~ CHAPTER 294

I shot an [Ice Shard] at a demon that began to climb up through the hole as soon as the "Bride of Astaroth" had fallen out of the way. There were some other notifications from killing the giant demon, but things weren't over yet.

"We still need to close it! Ahhh, my head hurts," Mimi groaned.

"Lilith, it looks like ritual magic. You should be the one to dismantle it while we protect you," Morrigan said. "Start with the corpses, the mana density is strongest there!"

"Got it," I replied.

I ran over to one of the bodies that was powering the formation. The ritual magic was among the most complex I had ever seen. The bodies were naked and partially cut open down the middle like a frog pinned to a dissection tray. Their faces were covered in ritualistic veils, which is what initially made me think these were cultists, but on further inspection, there was no way to know if they had done this willingly. From some of the bruises on this one's body... I suspected not.

The female beastkin pinned to the ground here had thick strings of mana tying her to the ritual magic, and was powering it like a battery, even though the woman was already dead. I began to trace the mana circuit to find a spot where I could start to disarm the ritual circle without causing it to violently come apart. It was unfortunately very difficult to focus on my task while there were still demons nearby and a gaping hole only a few feet away from me, no matter where I examined the ritual circle from.

I dodged out of the way as a claw tried to pull me into the crevasse and Silva was quick to kill it, but that only reinforced the danger we were all in as long as I continued to let the ritual circle function. I continued to follow the traces until I found a spot that I thought would lower the circle's efficiency without causing a dangerous reaction. I quickly used [Light Scribing] to create a small flash of fire to surgically scorch away the portion of the ritual.

The ambient mana felt like it shuddered as the circle's efficiency dropped. Already, the gash in the floor was releasing less light. The ritual circle had a pattern to it, so I would be able to do the same thing in the eight other places where this part of the circle repeated. I carefully but quickly walked around the circle and used my magic to burn away all of the repeating parts of the ritual. Each time, the circle's efficiency dropped and the power coming from the rift lessened. Unfortunately, that alone wasn't enough to completely break it yet. The number of demons coming through had already decreased significantly, so my friends had gained more control over the situation.

I continued to study the ritual circle. The places I had already erased seemed to be an easy win, and it helped, but I now needed to find another spot I could remove without causing too much feedback.

"Lilith, dodge!" Sibyl shoved me away from the hole and blocked an attack from a demon I hadn't noticed. I shook my head and returned to my feet before going right back to disarming the giant ritual circle.

There had to be something else. The best way to end the effect would be to take away the power source, but I couldn't just cut one of the corpses away. That would create too much instability while the others remained intact. I didn't like my chances of removing all of them in quick enough succession, and removing all of them at once might just cause the circle to go out of control anyway. Maybe I could remove the power indirectly somehow...

There! The bodies were powering the circle in a large loop. I couldn't disrupt the loop directly, but I could cut off some of the places the energy filtered through to the ritual. I needed to be careful, I would have to do it evenly or it would become too lopsided. Once I had removed enough of the places where the power was drawn, the power would stop cycling and the circuit should break down.

I began working again, delicately disrupting the places where the power was drawn into the ritual's effect. I had to alternate between two different siphons to keep the circle relatively balanced before moving onto the next one. After removing nine of the siphons, the mana in the room shook again and the tear in the middle of the floor suddenly shrank by about two-thirds. It was still active, but the effect had lessened considerably. Better yet, more of the ritual circle was revealed, giving me more places to disrupt the ritual safely.

"How much longer?" Silva asked. With the active part of the ritual so much smaller, they had begun to mostly wait around for the next demon to attempt to come through. The situation was now fully under control, but we still needed to turn it the rest of the way off.

"Mostly done now. I just need to starve the working a little more and it should break on its own," I replied.

I traced the newly revealed lines of the circle, looking for places to cut the power safely. The main lanes still powering the ritual were heavily saturated with mana, so I couldn't touch them, but the ritual was almost to the point where most of it wasn't getting enough mana anymore, and it was already breaking down. I just needed to plug up a few more channels and the ritual will be starved enough to lose power... There! That's perfect. I found three spots that will make the remaining mana have to travel the long way around the circle to power the effect. Removing those should make the circle fail to receive mana quickly enough and collapse the effect entirely. I burned away the first spot and the mana in the room shuddered again. It was close to becoming unstable, so I hurried to the next one and burned away that part too. The mana in the ritual was now flickering in and out. I hurried to the last place a little worried that the remaining trapped mana would explode. The moment I burned away the last spot, the room suddenly went pitch black except for the glowing lines of the ritual slowly fading away as it no longer had anything drawing on it.

I turned off [Light Siphon] and the ambient light in the dungeon returned. I watched as the remaining power in the ritual magic traveled through the circuit, but without anything to draw on, it started to break down and release into the room as ambient mana until the circle went entirely dark.

Mimi crashed into me and pulled me into a hug just as I was letting out a sigh of relief. She knocked the breath right out of me, but I laughed and returned the hug. "Are you okay?" I asked.

She looked up at me with a teary grin and nodded. "The dungeon stopped screaming. You helped it."

