Chapter 232: The Rediscovering Capital
Kai led them through the hidden entrance beneath Mythal, and the stone door sealed shut behind them with a low, heavy sound. The city disappeared instantly. Only silence remained, broken by the soft pale glow running through the walls, just enough light to see by.
Unlike Kai’s first visit, nobody stayed quiet this time.
Lily looked left, then right, then back at Kai. "...You’ve been hiding this."
Kai blinked. "I wasn’t hiding it."
"You absolutely were."
"It wasn’t intentional."
She stopped walking entirely. "You found an ancient underground civilization and forgot to tell me?"
Kai scratched the back of his neck. "...Yes."
Lily just stared at him. "...I’m actually offended."
Elden adjusted the strap on his bag of notebooks, mild amusement on his face. "In fairness, I only found out about it yesterday too."
Lily rounded on him. "And you’re not offended?"
"I assume he had his reasons."
"You’re too forgiving. It’s a character flaw."
Kai sighed. "Can we keep walking?"
Lily huffed, but fell into step beside him anyway. "...Fine. But I’m still offended."
...
As they descended deeper, Kai noticed something. The first time he’d walked this passage, all he’d felt was how unsettling everything was.
Now, watching the other two, he realized they were each noticing something completely different.
Lily suddenly knelt beside one wall. "...Wait."
Everyone stopped.
She ran her fingers along the seam between two stones. "No mortar."
Kai nodded. "I noticed that."
She shook her head immediately. "No. You noticed there wasn’t mortar." She looked up at him. "I noticed there aren’t any mistakes."
Silence.
She pointed down the corridor. "Every stone. Every joint. Every angle. They’re perfect."
She looked around with growing excitement. "...How?"
Nobody answered. She was already pulling out a notebook. "...I don’t even know what question to ask first."
Kai smiled. The first time through, he’d walked right past all of it.
Elden wasn’t looking at the walls at all. He was looking up. "...Interesting."
Kai followed his gaze. "What?"
"The lights." Both of them glanced up at the soft glow running through the stone overhead. "It isn’t fire. It isn’t crystal. It isn’t mana." He studied it a moment longer. "It doesn’t flicker. It doesn’t dim."
He laughed quietly. "Whatever this is, they illuminated an entire underground city with it." His notebook was already open. "Imagine teaching beneath this."
Lily crouched beside a nearby stone table, brushing dust from its surface. "...Someone worked here." She traced a crack running through the stone. "Probably complained about the exact same things we complain about. Deadlines. Bad chairs."
Elden smiled faintly. "And paperwork, knowing how thoroughly they indexed everything."
Lily laughed. "Definitely paperwork."
Kai watched them both quietly, realizing they were seeing an entirely different civilization than the one he’d walked through alone weeks earlier.
...
The staircase finally opened out into the Archive itself, and all three of them stopped at once.
Rows. Rows and rows of shelves stretching out farther than the light could reach. Thousands, then thousands more beyond that.
The scale of it swallowed every reaction whole.
Lily froze completely. "...No."
Nobody answered.
"This can’t fit under Mythal."
She turned slowly in a full circle. "...This is bigger than the Academy."
She walked further in.
"...Bigger than the Guild."
Further still.
"...Bigger than downtown."
Kai smiled. "...That was my reaction too."
She whispered, almost to herself, "...It’s beautiful."
Elden walked toward a collapsed shelf nearby and gently lifted a broken tablet from the wreckage. Even though he couldn’t read a single symbol on it, he carefully brushed away layers of settled dust.
"...Knowledge." He said it quietly. "This entire place exists because someone believed knowledge was worth preserving."
Nobody spoke. The sentence sat there, sinking in.
Lily started walking. Then faster. Then jogging outright, calling out sections as she passed them. "Research!" "Storage!" Classification markers everywhere, shelving labels stretching in every direction, different room layouts branching off the main hall.
"They indexed everything!"
She pointed down another hallway. "Look! Medicine!" Another. "Engineering!" Another. "Administration!" One more. "...Military!"
Then she vanished between two shelves entirely.
Kai blinked. "...Where’d she go?"
