CHAPTER 31: SANCTUARY OF THE FALLEN [2]

Oliver woke up with a sharp ache in his back. For a moment, he couldn’t even remember how he got here. The last thing he recalled was the glowing runes, the light swallowing him, and then... nothing.

He sat up slowly, his vision adjusting. He wasn’t in a chamber. He wasn’t in some boss room filled with monsters. He was standing in the middle of a massive cavern. The ceiling stretched so high that his eyes could barely make it out in the dim glow of faintly lit crystals embedded in the walls.

But what caught his attention wasn’t the cavern itself.

There were houses here.

Rows of them, built from stone, standing silently as though they had been abandoned centuries ago. A well in the middle of a plaza. Broken carts. Empty stalls.

It looked like a village. A village that once had people.

But now, it was empty.

Oliver forced his tired legs forward. His footsteps echoed unnaturally loud against the stone ground. Each echo bounced off the cavern walls, reminding him how alone he was.

He entered the first house. Dust lay thick over everything. A wooden table sat in the center, collapsed under its own weight. He moved further inside and froze.

In the corner lay a skeleton. Small. No longer than ten inches. A baby.

Oliver staggered back out of the house, his breath ragged. He clutched his chest, trying to calm down. But outside wasn’t better. Because the next house had more. A pair of adults, their bones slumped over a table as if they had starved to death mid-meal.

He checked another. This one had a skeleton lying on a bed, still covered with the faint tatters of cloth.

House after house, it was the same. Skeletons. Adults. Children. Babies. All dead, all left where they had fallen.

It was as if one day the entire village had simply... stopped living.

The silence pressed down on him harder than before.

________________________________________

The first day, Oliver searched desperately. He went through dozens of houses, overturning cupboards, searching through drawers. He found coins, bits of jewelry, cracked pottery. He even found scraps of parchment with words written in languages he could now understand. Notes about farming. Small records of trade. Simple daily life.

But there was no food. Nothing left that was edible.

By the second day, his stomach cramped constantly. He found himself clutching it, growling in frustration at the empty houses. He even broke down once, slamming his fists against a wall until his knuckles bled.

Coins and jewelry were useless. They glittered, but they couldn’t fill his belly.

By the third day, he wasn’t shouting anymore. He was muttering. Talking to himself.

He would laugh sometimes at nothing. Curse his classmates who abandoned him. Curse the gods who dragged him here. Curse this entire world.

By the fourth day, he started to lose track of time. Was it day or night? Down here it was always the same dim glow. He couldn’t tell.

His lips cracked. His throat burned with thirst. He licked damp walls, tried chewing on moss, anything to get moisture. His body was slowly breaking down. If it weren’t for his strengthened physique, he would already be dead.

The worst part wasn’t the hunger. It was the silence.

There was nothing scarier than loneliness.

________________________________________

On the fifth day, he stumbled upon it.

It was different from the other houses. Bigger. The walls were reinforced with layers of strange talismans. The heavy stone door was covered with glowing symbols. They pulsed faintly, still alive after who knew how many centuries.

Oliver’s weak body shivered. His instincts screamed at him to turn away. But his eyes locked onto the markings.

And then, his skill triggered.

[Language Comprehension Activated.]

The symbols unfolded in his mind. They weren’t random. They were words. Sentences. Commands.

"Here lies the Immortal One."

"The Devourer of Life, sealed for eternity."

"Beware. To break this seal is to invite ruin. The curse will not stop. Humanity itself will fall."

"Do not approach. Do not release. Do not speak the runes."

Oliver blinked, lips dry. He read and reread the warnings. Every line screamed danger.

And yet... he laughed.

A broken, rasping laugh.

"Ruin humanity? Heh. What about me? What about the human already rotting here?" His voice cracked, sounding half-mad. "I didn’t ask for this damned summoning. I didn’t ask to be thrown here. And if this world gets destroyed because I wanted to live—then so be it."

Oliver pressed his hand against the glowing door, staring at the maze of runes. They weren’t just pretty symbols. They were structured. Repeated. Interlocking.

The moment his [Linguist] skill activated, the lines and swirls stopped being "magic" and instead looked... familiar. Not exact, but familiar enough to trigger a memory.

Back on Earth, Oliver used to spend nights tinkering with cracking software, messing with encrypted files he had no business looking at. The way the runes looped and cross-referenced each other reminded him of those locked files. Layers of obfuscation stacked on top of each other.

