more light. If I accidentally unleashed the Void Crystal, and it was what I suspected, I might see myself turned into dust moments later, the energy holding my material form together devoured by the Darkness. Like the hotel had been, only that there, the Darkness might have done even more, devoured its entire existence, past, present and future.

Time Magic was the only thing that might explain why the grass in the clearing was the way it was now unless there was someone out there who had purposefully grown the grass and erased the traces the magic needed to do so left. While that wasn’t impossible, I felt it was a lot less likely than some sort of unknown time alteration, simply because I was well aware of just how powerful I was.

Or the reason for the grass might be something completely different, something not based on Astral Power. Given the forest we were in and its… peculiarities, I wasn’t about to latch onto a possible magical explanation simply because it more or less fit the facts I could observe. There was a lot more out there that I couldn’t observe than things that I could, to say nothing of the sheer, concentrated weirdness the dungeon had exhibited the entire time.

No, I’d need to keep an open mind and not discard any potential answers, simply because I felt another was more plausible.

For now, I could only continue my investigation, the Void Crystal securely tucked into my pack and as far from anything magical as possible. This was something I wanted to investigate slowly and carefully, it might be a huge boon or it might kill me. Either way, I was excited to find out.