Chapter 663: Fifty Kilometers.

Thoren continued deeper into the narrow tunnel, his undead Greater Dune Scorpion carrying him forward through the suffocating darkness.

He had long since lost track of how many kilometers he had ventured into the cavern system.

The turns, branching passages, and endless darkness made it difficult to measure the distance accurately, but judging from the time he had spent traveling, he believed he must have covered nearly fifty kilometers by now.

Fifty kilometers.

Even thinking about that distance made him narrow his eyes.

When he first entered the region beyond the thirty-kilometer mark, he had expected to encounter increasingly dangerous beasts, perhaps even creatures powerful enough to threaten his undead army. ℯ𝐥.𝒄ℴ𝓶

That expectation had proven correct.

The deeper he went, the more frequently he encountered Fallen-Star Serpents lurking among the rocks, their two heads and strange, star-patterned eyes making them dangerous opponents for ordinary awakeners.

Unfortunately for them, Thoren was anything but ordinary.

Along the way, he had killed three more Fallen-Star Serpents.

Each encounter had been swift and decisive, with his undead vanguard overwhelming the creatures before they could pose any meaningful threat.

Their illusions were useless against his undead servants, and under the illumination of his Soul Lantern of Eternal Crypt, hiding from his perception had become increasingly difficult.

Just then, a strange sound reached his ears.

Splash!

Thoren’s head tilted slightly.

The sound was faint, almost swallowed by the oppressive silence surrounding him, but it was unmistakable.

Something was falling in the distance, striking a surface repeatedly with a steady, continuous rhythm.

Water.

He listened again, carefully separating the sound from the subtle noises produced by his mount.

Splash! Splash! Splash!

The sound continued without interruption, echoing faintly through the winding tunnel.

‘Hmm?’ Thoren creased his brow as he listened carefully.

‘How could there be water?’ He thought in puzzlement.

Nothing he had seen suggested the presence of a substantial water source this deep underground.

Yet the sound was growing clearer.

It was not the irregular dripping of water from a distant ceiling. There was a continuous, steady rhythm to it, as though a considerable amount of water was falling from somewhere ahead.

Thoren’s expression gradually became serious.

Water might be nothing more than water.

Or it might be a warning.

Either way, he needed to investigate.

Without hesitation, Thoren urged his mount to quicken its pace.

The undead Greater Dune Scorpion immediately accelerated while the Soul Lantern of Eternal Crypt floated above his head.

The pale Soul Lantern light swept across the walls as they advanced, revealing deep cracks, protruding stones.

The tunnel sloped steadily downward, its path twisting deeper into the earth with every passing moment.

The air grew colder.

The atmosphere became heavier.

Even the faint noises produced by his mount seemed strangely subdued, as though the surrounding darkness were swallowing every sound.

Thoren’s eyes remained fixed on the passage ahead.

There was something deeply unsettling about this place.

It was not simply the absence of light or the suffocating silence.

Rather, it was the sensation that the tunnel extended far beyond what his eyes could perceive, leading toward a place that had remained untouched by the outside world.

Without his Soul Lantern of Eternal Crypt, he might already have lost his way in this endless darkness.

Still, he continued forward.

The sound of falling water grew louder with every passing moment, its steady rhythm becoming the dominant noise in the tunnel.

Thoren could now hear the water striking the ground and splashing against a hard surface, although the source remained hidden beyond the winding passage.

He did not slow down.

Twenty minutes passed.

The tunnel continued descending until, at last, the path ahead turned sharply to the left.

Thoren’s mount rounded the bend and the world before him suddenly opened up.

His eyes widened.

For an instant, he forgot to breathe.

Thoren’s jaw dropped, and his heart skipped a beat as he stared at the enormous structure emerging from the darkness.

The passage behind him had been narrow and suffocating, but what lay beyond this bend was something entirely different.

The space ahead was vast enough to make the tunnel he had traveled through seem like nothing more than a crack in the earth.

A strange word appeared in his mind.

‘The Weeping Ossuary.’

Thoren froze for a brief moment.

He did not know where the name had come from. It simply surfaced in his mind, clear and distinct, as though he had heard it somewhere.

The Weeping Ossuary.

He repeated the name silently; his gaze fixed on the enormous entrance before him.

It was a fissure roughly two giant men wide, carved into the stone as though the earth itself had been torn open by some unimaginable force.

Yet what truly caught his attention was the gate surrounding the opening.

It was made entirely of fused ribs.

Countless enormous bones had grown into the surrounding rock like the roots of some grotesque ancient tree.

They intertwined with the stone, forming an unnatural frame around the fissure, their pale surfaces stained by age and darkness.

The ribs curved inward on both sides, their jagged ends bending toward one another like the jaws of a colossal mouth preparing to close.

The structure did not look like something built by human hands.

It looked as though something had forced its way out of the earth and left its bones embedded in the entrance.

At the threshold lay a thick drift of bone dust, pale and fine as flour. It covered the ground in an uneven layer, collecting between the rocks and gathering against the base of the enormous rib gate.

The slightest disturbance could have sent the powder rising into the air.

But that was not the strangest part.

It was the black water.

The black water seeped from the stone above the gate.

It flowed continuously from cracks hidden within the rock, gathering into a thin, steady curtain that fell directly across the opening.

The water slid over the fused ribs and splashed onto the bone-covered ground below, staining the pale dust beneath it with dark, muddy streaks.