One Last System

"Just what is this place?" Vaner muttered under his nose as he looked around the room.

But the place that he found inside the mountain couldn't be called a room at all. More than that, it looked like a massive, circular corridor, likely spanning the entire circumference of the mountain.

To Vaner's back, there was the same kind of wall that resisted his attacks before. And as far as he could see, a majority of the corridor actually consisted of both the same material and the same pattern written all over it.

'Those are walls,' Vaner thought, gulping down his saliva.

He came looking for silver but found gold.

Because a technique to create walls that sturdy and on such scale... didn't exist anywhere in the world.

"But just what in all hell is this thing?" Mathew whispered, turning his eyes towards a round object that made up the other wall of the circular corridor.

It wasn't flat like a normal wall but widened towards the middle of the corridor's height, only to retract the further one looked towards the wall's extremes.

'It's like a pipe embedded into a corridor,' Vaner thought, taking a step forward and reaching out towards the strange object with his hand.

'Just what is this thing?' Vaner asked himself when he got close enough to see the details of the round structure.

It was somewhere between yellow and orange in color. Yet, when Vaner came close enough, he realized it wasn't just a single object.

Rather than that, this round pipe consisted of a myriad of extremely thin wires. Each of those tiny, hair-like strands made up a bigger wire. Each of those bigger wires combined into a rope-like structure... Several thousands of which made up the entire thing.

"Why would someone waste so much copper?" Vaner asked out loud as if the air around him could bring him the answer. "Or is it even copper?" he muttered, moving on with his hand to touch the strange object.

BOOM!

A powerful electric-like shock tossed Vaner's body away like a speck of air thrown against a hurricane.

Before the man could as much as blink, his back exploded in pain when he crashed right into the fancy wall that surrounded the round object.

"FUUUUHHHH."

What was supposed to be a curse ended up in a strange moan when all the air ended up squeezed out of Vaner's lungs.

The reaction was so powerful that Vaner ended up glued to the ceiling that he struck for several seconds before the residual energy finally calmed down, causing his body to fall to the ground.

'The heck...' Vaner thought, fighting to regain his breath while crawling all over the floor.

This was the second worse attack he received in his entire life, save for the one that ended his fight with the residing royal of the kingdom.

'And I didn't even get to touch it,' Vaner thought, his eyes widening as he stared at the round object.

In theory, he only had his own carelessness to blame.

There was no information whatsoever about who built this thing. In fact, Vaner never knew that such a crazy structure existed in the sect's mountain, despite living right beside it for over a hundred years.

And yet, someone had to build it. And from that realization, there was only a short way to the next obvious conclusion.

If there was a force, civilization, or a being that constructed such a monstrous structure... It had to have some use of it.

To this point, it was all logical. But there was one detail that made all this logical deduction turn into rubbish.

Because there were no signs of this structure being built within the mountain. Rather than that, it was as if the mountain itself grew over an already existing structure as many centuries stacked sediment and turned a man-made project into just a weirdly shaped freak of geology.

'But just what could be the purpose of such a thing?' Mathew thought, staring at the weird shape of the strange metal rope.

He then pulled all of his mana out of his hand before reaching forward again...

SNAP!

Like a twig thrown at the typhoon, Vaner's body was sent flying, crashing into a wall yet again.

'What the hell...' Vaner thought, surprised to no end.

'How the heck does it work?' he thought as he gathered himself from the flow and thew one yet look at the massive wire. 'There was no energy in my hand!'

For a moment, Vaner lost his patience. And instead of trying to find out what happened, he simply ended up cursing at the situation he was in.

As a former royal and someone with over a hundred years of keeping a massive secret, he shouldn't have any trouble just keeping another secret.

But when it came to accepting this structure remaining as a secret for him... Vaner couldn't accept it at all.

'I won't learn anything just by resting on the floor,' Vaner thought as he slowly gathered himself from the ground. And then, rather than trying to touch the object once again, Vaner started to job along the corridor.

'It's massive,' Vaner thought, only now realizing the true scale of the construction.

Just like he thought before, this strange metal rope went all around the natural formation that the sect was built on. And in two places, there were strange parts when the massive coil... seemingly split into two.

In the north peculiarity, the wire split into two, and then one of its parts moved up while the other one continued at the same level as the rest of the corridor. On the other hand, in the southern peculiarity, this round object split as well, but its other part went down, contrary to going up like the part of the wire on the other side of the site.

'Don't tell me,' Vaner trembled when he realized the possible meaning of such detailed construction.

On the inside, the mountain formation that protected the skyladder sect for several millenniums since its conception as but a small sect was split into several terraces.

Some of them had to be obviously dug out by a human hand, while the others were shaped by nature and then only adopted by the sect's disciples and elders.

'If this kind of wire goes underneath each of the  terraces...' Vaner trembled when he recognized such a possibility.

There was no other explanation for this place but to assume that some kind of long-gone civilization built it. This assumption would explain not only how a project of such scale could be completed but also the uses of such a massive construction.

And lastly, it would also explain how the heck such a complicated and precise design could remain seemingly untouched by the passage of time at all!

'If it's copper or even its upgraded version, it would take at most a few thousands of years before it would decay,' Vaner thought, taking as close of a look at the wire as he could without pushing his head into the same zone of influence that snapped him against the wall twice already.

And this was the last element of the puzzle that bothered Vaner.

No matter the original purpose of this place, all of the energy that once flowed through this system should be long gone. And yet, whenever Vaner pushed his hand near enough, once it would pass through a certain marker, an insanely powerful flow of energy would suddenly course through Vaner's flesh, reacting with both of his internal flows and creating the force that snapped him away from the system.

It didn't matter whether there was any energy in Vaner's hand as he attempted to touch this massive item. After all, once his hand got close enough, the immense power flowing through this strange copper pipe would resonate with Vaner's flesh, creating a flow of energy seemingly out of nowhere.

"How the heck the energy inside that thing could still flow?" Vaner muttered his question out in the open. It simply felt way too heavy for his mind to carry out alone.

Vaner then shook his head as he took another look at the round-shaped item.

'That's a wrong question,' he thought, forcing himself to accept the new reality. 'The right one is...'

For a moment, Vaner simply stood vis-a-vis the round item, simply in awe of this peak of magical engineering.

Now that he experienced the power behind this strange system, he could say with all the confidence in the world that there wasn't a civilization in this world that was capable of creating it.

And then, finally, as if breaking some sort of mental barrier of his, Vaner's lips started to move.

"Just what kind of energies are clashing inside of it?"

If the forces that came to be just from the interference on the outer layer of air around the object were enough to put Vaner, a former royal, into a state of awe...

Then what kind of force existed within this system?

And more importantly...

How could one harness it?

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