Taking a moment despite the time limit, Eik went through the contents of his rucksack of holding as quickly as he could. It would be disastrous to rely on the availability of a certain item only to find it missing in the middle of a fight to the death.

He found everything as he had left it, fortunately. As far as he knew, someone to whom a bag of holding was not registered had no way to access the contents as all, but who knew. It seemed like he discovered something new about the laws of the Unified Mass every single day.

With the enormous number of Potions of Mighty Strength class 3 now at his disposal, Eik's potential combat power went up explosively in combination with Perfect Consumption, the trait of Profound Toxin that boosted the effects of potions, poisons, medicines, and probably other items as well.

And for when it was all over, a beacon stone connecting directly to Andihar Dayarunar and his troops which he had exactly for a situation such as this. He was tempted to activate it right now, but the oracle had told him that the signal of a beacon stone without special properties would never be able to penetrate the magical veil installed throughout the cult's capital.

Not to mention how dangerous it would be to open a direct link between the Alliance and the cult without giving his allies any time to prepare. It would be a blood bath.

He stuffed his mouth with pill after pill of Eik's Legendary Mystery Medicine, each of them raising his power by a small amount, but by the time he had ingested all thirty seven pills that he had in his rucksack of holding, the increase could no longer be called minor. And it was permanent.

Rushing back to the stairs he jumped down entire flights one by one.

Between the third and second floor, he ran into yet another patrol but with the combination of Potion of Mighty Strength and a blue Backflow at modest intensity, he got to them before they could react to his approach and rammed both of their faces into the steps of the stairs, the sickening crunches of nose bones breaking ringing crystal clear in the stairway.

Quickly as he could, he disposed of their unconscious bodies in a room on the second floor before continuing downward.

As he reached the ground floor, against every urge in his body, he slowed down, clicked open the door leading out of the stairway, and peeked around the corner into the hallway. The ground floor would likely have significantly more traffic than any of the other floors and scuffles here would have greater risk of being noticed.

Seeing nobody within line of sight, he closed the door quietly behind himself and legged it down a narrow side passage on tip toes. Unlike the upper floors of the temple spire where Eik had been kept, the ground floor and the remaining space of the building was primarily made up of larger rooms, such as gigantic halls for worship, sacrificial altars, and dining halls.

Eik avoided all of those by taking the paths made for servants to go to and fro unnoticed as they performed their tasks. Unfortunately, he was still forced to cross through some of the larger and more open spaces to get to his destination.

Up ahead he heard the rustling of someone moving around and stopped dead in his tracks. He listened for the movement and concluded that someone was coming this way.

Shit.

He had to think fast.

A cultist made his way through the narrow passageway. Today was the first time in years that the venerable oracle had called for delivery. Right now, she would be relaying the divine words of the Lord. But not to him.

He sighed. The moment the news had reached his ears, he had been ready to run out onto the front steps to be the first there. But his superior had denied it. Even now, there was business to attend to, she had said. And someone had to do it, she had said. Then she had gone to listen herself.

What, was he not important enough to the Lord, or what? He sucked his teeth in annoyance. He was at least as devoted to the Lord as any of them! How dare they!

The cultist slowed his pace. Something was… strange. What was that?

At the very top of his vision, a blue glow pulsated. He looked up. A very still mass of blue goo hung from the low ceiling above, hidden behind a supporting column. If not the for the odd glow, he probably wouldn't even have noticed.

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Before his eyes, from one moment to the next, a man appeared in place of the glob.

Huh?

"What in the w—"

"Ah, man," the man said with a sigh. "I really wish you hadn't noticed that, guy." Then his body whirled, vanishing. In the same instant, a crippling pain flared out from the cultist's side as Eik snapped back into existence behind him and hammered his fist in for a liver shot, ripples dancing across the skin from the impact point. Without another sound, the robed man collapsed into a heap of fabric.

Eik dragged him along and hauled him into the next small room on his way, which seemed to be a wash room. He stuffed the guy into a large chest full of laundry and left him there.

