CHAPTER 198: BENEATH THE SKIN OF RUINS

The rusted door groaned in its frame, but held firm. Behind them, the silence grew heavier, more alert, as if the stone itself were holding its breath.

The young soldier, the last to cross the threshold, was shaking so violently the iron bar he’d just slid into place vibrated in his sweaty hands. His face, lit by the faint glow of a handlamp Julius had pulled out, was corpse-pale.

"Is... is it still there?" he whispered, voice fractured.

Julius pressed his ear to the cold metal. No scratching. No ragged breathing. Nothing but the dense silence of the deep. Still, he didn’t relax. His shoulders stayed knotted, his eyes locked on the door as if he could see through the rusted plating.

"It knows where we are," he murmured at last, stepping back. His voice was tired, but without fear. A kind of accepted fatality. "It knows we climbed. Now it waits. It’s got all the time in the world."

The air was different here. Still cold, but without the clammy wetness of the lower tunnels. A dry, mineral sharpness. And that smell... ancient dust, moldy parchment, and a metallic tang, like blood dried centuries ago.

They stood in a hallway of carved stone — more regular, more human. Low arches supported a vaulted ceiling lost in darkness too deep for their weak lights to pierce. Massive wooden doors lined the walls, some banded with iron, some swollen with age. Half-erased inscriptions, written in a language Dylan didn’t recognize, adorned the lintels.

The Observatory. Or at least, its forgotten bowels.

Dylan straightened with a muffled grunt. The burning in his muscles gave way to a deep, dull warmth that spread through his limbs like thick wine.

His weakness had faded, replaced by a raw, twitching strength. He could feel every fiber of his body, every amplified heartbeat. But it was a stolen energy, still unstable. It thrummed under his skin like a caged beast.

He glanced down at his hands. In the gloom, he thought he saw his veins glowing faintly green — where the essence ran. An illusion? Maybe. Or maybe the mark digesting its meal — too fast, too hungrily.

"What was that?" he asked, voice steadier than he’d expected, but tinged with a coldness that didn’t feel like his own. He fixed his gaze on Julius. "That thing."

Julius rubbed his weathered face with a rough hand. He looked suddenly older, worn down by forty-three years of dust and the fresh bite of fear.

"A memory," he muttered. "A memory the Empire should’ve let die. We used to call them the Starved. Creatures from the chasm, trapped here during the Purge. We thought we’d wiped them out... or starved them. Guess that one learned restraint."

Dylan gave a small nod. Feigned understanding.

"And it sensed us because of the gems," he said, clenching the fist where the mark still throbbed faintly.

Julius nodded slowly. "An anima gem... it’s concentrated life. It holds the core quality of a living being. For a Starved..."

He searched for the word. "Irresistible. Like a beacon in the night for a drowning man." His gaze weighed heavy on Dylan. "You excited her when you swallowed those gems. She won’t let us go now."

A shiver ran down Dylan’s spine — nothing to do with the cold. Not fear. Rage. A cold rage, sharp as glass. They’d stolen his life, his dignity. Now they wanted to steal his right to slip into the dark? To rob him of silence itself?

"Perfect," he growled. The word cracked through the hallway like a stone. The soldiers flinched. Even Julius raised an eyebrow. Dylan lifted his head, eyes locking with the old captain’s. In them burned something hard, almost feral. "If she wants what I have, let her come take it."

He turned and walked to the first heavy door. His bare feet made no sound on the dry stone. He laid his hand, without hesitation, on the cold, dusty wood. He felt the faint thrum of spiritual essence in his veins — the stolen power of dead beasts — focusing in his palm.

So this was how he could sense. Listen to the stone, the wood, the sealed history behind.

The wood reacted. Not like a living being — no. But like something that had waited a very long time to be touched.

An almost imperceptible wave vibrated under his fingers, and a strange feeling ran down his spine: a mix of reverence and unease, as if the door recognized a familiar presence... or an intruder.

Dylan closed his eyes for a moment, focused on that fine pulse rising up his arm. There was something behind it.