Elden chuckled, still flipping through his notebook. "...We lost her."
From somewhere deep in the stacks, her voice echoed back to them. "I FOUND ANOTHER SECTION!"
Both of them laughed.
...
Elden never looked at the shelves first. He noticed rooms instead, open halls, stone platforms, tiered seating carved directly into the rock. He walked quietly into one, and slowly smiled.
"...This."
Kai followed him in. "What?"
Elden pointed at the layout. Tiered seating. A raised platform at the front. Writing surfaces carved straight into the stone benches. Observation balconies ringing the upper level.
"This was a classroom."
Kai blinked. "You can tell?"
Elden nodded immediately. "The teacher stood here." He pointed. "The students sat there." Another gesture upward. "The upper seats gave everyone a clear view of the platform."
He laughed quietly. "They optimized sightlines."
He sat slowly where a student might have sat once. "I wonder what they were taught."
Silence.
Kai sat down beside him. "So do I."
"Do you think they had exams?" Elden asked after a moment, only half joking. "Somewhere in here there’s probably a student who complained about the exact same thing my recruits complain about."
Kai laughed. "Probably worse. They didn’t have B-Rank Dungeons handing out free experience."
...
While Elden and Lily explored, Kai simply watched for a while. The first time he’d come here, he’d searched for answers.
Now his friends were finding questions he’d never even thought to ask.
He thought about mentioning it to someone, then realized there was no one beside him to say it to right now, and let the thought settle quietly on its own instead. The first time, he’d only seen ruins.
Now he was finally seeing the people who’d lived here.
...
A loud shout echoed through the chamber. "KAI!"
He and Elden both turned at once, hurrying toward the sound.
Lily stood in front of an enormous stone wall, completely covered in carved symbols. She pointed at it excitedly. "I know what this is!"
Neither of them did.
She laughed. "...Right. You can’t read it." She started explaining anyway. "The symbols repeat. The spacing changes in a pattern. The larger symbols divide the smaller ones into groups." She pointed upward. "This isn’t decoration."
"It’s organization."
Kai looked closer. "You mean..."
She nodded, practically vibrating. "...This is a directory."
Silence.
Both of them turned to look at the wall again, and suddenly all of it clicked into place. Medicine. Engineering. Military. Education. Agriculture. Transportation. Research. Administration.
The Archive wasn’t one library.
It was an entire civilization’s knowledge, sorted with deliberate purpose.
Elden exhaled slowly. "...We’ve been standing inside humanity’s greatest repository of knowledge."
Nobody spoke for several seconds. They simply stared at the wall together.
...
Lily turned toward Kai. "...We’re going to spend months here."
Kai chuckled. "...Probably."
Elden shook his head slowly. "...Years."
Lily corrected him immediately. "...Decades."
Kai raised an eyebrow. "You’re planning to move in?"
"I’d bring a cot," Lily said, completely serious.
Elden pointed at the directory wall, curious. "Does that say anything about food storage? If we’re staying decades, I’d like to know there’s a kitchen down here somewhere."
Lily squinted at the symbols. "...Actually, there’s a section for that."
Elden’s eyebrows went up. "Really?"
"No idea what it says. But there’s a section."
He smiled faintly, satisfied with that non-answer.
...
Kai looked between the two of them, both already drifting toward different corners of the chamber without needing to be told.
Lily headed toward research and engineering, already muttering half-formed theories under her breath. Elden followed signs toward the educational wing, notebook filling faster than his hand could keep up.
Kai called after them, "No one leaves this district. If you find something important, call for me."
Lily’s voice drifted back from halfway down another corridor already. "...Too late."
Kai sighed. Elden laughed quietly beside him.
The two of them spread out through the enormous chamber, not because anyone had told them to, but because both of them had already found something they couldn’t stop thinking about.
Kai watched them disappear one at a time into the stacks. The first time he’d walked through the Forgotten Capital alone, it had felt like a tomb.
Now, with Lily’s excited shouting echoing from somewhere three corridors away and Elden quietly turning pages beside a dormant classroom, it didn’t feel like a civilization that had died at all.
It felt like one that was finally being heard again.