Chapter 255: Something Strange
Sigh!
Dhruv finally heaved a sigh of relief as he observed the scene in front of him. The thunderstorm had stopped just seconds ago, and the clear sky had begun to show up.
"It looks like we can finally get out of here, don’t you think, Azarex?" Dhruv asked, looking at the undead lord beside him.
"Yes, master. It took quite some time, but it finally seemed to calm down," Azarex replied, realizing that it had taken about 6 or 7 hours for the thunderstorm to truly calm down.
Nodding his head, Dhruv began to get ready to venture outside once again. The very first and probably the thing he did was to consume a mana potion and replenish his mana to the max.
"Let’s go then," muttering these words, he left the cave and once again stepped into the clear sky.
Nodding his head, Azarex began to follow the lead of his lord. As commanded, his eagle soared into the sky and began scouting the area ahead for them.
While walking in that direction he couldn’t help but question whether was he going in the right direction or not.
’Should we continue on the route we came or should we change the route... I mean the thunder had come from that direction wasn’t it.’ Dhruv thought really wondering about the choice.
As he thought about the question a new one formed in his mind, ’Uhhh! Is there ’really’ any safe route here... Every route should be placed with something challenging.’
’Wouldn’t it be wise to choose the route we know the most about...’ With his mind made up, he continued his route. He was moving diagonally in the dungeon, directly walking toward the top northeast part of the dungeon.
Dhruv continued to walk calmly above the newly layered snow... creating a trail for the next ones to come. It hadn’t even been five minutes into the journey when a sound disturbed the peace.
"Master, something is there," It was the sound of his guardian coming from behind him.
Nodding his head, Dhruv looked in the direction his guardian was pointing toward. Due to the area being covered in nothing but snow... there wasn’t anything distracting.
In just a single glance he could see some stains over this white snow.
Before moving in that direction, he turned to look toward Azarex and asked, "Those things aren’t alive, are they?"
"No, Master, they aren’t alive at all," Azarex replied, getting feedback from his eagle.
"It’s good then..." Muttering these words, Dhruv began to walk toward the stains. It didn’t take him long to reach the distance from where he was able to see what it was.
The moment he saw what was there, he couldn’t help but feel a sense of terror forming within himself.
"It wasn’t safe to stay here during the thunder... I guess we had made the right choice," Dhruv thought aloud as he comprehended the thing he was seeing in front of him.
In front of him was a corpse—a trail of corpses. From what he could tell, the corpses appeared to be a part of some type of wolf monster. There were tens of corpses just a few meters apart from each other.
From the position of the corpses, Dhruv could tell that the entire horde was running from the thunderstorm, trying to find a shelter... but unlike him, they weren’t successful.
With a little caution and a lot of greed in his eyes, he began to move toward it. While walking toward the monster, he suddenly felt something—something that shouldn’t be the case.
’Huh! Why don’t the corpses have any cores left in them...’ Dhruv thought, after confirming it with the help of his mana vision more than once.
At first, he thought that some other monster must have taken it out of the corpses, but it didn’t take him long to realize that... that shouldn’t be the case.
Another monster couldn’t have snatched the core from the corpses, as he had come out of the cave just a matter of minutes after the end of the thundering... until some monsters were already outside, which is even more absurd.
On top of this, Dhruv realized there weren’t any wounds on the monsters’ bodies, except for a part of their skin being charred black, indicating that they had been killed by the thunders.
"Be careful, Azarex..." Putting his greed to the back of his mind, Dhruv instead increased his vigilance to the max and tried to look for any traces or clues that had been spared by the culprit.
As he moved closer to the place, It didn’t take him long to realize that the situation wasn’t really in his favor.
"There isn’t even a trace of footprints on the snow..." Due to the heavy thunder-snowstorm, there was a layer of snow that had formed above the previous ones.
Assuming that the monster’s cores had been snatched after the thunderstorm, there should have been some type of traces left on the snow, but there wasn’t anything like that.
After much thought, he only found one plausible route. Looking toward his second guardian Dhruv proposed an idea, "Azarex, after making them your undead, could you extract their memory?"
Knowing full well about the realm of the Dead, Azarex didn’t need much time to come up with the perfect answer, "No, master, I can’t do that."
"Huh! Really? Why is that?" Dhruv blurted out.
"First of all, master, they didn’t have their own cores, which wouldn’t make them great undead, resulting in me not being able to do most of the things I’m capable of..." After letting him understand this point, Azarex told the second one.
"Second, even if everything were to be right, the undead would only have memories until their death... which we wouldn’t want, right?" Azarex carefully explained why it was impossible to acquire the knowledge they sought.
’This makes quite a sense...’ Dhruv thought, fully agreeing with the explanation.
"This isn’t good then. Let’s get away from here..." Not wanting to associate himself with any type of creepy monster once again, Dhruv decided that it was in his best interest to leave the corpses as they were and moved on.