"This... this is encryption." He muttered, his voice hoarse. "Multi-layered. Recursive. Self-repairing encryption."

Every time he followed a line of runes to its end, it didn’t stop. It looped back into another sequence, referencing a different cluster of symbols. Like a hash function feeding into another.

To anyone else in this world, it was divine script—magic beyond comprehension. To Oliver, it looked like a nightmare of endless re-checks, cross-signatures, redundant backups, and anti-tamper protocols.

A seal made not to be broken, but to waste eternity in trying.

He laughed dryly, the sound scraping his throat. "This is... literally DRM hell. This is worse than trying to crack Adobe in high school."

But the longer he stared, the more he understood.

A chunk of the seal resembled an AES-style block cipher—the symbols repeated in 16-character sequences, each shifting based on an unseen key. Another part behaved like public-private key exchange: one rune would only translate properly if its partner rune was aligned.

And every few minutes, the entire damn thing would refresh—resetting like a timed security token.

If anyone from this world tried to mess with it, they’d never even notice the refresh cycle. They’d spend years decoding one part, only for it to rewrite itself.

But Oliver saw the pattern.

"Cheap trick," he muttered. "You’re just rotating keys."

He got to work. Not with tools, but with his mind, his skill, and sheer desperation.

He started mapping the runes, writing invisible diagrams with his finger against the air. Every symbol he understood, he categorized. Every repetition, he logged mentally. Every refresh cycle, he counted.

It took hours. Then days. He lost track of time again. Hunger clawed at him. His body grew weaker, but his brain burned hotter.

At one point, he collapsed, his head swimming, and whispered deliriously:

"This... this is just... an encrypted archive. I just need the key. Find the key... break the loop..."

And then, after what felt like an eternity, he noticed it.

A gap.

A weak point in the recursive encryption—an overlap where two refresh cycles conflicted for a fraction of a second. A misalignment.

He grinned through cracked lips. "Got you."

On his next attempt, he forced the sequence open during that brief overlap. The rune stuttered, glitched, and then broke.

Crack.

One entire layer of sealing shattered, the talisman burning into ash.

The runes across the door flared angrily, reacting to the breach.

Oliver slumped against the door, panting. He was too weak to celebrate properly, but his eyes gleamed with madness and triumph.

"...You’re just code," he rasped. "And I’ll crack every last line of you."

~~~

Oliver sat hunched before the sealed door, his eyes bloodshot, lips cracked. His body screamed for food and water, but his mind was locked onto the shifting runes. Each cycle he observed, each sequence he mapped, chipped away at the impossible puzzle.

Hours bled together. He no longer knew if it was night or day—down here, there was no such thing. Only silence. A silence so oppressive it gnawed at his sanity.

But in that silence, something else existed.

A sound.

At first, he thought it was his imagination. A faint hiss in his ears, maybe the ringing of his own heartbeat.

But then he froze.

It wasn’t his heartbeat.

It was... breathing.

So faint it almost blended with the stale air. A slow inhale, a sluggish exhale, stretched over impossibly long intervals. It wasn’t human. Or maybe it was, but it didn’t sound like anything he’d ever heard before.

His back prickled with goosebumps. He turned toward the massive door again, eyes widening. The breathing... it was coming from behind the seals.

His dry lips curled into a grin despite the fear gnawing at him. "So... I’m not alone."

His hands moved faster across the glowing patterns. The seals weren’t simple locks anymore. He recognized the patterns like layers of encrypted data, jumbled substitutions and countermeasures meant to trigger resets. Whoever made this didn’t just want something locked away—they wanted it forgotten.

And yet, with every barrier he pried apart, with every algorithm he unraveled, that breathing grew just a little clearer.

Inhale. Exhale.

It was weak. Fragile. Barely clinging to existence.

The knowledge that another soul was here, even if dangerous, was like water to a dying man. His exhaustion dulled. His hunger quieted. He typed invisible keys in his mind, rewriting lines of code no one else in this world could even comprehend.

One by one, the seals flickered out. The talismans charred into ash. The symbols unraveled like broken encryption strings.

Hours turned into a full day. His body was trembling from the strain, his vision blurry, but he didn’t stop.

And then—

Click.

A deep, mechanical sound echoed from the door, different from the others. His head jerked up, adrenaline surging. This wasn’t another seal breaking. This was the final seal breaking.

The breathing... stopped.

And then—

A voice, hoarse yet chillingly clear, whispered from behind the door.

"...Some... one..."