Black Iron’s Glory

Chapter 34 Discovery

Bok Al and Eriksson went hunting with Verikero in a high spirits, and for them, the biggest adventure on this trip to Bai Lu was to catch a few more good prey.

Because Verricolo said that because of horrible legends and rumours like Verricolo, so few people were willing to go to collect and hunt, there was a lot of prey on Verricolo and it was easier to harvest than to go hunting in the mountains, which was also the main reason why Verricolo's father brought him here on his winter holidays these past two years.

The mountain deer that was captured last night has proved that Villicro is not lying. If you want to hunt a mountain deer in the mountains, you need to let the hunter break his legs if you want to find the trail of the mountain deer herd. It won't be possible at all without ten and a half days. It's so easy to hunt a mountain deer by the creek.

This time Bok Al and Eriksson are all dreams of getting rich and looking forward to a good afternoon hunt. Besides, they're ready to collect, even if they don't get a good hunt, just find a few rare herbs and get a good price in the town's pharmacy.

As the partners left, Claude was ready to start exploring the ruins of this magic tower, even if he was eager to search the basement floor immediately for what the Landers magician had left behind, but he could still calmly restrain his impulse and at least give the whole surrounding environment a chance to discover it in case of sudden and unexpected changes when he got something.

Speaking of which, this is also the after-effect of reading those online novels in previous life. Anyway, every time the main character in a novel searches for treasure, there will always be a variety of unexpected situations. Either the enemy suddenly jumps out or something abnormal happens, leading to the main character egg flying, and he will have to go through the test of life and death to escape. So many online novels, the traverser has never seen a protagonist go smoothly, safely and safely, nothing unexpected happened to get the treasure...

Well, the lesson has to be learned, and while what the Landers magician left behind is not a treasure, Claude doesn't want anything unexpected to happen, so first we have to search the entire ruins of the Magic Tower to stop any possible threat to himself.

Only Claude spent an hour carefully searching the ruins of the entire magic tower. Apart from the sound of sea breezes sweeping through the remnants of the ruins' walls, nothing abnormal was found. Even insects like spider ants were rare. Occasionally, there were several gulls or seabirds parked in the distant rubble heap and pecked something lightly. It felt very quiet and peaceful.

Far away came the roar of a fire rope gun, and it was not known whether they had struck any more prey. But Claude was setting the torch on fire, and there were a few dry pine branches in the firewood stack, which was a good choice for making the torch, wrapping a broken rope around it, and getting some oil on it, so that the lower basement level wouldn't worry about lighting.

Claude has located three underground entrances, the front, middle, and rear locations of the ruins of the Magic Tower, as Villicro calls them. The entrance in the middle is the largest, and the entrance in the back is close to the cliffs of the sea, and the entrance in front is just outside the site.

The two most likely entrances are the middle and the back, as Claude thought. Because the diary says that the small room near the downstairs stone staircase is where Master Landers lives, it can be seen from this sentence that, as a four-ring magician, Landers is not in a high position in the magic tower, perhaps equivalent to those apprentices or servants who would otherwise not have been able to live in the basement.

Just like the aristocratic families, the owners do not live in the basement, and only servants hired, such as cleaning ladies, live in the basement if the kitchen is cluttered. If high-ranking servants are like housekeepers, chefs and close-fitting maid drivers, they will not live in the basement, but will be housed in the rooms next to the kitchen, restaurant, warehouse.

In this way, it is obvious that the basement floor where people can live will not be the entrance in front of them, because no one will place the entrance to the basement where the servants live next to the door of the house. The simplest logic is that it is as if the guests who come from the house enter through the door but see the servants entering and exiting the basement entrance next to the door, which is very ungraceful and polite.

So Claude thinks that the two entrances in the middle and back are what he's looking for. As usual, the entrance in the back is very close to the cliff, so if this basement is the residence of a magician, it's likely to open a few windows on the cliff on the coast, which is ventilated, and the view of the ocean. Although the status equates to slaves living only on the basement floor, the lower magician is also a magician after all, Claude believes that there should be a preference for that Landers magician...

Unfortunately, the cliffs on the coast burst outwards. Even if Claude lay on the edge of the cliff, he couldn't see whether the cliffs below were open or not, and he couldn't possibly go around a large circle to see if there were windows on the cliffs. Besides, hundreds of years later, even though the cliffs on the coast have been hit by the wind and rain, there are still plenty of places where dense vines and low bush trees grow. Claude suspects that even with windows, they are covered by those vines...

But Claude took the back entrance to the cliffside of the seamount as his first search target, and he didn't have to search the entire basement floor anyway, just checking to see if there was a blue slate at the bottom of that downstairs staircase. If not behind the stone staircase at the back entrance, look for the middle entrance down behind the stone staircase.

Six torches were stuck, probably enough. When Claude just stood at the entrance to the basement, he discovered that the basement of the magic tower could not simply be seen as a basement, because no basement would be five or six meters high, which was almost as high as a basement cave.

