Chapter 18: The Dark Underground

The Dwarf packed his bags to see if he had lost anything in that mess earlier, and fiddling with them, his eyes were suddenly fixed on Jace’s right side.

Jace’s eyes glanced to his right and found a skeleton buried up to his chest in weeds laying there, although the bones all over his body were messy and unformed, but every part was still intact, and his right leg was already sitting underneath Jace’s butt.

Jace closed his eyes and said helplessly, “I’m not going to be poisoned, dammit.”

“Anyway, you brought a change of clothes, and now I have to say you’re far-sighted, brother.” Grider half sneered.

“I did bring clothes, but I didn’t bring pants.” Jace slowly stood up, realizing that the man was missing an arm, perhaps the owner of the one from earlier.

“What’s going on with his body rotting to the bone, but there’s still flesh on his arms?”

“I guess.” Grid said, “His arm was probably scratched and poisoned by a zombie, and he chopped off his arm so he wouldn’t turn into a zombie.”

Jace looked at the empty head, which had gathered a lot of dust, and asked, “So does that count as a success or a failure?”

“Cutting off arms hurts.” Grid said, “If that’s really what I’m guessing, I’d have to admit that the human is quite courageous and decisive. He most likely passed out from the pain and couldn’t hold on, lost a lot of blood or something, and then got eaten by some other small beast. If it was a large animal, such as a bear, it shouldn’t have left such a complete skeleton.”

Jess asked skeptically, “You’re describing it in too fine a detail, aren’t you?”

“There are so many of those, I’ve seen an elf die like that in Cintron.” Grid said, “But it wasn’t a zombie that bit him, it was a spider.”

The spiders of Cintron were so impressive to Jace.

He, who once still had some fear of spiders, felt goosebumps running wild while fighting monsters when he came to the last step of killing the boss while doing that Spider God quest in Cintron and saw the giant Arachnid Mother suddenly appear.

That Spider God also had a very charged name, but he couldn’t think of it all at once, and after a while the thought turned into an obsession that he had to get it out of his head.

“Sha …… Shad ……,” he tried to pronounce it to get a feel for it.

“Shadrach.” The dwarf added, “The god of spiders worshipped by the Amani trolls, you know quite a bit.”

“Yes, that’s the name.” Instantly comfortable, Jace said, “There are some troll ruins in Lordaeron, too, over in Hillsbrad, so it’s not surprising that I know about them.”

Without the metal fences to hide them from the low walls, the cemetery, shrouded in the morning’s still-living mist, felt a touch more chilly than before.

Now Jace felt like he was facing this cemetery being completely honest about himself, no longer having any protection or gaps, and there was no way to hide or avoid any danger should it pop up out of nowhere.

The two men pressed themselves against the fence and tracked the edge of the cemetery, Grid keeping an eye out for possible anomalies in the center and Jace holding the scroll in his hand as he looked around for suspicious plants.

The two searched for about an hour or two, to the point where the mists had faded a bit, and found three clusters of silverleaf grasses of varying sizes, one of which it was difficult to determine if it was a silverleaf grass and not some other similar plant of the same genus.

All in all, the harvest was not very fruitful.

Most importantly, they rummaged through several consecutive headstones near the edge of the cemetery and there was no sign of any cemetery moss present.

Here is not a game, even if it is a real herb on the body does not glow, the mouse to move up will not show can be interacted with, of course, here there is no mouse pointer for you to move, all rely on the naked eye and hand.

After two hours of such concentrated staring, Jace was already so tired that his eyes ached, and the bag only had one bottom, and it was all cheap silverleaf grass.

“We’ll have to go deeper.” He confessed, “You won’t find anything good at the edge.”

He pointed to a stone house guarded by animal statues not far away and said, “See those burial chambers, maybe there’s a whole lot of graveyard moss waiting for us in there, and we’re just going around in circles, missing our chance to get rich over and over again.”

“Lead the way.” Grid said.

Jace looked at him, let out a long breath, and said, “Bring it on.”

After saying that, he headed straight for one of the chambers.

Grid licked his dry, rough lips as if he was a bit surprised at Jace’s boldness all of a sudden, but since the humans were already ahead of them, there was no reason for the dwarves to lag behind.

Most of the burial chambers here have wooden doors, although the houses are of stone and brick.

