Bai Shi looked at the sprawling cityscape and couldn't help but feel a headache coming on.
Nokron was massive. Unlike in the game, there were no clear paths to follow, nor had buildings conveniently collapsed or tilted over the roads to serve as stepping stones.
There were no obvious roads within this enormous cluster of buildings, which meant Bai Shi would have to explore on his own.
Finding the right direction alone in such a vast place would be extremely difficult.
Not to mention, most of the buildings had been shattered in the past cataclysm. Entire sections had been reduced to ruins, leaving no place to even stand.
The buildings that still stood were all embedded with numerous massive meteorites.
These were the culprits behind the destruction of Nokron, the Eternal City—meteorites summoned by Astel from the void.
The scale of the Eternal City was immense. This particular area seemed to be a residential district, one that might have once housed over a hundred thousand people, or perhaps even more.
As for the Night's Sacred Ground, Bai Shi's destination and the location of the Fingerslayer Blade, it would have been a place of great importance to the Nox dynasty, physically isolated from this residential area.
Bai Shi stood by a window, gazing out in all directions.At last, in the distance, he spotted a faint orange glow in one direction, quite conspicuous against the purple night mist.
Since he couldn't find any other landmarks, his only option was to head toward that distant light.
However, Bai Shi didn't rush toward it. Instead, he started descending the stairs of the building he was in, hoping to reach ground level.
He was curious to see what lay in the bottomless depths of Nokron.
But after descending a few floors, Bai Shi found that the lower half of the building was severely damaged and shrouded in the night mist, obscuring his view.
Bai Shi simply leaped from a window into the adjacent building.
This building was in relatively good condition, and there were signs of life inside.
Various pieces of furniture lay scattered on the ground, and debris littered the floor.
Among the clutter were some inscribed clay tablets covered in a script Bai Shi couldn't read.
Bai Shi picked one up, only to find that all the objects here seemed frozen in time. Apart from the initial physical damage, they had suffered no erosion over the long ages.
He looked at the other objects and found they were all the same, coated in a layer of silvery light.
At first, he had thought it was an issue of material, but that didn't seem to be the case.
It was impossible for so many different kinds of items to have been made from the same material.
Bai Shi recalled a material from the game—Dewkissed Herba.
The item description for Dewkissed Herba seemed to mention that its dew carried a 'mysterious' aura.
In the game, 'Occult' was even an infusion affinity, which meant it definitely possessed some kind of power.
Considering the silver plants in the Eternal City didn't sway in the wind, it was probably the 'mystery' permeating the false night sky that had preserved everything in this state.
Furthermore, the building Bai Shi had just been in was different from his current one.
Though their architectural styles were identical, the difference in their interior spaces was substantial.
The space in the previous building was roughly suited for beings of normal human height.
This one, however, had immense interior spaces and door and window frames.
It looked like it was meant for creatures at least three or four meters tall.
But for all the things these ruins contained, they were missing the one thing that should have been most abundant.
There wasn't a single corpse to be found.
Filled with doubt, Bai Shi continued his descent down the stairs.
The staircase in this building was fairly well-preserved.
Although some sections had been destroyed by meteorites, he could still make his way down by jumping.
Along the way, Bai Shi explored several other rooms, but still found no corpses.
However, some rooms contained numerous artifacts reflecting the lifestyle of the Nox people, which could be excavated and studied by archaeologists in the future.
Soon, Bai Shi encountered the first living being he had seen thus far.
It was a writhing mass, a Silver Tear wandering about the room.
Upon spotting Bai Shi, the silver tear immediately changed its form.
The silver tear's liquid body shot upward, solidifying into a sharp spike that thrust toward Bai Shi.
Bai Shi easily sidestepped the attack and grabbed the spike.
It felt incredibly hard, like real steel, but he could feel a liquid substance flowing constantly beneath its shell.
Bai Shi increased the pressure in his hand and snapped the spike in half, sending silver liquid splashing everywhere.
With a flick of his wrist, Bai Shi easily shook off the liquid, which had almost no viscosity.
The silver tear writhed, retracting the broken half of the spike back into its body.
Curious to observe this peculiar lifeform, Bai Shi held back from immediately pursuing it.
The silver tear seemed to feel no pain, as it immediately extended a second spike and lunged at Bai Shi again.
Bai Shi swiped his right hand, and a blade of wind sliced the silver tear's body in two.
However, such an injury was ineffective against the liquid-metal creature. As the silver tear writhed, its two halves reconnected and became whole again.
It seemed the silver tear was resistant to slashing damage.
So, this time Bai Shi tried a different method, thrusting his hand directly into the writhing silver mass.
The silver tear reacted instantly, hardening its entire body.
But it was too late to stop an attack from within.
A storm erupted from his palm, blowing the silver tear apart. It exploded into countless pieces that scattered in all directions, and then, it went still.
Bai Shi searched its remains but couldn't find a core.
This type of tear was the most numerous, common, and low-level tear lifeform in the Eternal City.
They possessed only a very weak shapeshifting ability, allowing them to change parts of their bodies for offense or defense, but nothing more.
A slightly more advanced tear could release lightning on top of that.
Further up the hierarchy were the highest-level Mimic Tears.
Mimic Tears were incredibly powerful, on a completely different level from these silver tears.
A Mimic Tear could imitate the form of another living being, perfectly replicating its power.
Most importantly for Bai Shi, he could extract Larval Tears from the bodies of Mimic Tears.
The Larval Tear was the core within a Mimic Tear, and it could be used to perform the rite of 'rebirth.'
The children born from the Queen of the Full Moon's 'rebirth' were all frail and short-lived.
