บท 17: Tomb of Ten Thousand

Seeing all of this, Apollo, who was finding it difficult even to stand, sighed in relief, and immediately, his aura continued to drop at an alarming rate, and he returned to his normal state.

A smile appeared on his face as he saw the devastating power of his self-created skill, 'Ice Nova', which uses all four of his Prana circuits at the same time to create a deadly cold wave that freezes everything in its path.

The only problem with this skill is that it cannot differentiate between friend and foe, so everything within his range will get caught and frozen, and it needed too much life force to use as, with his current strength, he could only use it two or three times.

If he tried to use more than that, he might suffer excessive loss of life force and could die. So it can only be used as a trump card, not as a regular means in battle.

Although there were some problems, it was without doubt a powerful skill that he created himself.

As he was feeling happy, suddenly his head, started spinning, and the surroundings around him started to change. The sky with the blood-red sun disappeared, and the backyard changed as he appeared to be sitting in a completely different place.

"F**k!"

As he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was a dead skeleton appearing in front of him, which surprised him, but after a second, he calmed down and looked around. He seemed to appear in some sort of cemetery, and the dead body in front of him was giving him a familiar feeling like he had seen it before.

The cemetery was the biggest cemetery he had ever seen, as he saw thousands of tombs. He could not guess the total number of tombs unless he looked carefully, but according to his guess, there might be more than ten thousand tombs buried here.

He then focused on the skeleton in front of him, which was surprisingly lying outside the tomb ahead of him. This skeleton was wearing armour and was holding a spear.

And after carefully looking at it, he surprisingly felt a similar aura that he felt in the illusion or dream, whatever that was.

"Could this person be the mirror twin he met in the illusion?"

"But how? Shouldn't he be dead?" But then again, Rion had many mysterious creatures, like those death beasts that were said to be from the divine era hundreds of thousands of years ago, but they still exist, so it might be possible.

Apollo felt this should be the truth. Except for having the same face, everything about that twin was different, whether it was fighting style or personality; it was not like him but entirely different from some other person.

And his talk about devouring him might be true, as that illusion should be in the mind, and they battled to determine who would control the body. He won, so he returned perfectly to the real world, but that person completely lost his soul.

"That must be."

The more he thought, the more he felt this should have happened.

He quickly got closer to the skeleton and looked at the spear and the armour, as they seemed to be of such high quality that even after thousands of years, there wasn't much damage to them. They seem to be made of rare materials that are hard to find now.

After some simple patching, they will not be different from the entire new weapon.

He wore the armour, took the spear, and started to move while looking for treasures, as this place has thousands of tombs. If he digs some tombs, he should find great things.

He looked around and tried to find extravagant tombs or tombs that were in great shape. Although it's not glorious to dig other people's tombs, knowing these tombs might carry hundreds of treasures that cannot be bought outside, he cannot stop.

After some time, he found some such tombs and dug them out, but he did not get much as, although from the outside, they looked good, after digging, he found mostly trash.

Most of the weapons and armour he found were in much worse condition than the armour he found at the first tomb. Most of them were in such a degraded state because they seemed to be corroded by the death energy that they were no different from scraps.

But he still did not give up completely and moved ahead to look for better treasures.

Just as he looked around, he saw something surprising.

"That!"

He saw a person sitting with closed eyes in front of a tomb, but it seemed that he was covered in some unknown aura.

His eyes can see weird, tiny energy particles in the air that seem to cover the person and the tomb.

When he came closer, he instantly knew who was sitting ahead.

He was none other, but the soldier named Mark from the Fletcher family came here with him and, like him, was swallowed by the shadow.

Seeing this, he quickly ran toward Mark, who still seemed to be an illusion.

After coming closer to him, Apollo looked at the tomb and Mark carefully, but he did not find a solution.

He did not try to awaken him forcefully from the outside, as he did not know what impact that would have on Mark. Such a forceful method might lead to an even more devastating result, but the situation was getting worse, as he was feeling weird power within Mark, which was getting larger and larger.

If Apollo could not find a way, something worse was going to happen, but he did not find anything around Mark and the tomb.

But after some time, he comes to a difficult conclusion: the arrangement of this power is beyond his understanding, and he can only wait, hoping Mark can come through on his own.