The Regressed Heir of Ravencrest

Chapter 55: Into the Cave

Ethan remained hidden beneath the dense canopy, his gaze fixed on the last of the Eclipse members as they escorted the bound villagers inside. The massive stone sealing the entrance rumbled shut behind them. Even after the sound faded, Ethan didn’t move. He looked at the cliff for a while, reviewing everything he’d learned since arriving at the village.

This has already exceeded the scope of the mission. A direct report to the guild would bring experienced hunters, but by the time they arrived, every captive would most likely already be dead. Before anything else, I need to confirm the number of enemies and their strength. If there are survivors from earlier abductions, apart from the ones they just brought in, I need to find them too.

For now — let’s go in.

Beside him, Rune remained perfectly still, blue eyes fixed on the cliff. For a brief moment Ethan considered leaving him outside. The cave was an enclosed space, and if they were discovered, escaping would become far more difficult than fighting in open forest.

He dismissed the thought just as fast. Rune had stayed hidden from veteran knights before in the ice valley. Unless someone here carried senses well beyond an ordinary hunter’s, finding him would remain just as difficult.

As if reading his thoughts, Rune lowered his body and merged deeper into the shadows, his breathing slowing until it became almost impossible to notice. Even Ethan found it difficult to notice him, had it not been the bond linking them together.

"You’re getting better..." Ethan said.

Rune’s tail gave a single flick before going still again, as if telling him not to worry.

Ethan waited a few more minutes, confirmed no patrols moved through the surrounding forest, and began circulating the Night Sovereign Art. He suppressed every trace of his aura until he was little more than another shadow beneath the moonlight. Rune matched his pace without a sound. Together, they slipped through the narrow gap left between the boulder and the cliff before it settled fully into place.

Cool air rushed past them the moment they entered, carried up from somewhere deep in the mountain.

The passage inside was wider than expected, lit only by scattered torches fixed along the walls, their orange light flickering whenever the underground draft passed through. A hooded figure near the rear slowed, glancing back toward the entrance.

"Huh..."

"What are you doing? Hurry up. The ritual will begin soon," another voice called from ahead, impatient.

The first man lingered a moment longer, frowning slightly. "...Must’ve been the wind." He shook his head and walked on.

Ethan waited until the footsteps had fully faded before advancing. The passage widened as they went deeper. The scent of blood grew stronger with every step, thick enough now that it seemed to cling to the walls themselves, and beneath it, mana fluctuations he could feel building the further in they went — faint at first, then unmistakable.

It’s coming from beneath the cave.

The murmur of low voices gradually reached Ethan’s ears. It wasn’t conversation. More like quiet anticipation. Heavy footsteps echoed somewhere ahead, followed by the scrape of wood against stone and the rattling of chains.

Ethan slowed instinctively, pressing himself against the tunnel wall before carefully looking ahead.

Several hooded figures emerged from a side passage, escorting another group of exhausted villagers toward the chamber beyond. Their wrists were bound behind their backs with iron shackles, thick ropes connecting them together to prevent anyone from breaking away. Some barely remained on their feet. Others had to be dragged forward after their legs finally gave out. None of the Eclipse members spoke. They simply continued walking as though transporting livestock rather than living people.

Ethan let them pass before continuing.

The tunnel finally opened into a wide chamber.

It was larger than Ethan had expected — Rough stone walls, torches fixed in iron brackets, wooden tables scattered near the edges cluttered with parchment, glass vials, and instruments stained dark with something long dried. Roughly fifteen hooded figures moved between them without speaking above a whisper, some recording notes, others adjusting formations carved directly into the stone floor. Their movements carried none of the sloppy arrogance he’d have expected from ordinary cultists.

There are at least fifteen in my line of sight. There could be more further in.

At the center of the chamber stood a stone pedestal, and resting on it, a blackened skull. Faded crimson runes crawled across its surface, pulsing faintly, and Ethan noticed — with a small, cold jolt — that each pulse seemed to be answered from somewhere else entirely, somewhere beneath his feet rather than in front of him.

Ethan’s eyes tracked the shallow grooves running outward from the pedestal like roots, dark with old blood. Dried.

Is this the blood they collected from Greenwich Village?

Beyond the formation, dozens of captives from earlier raids had already been gathered beneath armed watch. Men, women, and children stood shoulder to shoulder, wrists bound with iron shackles, faces pale from exhaustion. As Ethan watched, the newest prisoners were pushed into the chamber and separated from the rest. The Eclipse members didn’t throw them together at random. They arranged every captive around the formation with practiced precision, occasionally stepping back to compare positions against magic cjrcles carved into the stone.

Ethan spotted a boy who couldn’t have been much older than Amelia, his eyes stayed on the boy a moment too long before he looked away.

Not yet... Charging in now guarantees their deaths. Fifteen against one, with this many lives standing in every line of sight, will put them all at risk.

He kept still, piecing everything together. The blood. The captives. The skull. The mana, rising from somewhere far beneath the cavern floor — not from the artifact, not from the cultists, but from something buried deep under the rock itself.

A dormant dungeon.

His breath caught, just slightly.

He’d seen this shape before. In his previous life, dormant dungeons had opened without warning across the Empire, one after another, innumerable monsters pouring out of each the instant it broke. Killing thousands of people and swallowing towns whole. Scholars blamed the phenomenon on unstable mana fluctuation. Until the truth gradually emerged...