A loud bang suddenly erupted from the center of the room, causing all of us to jump. A blaze of fire erupted around Morrigan as she brought several fireballs to life around her. Her magic illuminated the source of the noise... a giant chest had loudly fallen to the ground just outside of the ritual circle.

"I've never heard of a dungeon spawning a chest

in front of anyone before," Lorriene said cautiously.

"I haven't either," Silva replied.

"It's not a mimic, is it?" Torien asked warily.

Mimi cleared her throat and stepped away from me after wiping her tears away. "No. It's not a mimic. It's a chest... I think the dungeon is thanking us. That ritual spell, it was hurting the dungeon."

"Should I open it?" Silva asked.

I looked at the chest again. "I... guess."

"Let me do it. I'll check it for traps," Lori said before slowly walking up to it.

I could feel a bit of impatience coming from Mimi, but she didn't argue. This was still a dungeon. Dungeons were known for being tricky to adventurers. Lori kneeled down next to it and gently ran her hands across the top before poking at it with a dagger in a few places. When she was satisfied, she stood up. "It looks safe. Should I open it, or would you rather do the honors?" she asked me.

"You go ahead," I told her. I was a bit tired from all the focus of disarming the ritual circle while pumped full of adrenaline. And that was after fighting that large monster. Besides, there was something else I was a bit more interested in at the moment.

A few of the others went to look over Lori's shoulder as she looked through the contents of the chest, but Silva came over to me as I crouched down to examine one of the bodies that had powered the ritual circle.

"All of these women look nearly identical," Silva said when she crouched down next to me. She wiped the sweat from her face with a cloth as she caught her breath. I thought that fight and disarming the ritual afterward was tough, but she had been running around the entire time. I wondered what her endurance was at. It must be pretty high.

I nodded and pulled one of the veils away from the dead woman's face. "I noticed that too." She was a feline beastkin. Her eyes were closed, which gave me hope that they had at least killed her in her sleep rather than doing this to her while she was awake.

Silva lifted one of her arms and examined the wrist. "Old rub marks here, this woman was probably a slave."

My eyebrows rose and I turned to her. "Do you think this is what they were looking for at the slaver's guild? Identical looking women to do... this

to?"

Silva grimaced and put the woman's arm back down. "That seems like a reasonable guess. I remember you telling me about those strange notes you found in Goldenhearth, ones with a bunch of seemingly random measurements. At a glance, all nine of these people look identical. It's too uncanny to be a coincidence."

I frowned and looked at the woman one last time before putting the veil back over her face and standing up. "I need to make a copy of this ritual in my notebook. I want to know how this ritual works. Maybe it could give us a clue on how to find them."

"Do you think that's a good idea? If someone else got a hold of your notes, they could use this horrible ritual too," Silva asked.

In response to Silva's words, a book fell from the ceiling between us. The two of us were startled and jumped back. Before either of us could say something about it, Mimi stepped forward and picked the book up before turning to me. "The dungeon is still listening to you." She handed me the book. "My identify says that book is called 'The Endless Notebook.' It's a soulbound artifact that destroys itself if its owner dies. It allows you to keep notes of things, tear out non-soulbound copies of anything you write in it, and it never runs out of pages."

Silva's eyebrows rose. "That sounds incredibly valuable."

I sighed as I looked over the fine leather cover with gold stitching. "And it solves the exact problem I was just talking about."

Mimi nodded. "The dungeon was screaming since before we came here. If I had to guess, the tear that was letting out demons has been here from the start of the siege. We just rescued it from constant torture." Mimi solemnly looked up at the featureless ceiling.

Silva looked around. "I knew that dungeons were considered intelligent... but to be able to give us something like this after listening to our conversation..."

I flipped the blank notebook open. The paper appeared to be of high quality, bright white, and unruled, perfect for drawing or writing. I didn't know how the endless part worked, but it felt fairly thin and it was about half the size of a standard letter-sized notebook. I didn't really care how valuable this book might be. It was perfect for me. This would be the kind of thing I could see myself spending all of my saved gold on. Without another word, I attuned my mana to it and bound the book to myself.

"You bound it already?" Silva asked in surprise.

I nodded. "It's too perfect for me. Let me test it out." I doodled a quick picture inside and handed the book to Silva.

She shook her head. "I can't open it. It acts like it's glued."

I nodded and "tore" a copy of the note out of the book. The paper looked the same and was still of the same quality. It wasn't magical anymore to my mana sense, just a normal piece of paper. I handed the note to Silva.

She looked down at it and then back up. "Is this supposed to be a drawing of me?"

I laughed and looked down at the paper. It was a quick silly doodle of her flexing. "It looks like it works." With a thought, I found that I could erase the page from the notebook as well, returning it to being entirely blank. This was too perfect.

Walking around the edge, I began to sketch a copy of this horrid ritual circle, minus my modifications to make it non-functional. When I was finished, I would sketch one of the poor sacrifices as well. I didn't know if these women were collected because they looked the same, or if they looked the same just because they all matched the requirements. Either way, I wanted a record of this. We would bring the corpses back with us too, but first, we would need to figure out what we would do with the dungeon. It might not be a demon spawning dungeon after all.

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