Chapter 414: Bahamut

    Mid Afternoon - Mid Winter : Elafos Family Estate, Eikasi?a | Eastern Bahamut

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    -Where.. are you from...- Sitting down next to the statue smaller than my paw, I stared at the clump of stone with an indescribably scrutinous gaze.

    Somehow, even though my memories as Bahamut had no recollection of the dragon, something about it scratched the deepest recesses of my mind.

    It was the faintest familiarity, an almost impossible-to-catch sensation tied to a memory that wasn''t logged in my mind, and just like a computer searching for a file that didn''t exist, I couldn''t put my tongue on it. -Who.. are you...-

    However, even though I recognized that the familiarity was coming from somewhere in my soul, not only could I not pinpoint it, I didn''t even know where to begin when it came to forcibly surfacing such a memory. -From my experience, the only ways are stimulating the memories with something I recognize, falling into a dragon sleep, or dying...- And considering the latter options were completely out the window, I was forced to try and find something else in the room that could ring the bell louder than the statue.

    But as one would expect, that proved to be far easier said than done.

    Going back to looking around the room, I tried my best to find things that were more unique than the prayer plaques, whether they were statues, essentially fossilized pieces of fabric, or artifacts I thought could have had messages in them.

    But to no avail.

    Compared to a statue of the dragon, nothing else could even remotely scratch that missing part of my mind again.

    However, it wasn''t a totally fruitless effort.

    After spending a little over two days deciphering more texts, I managed to get to a point where I could at least partially read everything in the room, and in the process, found quite a few interesting anomalies regarding the consistency of their contents, and the state of their preservation.

    The thing was, from the most recent texts back until I was reading the prayer plaques from the earliest days of Bahamut''s rule, most of the prayers metaphorically thanked their god for things like the ''blessing and enrichment of mana'', which, being left to interpretation, I assumed regarded the mana well. The plaques'' remarkable preservation only went to reinforce that.

    However, the deeper I dug into the phrasing, the more unusual it became, until eventually, I stumbled across a massive gap in the timeline, a time period of at least thirty or forty millennia where not a single prayer plaque was dropped by the well, and with it, the contents of the prayers changed completely.

    Compared to the younger texts, the contents of the older plaques were far more explicit, praying directly to a god that supposedly resided ''here'' as if speaking directly with them, not relying on euphemisms or figurative speech that was up to interpretation.

    However, at the same time, the mention of mana I could possibly relate to being from the well ceased completely, with the mention of the god''s presence as the only exception. -But that doesn''t make any sense.. even the old plaques are preserved nearly perfectly...-

    As I continued to read though, the thought that maybe this place wasn''t really a mana well was something I simply couldn''t shake from my mind. -It''s almost like this place just didn''t exist before that time skip around Bahamut''s rise...-

    But mana wells don''t just appear like that. -As far as I know, mana wells rise up out of the ground similar to dungeons... Could these older plaques be from before the well reached the surface?-

    The thing was, while each era of plaques had its own trends and consistencies, the older texts constantly spoke of this place being where the titanic dragon they were worshipping lived, very similar to the Tree of Prayer with me, with it being regularly mentioned that the god''s presence was too much for younger dragons. -That could be explained by the well just not having surfaced yet...-

    After all, such a colossal volume of mana being pushed up through the ground could easily be misunderstood by primitive dragons as the presence of a dragon the size of a mountain range, a god. -It''d also explain why none of the older plaques thanked anyone for the mana.- Since if they believed the mana belonged to a god, they wouldn''t dare take it.

    -How likely are primitive dragons to mistake regular mana for an aura though...- Although it was indeed understandable how a human could make the mistake, a dragon was an entirely different being. -Even if they were that primitive...- Aura had drastically different properties from normal mana to the extent that one could tell the difference completely instinctually.

    So, in order to fix my curiosity once and for all, I decided to try digging into the ground like I did the ceiling, but instead of taking several shallow samples, I took one super deep one. -Depending on how deep the black mythril goes compared to the walls, I might be able to tell if the well came up from the ground...-

    Not believing it, I quickly turned and started walking along the bump. If the lumps really were ribs, then I''d eventually find a vertebrae, but even as I passed the highest point of the cavern and started making my way down the wall, there was nothing. -Hah,- It made me want to laugh to shake off the anxiety welling in my stomach. -Who am I kidding, this cavern is way too big to be something like a skeleton...-

    After all, I, a dragon well over a hundred meters tall, felt like I was walking the perimeter of a huge colosseum as I made my way down the wall.

    However, just as I neared the middle of the wall, the hump I had followed across the roof and down the wall abruptly ended, and intersected with a different, much larger formation.

    One that, after feeling around for a moment and walking across it, only to find another hump stretching from the other side, made my entire body tense, and sent a chill down my spine.

    It was a vertebrae the size of me...

    I was inside of a creature''s chest cavity...

    -Then that means...- The plaques in the room were right. The inconsistencies I found were actually consistent, and the mana well wasn''t actually a mana well.

    It never was.

    -All this mana.. came from this creature...- Almost instantly, the series of lines I had drawn in my mind from tracing the cavern filled out, and I found myself in the middle of an unimaginably colossal skeleton.

    What was sunk into the ground wasn''t a mana well, it was a grave.

    The grave of a being who was once the true god of the dragons.

    The real Bahamut.

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