There's also that downstairs stone staircase, staircase in a regular house, which basically folds to save space on the staircase. Instead, the three entrances were all straight down to the lower level of the stone staircase, so that the light of the entrance illuminated only a fraction of the stone staircase. Claude stood looking down at the entrance, dark and unseen, without a little light, and smelled like a stinking gutter.

Verricolo said that the basement was full of sludge, one or two feet deep, which his father had told him, and there was nothing to lie about, not to think about. Claude assumes that this should be hundreds of years of accumulated dust, combined with winter ice and snow melting and rainwater flowing in at the entrance, making these dust sludge and possibly clogging the sewage outlet below, which is causing more sludge below...

Claude was also worried that the sludge below would produce biogas, after all, for hundreds of years. Although he smelled a stinking gutter, he lit a fire to throw it far into the mouth to try it out, and found it to be okay. When I came to the entrance, the torch was still burning underneath, but the flame was small, which most likely fell into the sludge.

After double-checking the equipment, the hunting knife, the shovel, the dagger inserted on the hiking leather boot, and the short rope, to make sure there was no omission, Claude was ready to put the rope ladder.

That's right, the rope ladder, Claude wasn't going to follow the stone ladder silly enough to run a foot or two deep behind the stone ladder, which was a waste of time, and Claude had no interest in the sludge below. The sludge accumulated over the centuries, who knows what germs are in it, in case you get any strange skin diseases when you go back, it's all on your own.

Claude has calculated that the first stone staircase is more than 134 cm high, more than 30 cm wide, but less than 40 cm high, and the height of the basement floor is estimated to be between 5 meters and 6 meters, so that the calculation of this stone staircase has more than 40 steps, the total length of which is about 13 or 4 meters, so that you can go back more than 10 meters down the stone staircase, and you can't help but go back behind the stone staircase with sludge.

So Claude decided very simply to go directly from the top of the stone staircase to the back of the stone staircase, and put the rope staircase a little below the entrance, because there was no railing next to the stone staircase, and it was bare. Then up and down the rope ladder, at most four or five meters high, and around the back of the stone ladder, it's probably two or three meters, which is easier than coming back up and down the stone ladder.

The rope ladder was also made by Claude during the firing of the torch, just in case the climbing rope was brought up, nearly 20 meters long, enough to make the rope ladder. The transverse barrier of the ladder is the field material, the more dry and resilient the wood is. Claude tried to hold his weight. As for the roping ladder, it's easier to tie a knot 30 centimeters apart, just stick one end of the wood in it and tie it up, you don't need to be tough, use it temporarily anyway.

Just before going down, Claude chopped off some shrub branches and threw them in a bundle, so that there was room to set foot instead of stepping into the sludge. It took more than half an hour for Claude to throw down four bundles of shrub branches and feel like it was almost there, which lit the torch and climbed down the rope ladder.

At the end of the day, Claude lit the torch around, it was dark, and the space should be huge. Beneath your feet is a bundle of shrub branches, with three bundles next to you. The sludge underneath is damp, but it hasn't reached the point where the sewage flows.

The good news is that less than a meter ahead is the corner of the stone staircase, and that corner is the back of the stone staircase. The bad news is that Claude discovered that the sludge depth below had exceeded two feet. In that diary, Master Landers said that the bluestone plate was at the bottom of the back of the stone staircase, which meant that Claude needed to dig the sludge first to know if there was that bluestone plate...

Shut up and bury yourself. Claude first moves a bundle of shrub branches to the front, so that it reaches the corner of the stone staircase, then throws one behind the stone staircase, and the other bundle of shrub branches throws away, more than a metre from the back of the stone staircase, then lights two of the torches he brings in, and traces them onto the bundle of shrub branches to ensure enough light.

Unfortunately, the back of the stone staircase also looks like a giant gray rock with no cracks and no way to plug the torch into it. But it also has the advantage that if there is a bluestone slab underneath, you can see it by digging up the sludge.

The sludge stinks, which is inevitable. Claude took the shovel and threw the sludge aside, quickly revealing the bottom of the back of the stone staircase. Even though the deposition of sludge makes the bottom look dark, it is clear that the bottom piece reveals a rectangular profile.

The Landers magician was not lying... Claude's heart was unusually excited, and he could not have guessed it. The underground entrance near the cliffs of the seamounts here is really the lowly magician's residence.

Carefully scrape the sludge off the stone wall with a small shovel and push it with your hand. This rectangular contour is a little shaky, but not pushed.

Claude, think carefully about what the diary says, yes, push hard inside. It was just that Claude was squatting on a branch of a shrub, holding a torch in his left hand, and couldn't do it with his right hand alone, so he simply kicked it with his foot.

This rectangular contour fruit is really the bluestone plate, kicked under the foot and curled up. With one more lift, the blue tablet was picked up, revealing a square hole in it like a drawer.

Use the torch to look inside, inside is a white jade like box, looks 30 centimetres long, more than 10 centimetres tall, it feels very component.

Claude looked around and was going to find a place to plug the torch in. Obviously, one hand might not be able to hold the jade box.

Just at this moment, Claude suddenly heard a "grunt” sound, seemed to get closer and closer, looked up, had to be shocked, but saw a blood basin pounding straight at himself...