Unmaintained and unrepaired for a long time, the door to this chamber is also cracked as if it could be split open with an axe.

Jace gripped the axe in his hand, however the extreme silence in all directions kept him from flinting and chopping, after all, it was a moment that could probably be heard throughout the cemetery.

“I’ll get it.” Grid stepped forward, glancing first into the doorway to make sure there were no walkers hiding behind it to sneak in, then reached out and wrenched the doorway tightly shut.

“Hey uh ……”

The dwarf exerted himself, holding back the red veins protruding from his face, his saliva bared, only to hear a crackling sound a large piece of wood was broken off by his hard.

The chains swung back and forth empty, and Grid casually snapped off the remaining planks and stepped right in.

Jace thought to himself that this was like bringing a siege vehicle.

The inside of the chamber was unexpectedly spacious, and there was a tunnel leading to the innermost part of it, and from the inscribed stone plaques around it, one could tell that the person buried here was a Stormwind City nobleman, whose last name was now unknown.

This nobleman died in the invasion of the Gulabash Empire decades ago and was a war hero.

Gulabash trolls in thousands of years has been occupying the entire Elwyn has been to the south of the Thorn Valley area, however, with the development and growth of the Stormwind Kingdom human, both sides of the friction over the past thousand years of the size of the troll empire’s line of control a little bit of the south, and ultimately the empire used to control half of the continent’s territories controlled in the Valley of the Thorns.

Twenty years before the opening of the Dark Gate, the peasants of the Kingdom of Stormwind once again clashed with the trolls of the Valley of Thorns, and the Gulabash War broke out.

The leaders and most powerful warlords of the Gulabash trolls came out in force this time; after all, they could no longer tolerate their already small territory shrinking again, and intended to teach the humans a thorough lesson.

Once the bottom of the Ten Thousand Years Empire was furious and unstoppable, the Stormwind Kingdom was retreating, and in less than a year’s time the troll army had already killed under the Stormwind City.

This time, however, they were greeted by McDevin.

At that time, only more than twenty years old Madiwen with unknown reason horror magic once swept away the entire walled troll army, the leader of the Gulabash with the whole empire all the elite instantly ashes, only a small part of the remaining troops fled back to the Valley of Thorns, huddle in the capital Zurgrab and a few troll cities further south, no longer dare to go out easily.

Not only the trolls are scared because of Madiwen’s magic, the human side is also scared, the royal family of Urien deliberately cover up the power of this magic, saying that it is the advantage of the weather and the soldiers defending the city bravely eventually repelled the trolls.

Of course, the human race had paid a huge price in this war, even though it eventually fought back to win, and judging from the time point told by the eulogy on the inscription, this nobleman was killed in battle during the first wave of the trolls’ invasion.

“I didn’t realize that the owner of this tomb was a war hero.” Jace said.

“Couldn’t have been a knight.” Grider: “Then his burial goods might have had swords and armor ……”

“We’re medicine pickers, not grave robbers.” Jace said, “Besides, do you want to be chased by ghouls carrying a full set of dozens of pounds of metal armor?”

Greed said smugly, “If I had the full body armor of a Stormwind Knight, why would I run when I encounter a ghoul?”

Jess said, “Spraying you with necrotic poison is just as bad luck unless you plug all the crevices in your face with mud.”

“Fuck you.” Grid said as he threw over a gravel head, which Jace easily dodged.

They took the torches hanging from the shelves from the entrance of the tomb, and after lighting them, they went underground together, only to realize that although the chamber was quite large in size, most of the coffins were empty and there were not much in the way of burial goods.

As it got darker and quieter around them, their steps got slower and slower.

A faint, wet stench of unknown origin never dissipated, which indicated that there should be dead bodies in the chamber.

Since there were dead corpses, there could be graveyard moss present. After all, according to the description in the book, graveyard moss grows by drawing on the breath of the dead from corpses.

What should have felt creepy was now a cause for anticipation instead.

The only sound left in the chamber was the footsteps of the two men, Grid walking ahead and Jace walking behind. It wasn’t long before Jace suddenly heard a sound of water just beside him.

“What?”

“I stepped in water.” Grid shone his torch downward, only to realize that he had stepped under a step, and that the bottom had been completely flooded.