Not quite a creature, not exactly a trap... but a place, a memory frozen, buried in layers of silence and dust, ready to collapse at the slightest breath.

"It’s inactive," he said in a half-voice, as if only speaking to himself.

He pushed.

The door creaked on its hinges but did not break, revealing a wide, circular chamber, tiled in broken slabs and rusted old mechanisms. Cables spilled from the walls like the roots of an iron tree. In the center, a stone lectern, worn by time, rested atop a raised pedestal. Shards of broken mirrors littered the floor — remnants of an ancient system of observation.

The ceiling was high, marked with faded frescoes, and a domed opening let through the sky — or what was left of it: an ashen darkness, blurry, dreamlike.

"The Observatory," murmured Julius, who had followed slowly. "The real one. Not the surface shacks. This is where they read the heavens. Where they studied the world’s soul."

Dylan stepped forward. The floor barely creaked beneath his feet. The atmosphere was strange here — slowed, thick. Even time itself seemed frozen in a silent loop.

"Does it still work?" he asked.

Julius shook his head. "Not really. The Empire drained it, like everything else. Took the souls, left the shells. But sometimes... fragments remain."

Dylan placed a hand on the lectern. There were no obvious symbols, no controls. Just bare stone, cold, and a minuscule crack across its surface. A spiral fissure — almost natural, but too precise to be an accident.

He fed it a drop of his essence. Nothing violent. Just a whisper of energy, offered like a hand to a skittish beast.

The lectern vibrated.

Slowly, very slowly, the spiral lit up with a pale green thread of light, flowing into the cracks like ancient ink. The ceiling reacted in turn.

The frescoes came alive, projecting shifting shapes — not constellations. Lines. Maps. A tangled web of paths, tunnels, and hollows, all underground.

"A map," one of the soldiers breathed. "It’s a damn map of the complex..."

"No," Julius whispered. "It’s more than that. Look closely. Some of these don’t seem familiar?"

These maps revealed the entire underground lacework of the city — not like an engineer’s blueprint, but like a living memory, an organic network of black veins coursing beneath the dead skin of the ruins.

Some paths glowed. Others barely pulsed, like they were still breathing. Dylan narrowed his eyes. There were trembling zones, blurry, unstable — likely collapsed, condemned... or too alive to be charted.

"There," said Julius, pointing to a thin, sinuous path climbing toward an old air vent, far to the west. "It comes out near the Green Zone. The statue park. Deserted. Light surveillance. That’s our best shot."

One of the soldiers frowned. "And that?" He pointed at a strange offshoot in the stone — a spiral, annotated with incomprehensible symbols. "Looks like a dead end... but it’s glowing."

"That’s a sanctuary," Julius answered without pause. "An old one. You don’t go there if you want to stay yourself. Or stay alive."

No one spoke. They stood in silence, mesmerized by the shifting image — fascinated the way one is by a wound too beautiful to be real.

Then Dylan straightened. He had made his choice. He pointed to the route leading to open air. "We take that one. The way out is offering itself to us."

A short, sharp silence of agreement followed.

They memorized the key branches, copied the directions into an old notebook found nearby, scribbling by the pulsing glow of the spiral. Then they moved out, leaving the Observatory like one leaves a tomb that talks too much.

In the corridor, the shadows had tightened. But this time, they no longer walked blindly. They had a path. A way out. And maybe — just maybe — a reason to keep walking.

They walked first in silence. That mission silence, tense but shared — the kind that settles between people like a thin blanket: just enough to not feel cold, too fragile to forget you’re exposed.

Dylan took the rear, the notebook tight against his chest, his back still aching in places. The gems he’d absorbed dulled the worst of it, but the fatigue — that clung to the marrow.

Ahead, Julius walked with the precision of a man no longer allowed to make mistakes.

At every junction, he compared walls, curves, stone marks to what they’d seen in the Observatory. He didn’t need to speak to be followed.

He carried the kind of worn but solid authority found in men who’ve lost their uniforms but kept their convictions.