The Runic Alchemist

Chapter 934: The Duchess of Night: Darkness of Desire

Inside The Astral Fall Expanse Dungeon, 37,647 Km from Mainland, Moondancer.

It was another interesting one.

The pitch-black night sky was much closer than it should be, as if they had grown thousands of kilometers tall. She could see the curvature of the white dusty land in the distance. Another world, or a ’Planet’ as the bastard says, but much smaller than their world.

’So I would have a view like this if I fly higher and higher, leaving our world?’

“Faster!”

The annoying voice urged them once again. They were already on level 76. That too under just 40 minutes. Even by their extreme standards, this broke all records, and Damian was urging them to go even faster.

He must have discovered something new and was eager to try it.

The last time Moondancer had seen the guy this eager was when he did that connecting experiment. If she didn’t know him, Moondancer would definitely call the experiment the biggest waste of her precious time. She had several things planned for using the new dungeons as well. Such as confirming the mana theory hypothesis, experiments, and recording closer footage of some of the interesting scriptures she had noticed on the dungeon run.

[Note: Connecting Experiment refers to Damian trying to connect a newly earned dungeon core and captured final boss monster to all dungeon floor key points using his prime spell runic-machine and waygates. The aim was to see if the dungeon could be controlled that way. It was a failure.]

The speed of the clearing was given so much importance that only the two fourth-rankers were the ones fighting. All others were tasked to use the runic live capture tool to record videos of each part of the dungeon floor.

These videos will be analyzed by thousands of people at once, and they will have a solid guide and map of the whole dungeon in less than an hour. Using which they all could enter the dungeon with people under their charge and clear it again and again till they were dead tired.

That’s how they explored each high-level dungeon. They would form two seperate hundred people party, one led by Landbreaker and the other by Runebreaker himself, once the demons confirmed the dungeon as functional. The two parties would record everything, and a plan would form. Which will be shared with all the thousands of ships that participated in dungeon raiding.

At first, they lost a lot of demons that way, but then the great-fucking runesmith created a dungeon mana sensing machine. It recorded the mana fluctuation patterns and compared them with a database of stored mana fluctuation patterns.

Their prediction of which dungeon would have what kind of environment, mana elements, and monsters inside slowly became scarily accurate. They rarely failed to identify a dangerous dungeon anymore. And all those terrifying dungeons were closed by Damian as they found them.

He was such a spell thief that even Eldoris’ royal spell, which took so much effort to launch, was also stolen by him after witnessing it just once.

Moondancer didn’t want to admit it in front of him; it would only boost his ego, but all these discoveries he had made and shared with the research board had actually helped her personal work greatly. Her mana origin and causality-related theories were confirmed several times by odd experiments Damian did. The random conversations she had with the man actually helped her work more times than she could count.

When they started, the whole group treated her like an infectious disease, except for Vidalia, who knew her for a long time and was used to her. She had fought against Faerunians, Eldorians, and the Sanctuary people in the past. That was to be expected. That was how everyone treated her all her life, so she wasn’t expecting anything different. The odd thing was the change that came afterwards.

As every transcedent in the exploration project, she too had a command of a whole Axiom-class ship. She was in charge of a thousand people. As a duchess, she knew how to lead. The Empire’s military was annoyingly strict and had meaningless, weird rules. She was still a duchess in a region of Dawnstar, but it wasn’t the same as her own homeland in Ashenvale. She didn’t really care for all those people, but she did prefer the political freedom of Ashenvale much better.

The Emperor had used her against the Faerunians and always kept her separate from the ’true Empire people’. Her reason for joining the empire was revenge against the elves and that brat, but Damian was lost in a dungeon, and fighting Vidalia had gotten boring over time.

After fighting years against the Spellmaster, in which she didn’t have her powers, and her true face was visible. Moondancer realized why she hated the pretty elf. It was mostly the achievements she had and the title of Spellmaster. She wanted to prove herself better than her. Despite being an esper, the level of mana knowledge she commanded was rare among even transcedent mages.

But that wasn’t everything. With her true face revealed for the first time in her century-old life since she chose the Esper class as first ranker, she was accepted. People did not fear her. They came to her to have a chat. That had never happened before. All her life, she was hated for her darkness, and she had learned to hate people back, starting with her family.

But after Damian took her powers, her face was back to normal. People laughed when she said something witty. Men craved her. The most influential people came to ask for her hand in marriage. That was the oddest feeling ever. While fighting together with her people against Vidalia, she realized her killing intentions had lessened.

And the realization hit her. All her life, she thought she hated Vidalia for her achievements, but that wasn’t the full truth. She hated her because she wanted to be her. The Spellmaster had everything she wanted since she was ten years old. Her beauty, intelligence, and fame as a renowned mage and scholar, but most importantly respect and love of her people.

When she rode to war to protect Eldoris, they cheered her and called her a great hero. But when Moondancer did that for her duchy in Ashenvale.. they breathed in relief that she was gone.