96 Black District VI : Into The Tower Of The Stone Rats

"Owwwwwwwwww, 'sniff' what's that smell, is someone burning something?" I asked as I turned my aching body over.

Magellan put his hand on my back as he helped me up to a sitting position. We were back in the blue district, just past the barrier as the black district was still sprawled out in front of us, along with a mountain of rat corpses. And a big crater that was still smoking.

"That smell would be your body healing Lord Kael." Gus said telepathically to me as they all came closer.

I looked at my body to see that the burnt flesh was peeling off, and a smooth and unblemished brown skin began to make its way out. From the looks of it, I was badly burnt, but thankfully I'm alive, though the same could not be said for my clothes. They were hanging off my body in strips, and were barely being held together. I looked up at my companions and asked.

"So was I struck by lightening?" they looked at each other,before nodding their head yes.

I got too excited. Nature's backlash was one of the very true dangers a weaver would experience no matter which circle they were. As long as weavers kept breaking and altering the laws of reality, then the very planet itself will keep fighting them.

From the look of things, the amount of boneless rat corpses in front of me were thousands upon thousands and they were heaped one on top of the other, starting from where I stood which was right in front of the barrier to their tower. And in each of those corpses I had weaved a rune into them, and given it intent...….thousands of runes at the same time. Impressive ad that was to me, It was nothing short of a miracle that I was still alive, and that could mainly be attributed to my being a vampire. Instant regeneration counts for something after all.

"Are we heading back now?" Kodak asked me. I shook my head as I answered him.

"go back?we've not even met a challenge yet, and we've barely just got here. We're going into their tower, it would be quite rude to knock on their door and not go in." I said to him, but loud enough that all of them could hear me.

"Are you sure?That lightening bolt was...…quite...…..large" Teluna said. I waved his worries away and said.

"I'm completely fine. You guys have been sealed so long you're all forgetting one thing, and that's the fact that we're vampires. We can regenerate our entire body from a drop of blood if we so choose, so don't worry I'm fine."

It seems I was not unconscious for long since I woke up in time to see my body healing, looks like I was more sturdy than I expected. With that out of the way we made our way towards the tower, I looked worse for wear with my tattered clothes, but I was not really worried about it. But I felt a change in my surroundings, my senses where sharper for some reason, and when I decided to check, I realized I had reached the third circle of the open mind realm. The third ring on my minds tree, pulsed with energy as it released wave after wave of mental energy through my mind.

I was a little startled by it, training mental energy was supposed to be the hardest thing in the universe, unless of course you were born for it. But I realized something though, it seems the backlash of nature could also serve as a grind stone to sharpen and temper a weavers mind, thereby enhancing the power of his mind and increasing the mental realm. But this was too risky, relying on nature's backlash for training might seem like a good idea, but it was suicide.

The attacks from nature's backlash did not just target the mind, it went for the body, and soul as well. It's the mental energy's job to protect the soul and body from nature's backlash, training it at the moment of the backlash would leave my body and soul defenseless. That's just not instant death, but a complete erasure from existence. So for safety sake, I will have to keep the amount of runes I can weave simultaneously to a very small amount, at least until I get stronger.

When we got close to the tower, there was a rather thick stench coming from it. I was not really surprise considering the amount of rats that lived in it. The smell was almost unbearable, but not something we couldn't handle. There were many tunnel like entrances in the tower, but we picked the biggest one close to us. The entrance was still littered with the bodies of dead boneless rats, their guts was spilled all over the ground, but their rock like exterior served to eliminate the danger of slipping over rat guts. We stepped over them as we made our way upwards.

The tunnel was built by the rats at an incline, which was surprising since rats lived underground and I expected that they would instead burrow into the ground making tunnels under the ground, rather than tunneling upwards. We were in that tunnel for almost fifteen minutes traversing the deadbodies of the stone rats, before we came up into what I would consider a main tunnel shaft. The tunnel we just came from, coupled with a few hundred others connected to this one.

The main tunnel was quite big, and it also stretched and twined upward like some sort of spiral staircase. but the tunnel was as wide as the hallways I've been in the rune circles, if I was not here with companions, I could have swore that this was another rune circle. The incline upwards was not as obvious as the tunnel we just came out from. It was a steady incline, and going up would not tire us any time soon.

From where we came up, the right side of the tunnel went upwards to whatever it was that laid above us, and the left side went on to an open hole on the side of the tower that led back outside. It was a really big hole, but it still signified a dead end, so which meant the only path available was upwards.

The amount of corpses in the main tunnel were not as much for some reason, in fact it looked as if some of them has been dragged off, going by the skid and claw marks we could see on the tower floor. Although there were hundreds of such claw marks, this; were a little deeper, and stone rats were missing in places they were not supposed to be missing from.

"look alive boys, we're not alone in here." I said to them as we made our way up.

I picked up the longsword that was with me, and etched a rune circle with two isolated runes on it. Of course it was the only two runes I knew at the moment,but they served their purpose. Two concentric circles with the rune words [LIGHT] and [BREAK]. At this point in time, they would be called a rune phrase, as the combination of two rune words, combining their effects were called rune phrases. The longsword immediately lit up, bathing the dark tunnel with bright glows of white serene light.

We didn't need the light as we had an even better night vision than the rats themselves. However it was best not to underestimate our enemies, and I knew this particular species of rats were rather sensitive to light. So I was going to be using that to my advantage.

The others were insistent on having their own weapons glow too, even though it seemed as if they were not going to be using it much. Kodak favored hammers, so he had a massive two handed Warhammer with him. Of course he could use his ability to control blood to create one, just like he did before, but that was literally expensive as he had to use the blood in his own body to do so. Bloodchilds can control blood in massive amounts, but to do that a blood connection has to be made. Which means for every little of blood controlled, they probably had to mix 10 centiliters of their own blood to establish a connection.

Magellan was using a massive broad sword half a meter wide, and a meter and the half long. The most terrifying part was how he seemed to swing that sword around like it was a feather. Which to his insane strength, it probably was. Teluna used two daggers, which was typical of an assassin,but Gus did not have any weapons. Even though his class had the potential to be really dangerous, at the moment he was just learning the ropes and was not capable of much, so he relied on his vampiric abilities instead.

We were only in that tunnel for about fifteen more minutes before we started hearing squeaks and the sounds of movement within the tunnel. I knew my mass genocide attempt was relatively successful, but my soul energy was limited.

I was capable of covering a conical area of a hundred meters in circumference and height with my soul energy, and even at that point I would be stretching myself and my control thin. The tower was way bigger than that, so it was impossible to say that I had gotten all of the stone rats. So there was bound to be more of them ahead.

Ten minutes later we came up into an open area, it was like a cavern within the tower and it looked like where the stone rats slept. The only difference is that the stone rats here were bigger, larger, and meaner. We had come into the burrow of the elites, and with how they kept sniffing the boneless body of the much more smaller comrades, I think we might have pissed them off.