He shook the torch before realizing that the firelight was surprisingly unable to illuminate anything more than a few meters away at all, which was why they hadn’t even noticed that there was already standing water not far away.

Grid asked, “What’s going on here, how come it’s so dark that it even swallows the firelight?”

Jace asked rhetorically, “Isn’t it the same out there?”

That being said, it was only after arriving here and really touching the darkness that covered the Twilight Forest that one could truly feel how terrifying the darkness inside of Madivan really was.

It permeated every corner of the entire forest, gathering in every nether place deep in the earth, where it gathered more and more, darker and darker, making life worse for the living and preventing the dead from sleeping in peace.

“Let’s get in and out.” Jace said, “If this dark thing is poisonous, we don’t have a cure.”

“You just thought to warn me now?” Grid waded through the water with his torch raised, running faster and faster with each step.

The catacombs here seem to have crushed and collapsed for some geological reason, and the walls are cracked in many places.

The floor had also changed from slate tiles to dirt, and some strange cave algae was growing here, completely unrecognizable as to its species, and not any of the varieties of herbs that Jace had seen in books.

Within a few steps, he reached the deepest part, and only the last half-submerged sarcophagus was left in front of him.

Jace held his torch close to the water and looked underneath, there was no sign of anything resembling graveyard moss except for some water plants.

Grid fumbled halfway up the wall, looked back at Jace, and shook his head as well.

Now, there was only the last tightly closed sarcophagus in the entire tomb that hadn’t been searched.

Jace felt his scalp tingle, turning over a sarcophagus was something anyone would feel uncomfortable thinking about, especially not knowing if the body inside was dead or alive.

“Whatever the tomb owner is wearing or holding, don’t move.” He emphasized.

“I wouldn’t take what the dead keep close if you asked me to.” Grid muttered as he approached the sarcophagus.

He gritted his teeth and pushed the sarcophagus away a little to reveal a small opening, then immediately raised his sword to aim for a moment to make sure that the body inside hadn’t reached out to tickle him before continuing to push.

Jace took the torch and leaned in close to shine it in, when suddenly the darkness inside began to roll violently.

“What the hell?!” Grid was so scared that he practically catapulted backward and fell into the water, and Jace took several steps back against the wall.

A blackness gushed out of the sarcophagus opening that hadn’t been completely pushed open like boiling mud, and it was impossible to see clearly in this dark-to-dark tomb.

“If I don’t make a single gold coin on this trip back, I’m going to tie you up and sell your ass in Old Town!” Grid cursed as he approached again.

“You …… have to have someone willing to pay for it too.” Jace held the torch closer before the two could see what those black things were.

It’s countless densely packed beetles!

The beetles came out of the catacombs in a tidal wave and then crawled into the water, and Grid, who witnessed the scene, couldn’t even hold his sword.

The beetles, however, seemed to have no intention of mobbing them, but were only frantically fleeing the fire and scattering through the water.

Grid said as if he understood something, “These beetles aren’t living bugs anymore, they’re all mutated creatures raised by necromantic energy. Many of the torches in the catacombs were made by the Church of the Holy Light, especially in the family chambers of the nobles, and have some slight ability to ward off evil spirits, which is why the bugs escaped.”

“If you get bitten by one of these bugs ……,” Jess asked hesitantly.

Grid said, “You might get sick, vomit and faint or something, but one or two of them wouldn’t be enough poison to turn you into a zombie, so hurry up and see if there’s any graveyard moss in there.”

Jace approached with the torch again, most of the beetles inside had fled, and inside a rotting, festering body lay flat in the mud, the exposed skeleton plastered around with dark green, bizarre plants that clung like a bunch of spores to the surface of the leg bones and the already blackened clothing.

“This is graveyard moss.” Jace said as he fought the urge to vomit.

Grid sighed and said, “I really fucking hope you’re saying it’s not.”

Though Jace plugged his nose as hard as he could with his arm, though he knew it wouldn’t do much good.

It was just that the body in front of him was rotting to the limit of what he could imagine, but the stench in the air really wasn’t too noticeable.

“Why doesn’t anything stink?”

Grid pinched his nose and said, “All the corpses affected by necromancy don’t have the same stench as a corpse naturally rotting, it’s more of a weird fishy odor, just like this one. This one might even be a little lighter when soaked in water …… Let’s stop discussing this and quickly get to work! Get out as early as you can!”