The reason lay in the incompleteness of the rite itself. The key to solving this problem was the amber egg cradled in the Queen of the Full Moon's hands.
Within that amber egg was the Great Rune of the Unborn, a gift from Radagon to Rennala.
With the power of that Great Rune, the rite of 'rebirth' could be perfected.
However, Great Runes needed to be activated at a Divine Tower to restore their power before they could be used.
Yet, the Great Rune of the Unborn had no corresponding Divine Tower to empower it.
This was where the Larval Tear came in.
The Larval Tear was precisely the material needed to activate the power of the Great Rune of the Unborn within the amber egg.
Once he found some Larval Tears here, he could prepare to head to the academy and create a body for Melina.
Bai Shi stepped over the puddle of the silver tear's remains and continued his descent.
After a few more floors, however, Bai Shi could go no further down.
The floors below were completely submerged in water.
Bai Shi looked out from a window on his current floor and saw a vast, boundless body of water.
The Eternal City was flooded.
The surface of the water was as calm as a giant mirror, reflecting the brilliant, false night sky.
This once-thriving city was now filled with only deathly silence.
Beneath the water, countless skeletons lay still, as if time had frozen. Everything was fixed in the instant the disaster struck, the bodies forever slumbering in the silent abyss.
In their despairing demise, they had become history along with the Eternal City.
The skeletons were tangled and piled high; it was impossible to tell how many were stacked beneath.
Bai Shi briefly observed the remains.
Some had been crushed by rubble, while others were sheared in half.
This was not the kind of damage falling meteorites would cause.
Without a doubt, this was all the work of the young Astels.
It seemed the Astel that came to destroy the Eternal City wasn't alone; it had likely brought many of its young along with it.
The Astels' method for destroying the Eternal City wasn't simply to obliterate the entire, massive urban area with meteorites.
Their meteorites had inflicted great damage, but not enough to completely erase the Eternal City from existence.
They had destroyed the Eternal City by slaughtering the vast majority of its inhabitants.
Among the corpses were many enormous skeletons, some of them humanoid and standing five to six meters tall.
These skeletons certainly didn't belong to races like the Numen or the Nox.
Recalling the giant skeleton on the throne, he thought they might be the descendants of that giant race.
It seemed that while the Nox dynasty was once powerful, it lacked truly top-tier strength.
Otherwise, they wouldn't have needed to resort to creating Mimic Tears in their search for a Lord of Night.
If they had truly possessed such power, they wouldn't have been annihilated by the Astels' assault.
Alternatively, perhaps they once had powerful champions who later disappeared or died for some unknown reason, which was why they needed a Tear to become their Lord of Night.
Considering the Fingerslayer Blade, could it be that the Nox's champions had been taken away by the servants of the Two Fingers?
But regardless, the advanced technology of the Nox dynasty was quite impressive.
After all, the Mimic Tear had saved Bai Shi's life countless times in the game.
—
Since it was impossible to walk along the ground level of the Eternal City to the light he had spotted earlier, it seemed he would have to traverse the rooftops.
Bai Shi aimed for an adjacent building and leaped across.
Then, from a doorframe on the far side of that structure, he jumped to the next building over.
He hadn't traversed more than a few buildings when the back of a pale skull appeared in a window before him.
The skull was hanging upside down with its back to him. Coupled with its massive, conspicuous mandibles, it was clearly one of the hanging Astels.
This Astel appeared to be dormant and hadn't noticed the visitor in the building behind it.
Bai Shi licked his lips. This was a pleasant surprise.
*There are still Astels lingering here?*
Seeing that it hadn't noticed him, Bai Shi quietly snuck over.
Once he was behind the Astel's head, Bai Shi summoned the Starscourge Greatswords from his spatial disc and swung both blades at the hanging cranium.
The Starscourge Greatswords bit deep into the Astel's gravel-like spine.
The Astel, finally jolted from its slumber, let out a painful shriek and began to struggle violently.
It instinctively used its gravity magic, attempting to repel the greatswords embedded in its body.
Bai Shi pushed harder and activated the Starscourge Greatswords' Ash of War, Starcaller Cry. Gravity erupted from the blades, countering the Astel's magic.
Its gravity magic failed. Powerless to resist any longer, the Astel's massive head was severed from its body.
Bai Shi quickly grabbed the severed head and pulled it back into the room, while the massive body plummeted down, creating a huge splash in the calm water below.
Bai Shi placed the enormous head before him and began to dismantle it.
The white, bony skull was useless, so Bai Shi shattered it.
He removed the hard, dark blue eyeballs from within, planning to study them later.
Bai Shi also took the two large mandibles.
The mandibles of these Astels contained the power of gravity lightning and could be used to craft a fairly powerful Somber weapon, the Fallingstar Beast Jaw.
Setting out again, Bai Shi encountered two more young Astels and a few silver tears hiding in rooms along the way. He dispatched them all and collected another batch of materials.
However, an alert Astel was not as easy to deal with, requiring two or three minutes of effort.
All in all, he reached the light he had been using as a landmark with relative ease.
Once he was nearby, Bai Shi realized the light came from a torch on the wall of the Siofra River Well.
If Bai Shi remembered correctly, the path to the Night's Sacred Ground in the game was near this well.
Bai Shi looked around the magnificent well, which pierced through the upper and lower rock strata, and finally spotted the faint golden light of a Site of Grace's guidance within a massive building embedded in the cliff face.
Bai Shi leaped across the ruins of nearby buildings to reach it, where he found the Site of Grace.
However, someone had already arrived before him.
Inside the building, Bai Shi saw Blaidd, who was drenched from head to toe.