Thirty seconds later, he stood in a doorway leading to a large agora. Several gigantic statues of various figures of various alien species lined the borders. In the center was a huge indoor fountain depicting different artistic renditions of the symbol of Moon Shall Swallow—a sun contained within the crescent of a moon—with an accompanying surrounding pool.

"Fuck," Eik muttered under his breath as he saw at least three individuals crossing through the agora going in different directions. This place was way too busy to just run through. The oracle had made it seem like there would be fewer. And since everybody was dressed in those damned cult robes, he couldn't even pretend to fit in.

Hold on… Uniforms, eh?

At a cautious run, he backtracked to the laundry room. He riffled through bed linens and undergarments until he hit a collection of dirty cult robes. He picked the one that stunk the least but even that one smelled pretty bad. How often did they wash these things?

He pulled it over his head and pulled up the hood as far as it would go. Then he went back to the agora and did everything he could to appear as inconspicuous and totally normal and not at all suspicious as possible.

The door he needed was almost directly across from where he had entered the agora. As he reached the fountain, a cultist passed closely by him but didn't offer him even a glance. Two more were marching across the agora further away. Hell yeah, it was working!

He slipped into another servant's passage and ran at full tilt, whirling through the narrow tunnel as the sound of the air whooshed by his ears. Now that he was this close, thanks to the mentally implanted knowledge from the oracle, he knew exactly where to go.

He found himself in a small, nondescript storage room. To the right from the entrance stood rows of shelves filled to the brim with boxes containing various miscellany. To the left, tools like hammers, saws, and spade. Directly in front stood three large bookshelves.

It was as she had said. If he hadn't known what to look for, this might well have been the last place anyone would look for what could be called the most important artifact of Moon Shall Swallow. There were no guards to hint at the true importance of the place. He closed the door quietly behind him.

At first glance, nothing about the room indicated a secret passage. Neither did a second glance, nor a third. In fact, no matter how closely one looked, there were no hidden holes into which to put a key and a tracing ability would find no magical concealment to provide any clue either. For all intents and purposes, this was a simple storeroom and nothing more.

Knowing exactly what to do, Eik went to the rightmost bookshelf and moved it almost imperceptibly to the side. He then did the same with the leftmost shelf.

From there followed a thirty four step sequence of seemingly random movements of objects scattered throughout the cluttered room. They had to be performed in the exact correct order or the mechanism would fail. In a way it was like one of those trick boxes where you have to solve a puzzle in order to open it, except instead of a box it was a whole room, and the pieces gave no indication of being part of anything.

In one place he pushed a box slightly in toward the center of the shelf it was already on, while next he moved a rake from one bucket to another bucket in the other side of the room. Even with detailed written instructions, Eik could have tried a thousand times and still gotten it wrong.

But with the way the knowledge had been planted in his mind, it felt like he had succeeded a hundred times before.

When he finally finished the last movement of the puzzle, something behind the central bookshelf clicked almost inaudibly and Eik went to push it aside. It slid inward without a single sound and with no indication of friction.

Inside was a winding staircase, expensive glow stones inlaid in the stone walls and ceiling with frequent regularity. The air was cool and completely still but there was a distinct lack of dampness and staleness that one might have expected from such a place.

As he descended, a sense of time distortion came over him, similar to what he had experienced sitting in the windowless cell. Intellectually, he was well aware of time passing as he counted each step he took further into the deep, but his gut wouldn't let him ignore that sense of strangeness. But then again, what could you really expect from the site of the reawakening of an ancient monster with the power to smite whole worlds? An odd feeling in the pit of the stomach wasn't so mysterious then.

Minute after minute passed and the stairs seemed to be never ending. Just how deep had they built this damn thing? Fortunately, like the oracle had said, secrecy was the best defensive measure they had for the Stirring Cradle so traffic down here was non-existent. With the exception of…

Soon his feet touched flat floor and he walked forward slowly and with his face cast in the shadow of the deep hood. A dozen paces of relatively cramped hallway saw him entering a chamber so large that the distant ceiling lights looked like nothing more than stars twinkling in the night.

In front of him suddenly appeared a person dressed in the same robes as him. A little ways away stood a second robed individual by a table, watching them attentively. Eik didn't need to raise his head to know what he was facing.

A-rankers.

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