It was never natural. Someone was forcing them open. And it’s happening right now, in front of me.

The last captive had barely been forced into position when the atmosphere in the chamber changed. Every cultist stepped back from the formation almost at once. The scratching of quills ceased. The movement of equipment stopped. Even the prisoners instinctively fell silent as an uneasy tension spread through the cave.

Nobody gave an order and neither did it require one.

Slow, measured footsteps echoed from the tunnel beyond. One. Then another. No one turned to look. Every Eclipse member lowered their head instead.

A tall figure finally emerged from the darkness, brown hair falling loosely over sharp features. Dark scales crept across one side of his neck before disappearing beneath his robes, while his enlarged right arm ended in thick black claws more suited to a beast than a man.

A Chimera.

Ethan didn’t know his face. But the shape of the man — the scale of what he’d clearly built here, the calm, almost gentle way he approached mass slaughter like a professor approaching a lecture — matched something he’d heard whispered about within the Eclipse Conclave in fragments over the years. A researcher known even among his own people for the particular cruelty of his experiments and the trail of ruined places he apparently left behind him.

One of the hooded figures stepped forward and dropped to one knee.

"Lord Vael."

"Everything has been prepared. The catalyst has finished absorbing the blood. The sacrifices are in position."

Vael.

The name settled into place beside everything Ethan had already half-suspected from the man’s appearance alone. He’d heard it before, only in fragments, whispered among rumors of the Eclipse Conclave’s worst researchers, notorious for his inhuman experiments but never had anything solid enough to put a face to it.

Now he had one.

Vael crossed to the pedestal and rested a claw against the skull the way a man might rest a hand on an old friend’s shoulder. His breathing changed, slower, then unsteady.

"Do you know," he said, quiet enough that only the nearest cultists could have heard it, "how many times I failed?" His smile widened, stretching further than it should have. "How many years. How many disappointments. How many sacrifices, wasted on formations that weren’t quite right, how many years I waited for permission to do this."

His shoulders began to shake.

"Heh..."

"Hehehe..."

It built without warning, spilling out until it filled the whole chamber. "HAHAHAHAHA!"

Tears gathered at the corners of his eyes. None of the cultists flinched. They simply kept their heads down.

"At last," Vael breathed, wiping his eyes with the back of one clawed hand. "My research will finally succeed."

Research.

Ethan’s jaw tightened.

This is it. This is where it started.

Every Eclipse member stepped forward at once. Short ritual daggers came out from beneath their robes, and one by one, they opened their own palms, letting blood spill onto the formation. Only a few drops each — nothing compared to what the skull had already devoured.

It was enough.

The runes ignited, one after another, until the whole skull burned scarlet. A low vibration ran through the cavern floor. Dust drifted from the ceiling, and somewhere far below, the mountain itself seemed to take a slow, deliberate breath.

Beside him, Rune’s ears flattened, a low growl caught in his throat before Ethan’s hand found his neck and stilled him.

Cracks spread across the skull’s surface, and blood began to weep from them — not fresh blood, but the blood already taken, changed now, glowing faint and wrong, moving through the grooves with a purpose that had nothing to do with gravity.

"It works," the Chimera breathed. "I knew blood alone wasn’t enough. It needed offerings." He looked at his bleeding followers with something close to pride. "Your devotion will be remembered."

The crimson threads reached the edge of the formation. Then, instead of circling back, they kept moving — outward, toward the captives.

A boy cried out as the light wrapped around him. An old man beside him screamed, chest tightening under threads of crimson light. Prisoners who’d been unconscious moments earlier jerked awake, panic flooding their faces as they fought restraints that weren’t rope at all anymore.

Ethan’s stomach turned cold.

The blood was only the catalyst, the people were the sacrifices.

If the Chimera finished whatever chant was coming, every captive in this cave would die, and whatever slept beneath the mountain would wake.

He looked at Rune once. Rune looked back, understanding arriving without needing words.

"Protect them," Ethan whispered.

Rune slipped away into the dark without a sound, circling wide toward the prisoners along the chamber’s edge, staying low and invisible.

Ethan turned back toward the center of the chamber, running the numbers one final time.

He let his senses settle briefly on each cultist in turn. None of them bothered concealing their aura. Most sat at first Circle. A handful, closer to the pedestal, carried the denser, steadier presence of Second Circle mages. Fifteen total, by his count.

His gaze shifted to Vael. The pressure surrounding the Chimera sat on an entirely different level — dense, controlled, pressing against the whole chamber the way a mountain pressed against the ground beneath it without ever needing to move. Fourth Circle, if Ethan judged it correctly.

I’m not strong enough yet to fight fifteen of them and him at once. Not with this many lives on the line the second I’m seen.

But he doesn’t know I’m here. Rather than confronting directly I should end it in...

One strike.

The Chimera stepped fully into the formation, arms spreading, the light beneath his feet climbing his robes. His voice began to shift into something forbidden, harder to place, each word pulling a heavier answer from the ground below.

Ethan closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

The Night Sovereign Art moved through him, and his presence folded into the dark until there was nothing left of him to sense at all.

He moved.

Twenty steps...

Ten...

One...

The Chimera never looked away from the skull.

Ethan’s hand closed around the hilt of the Eternal Sovereign Blade.

The moment both hands rose toward the glowing bone, Ethan broke from the shadows, the black blade driving forward in silence.