Chapter 24
THEY PROCEEDED down the hall for a while, ready to respond to any situation. Fortunately, they reached the director’s office without encountering the abomination.
“Perfect. This one’s unlocked too!”
The security reset had also applied to the director’s office, so the door opened with ease. This had required many detours, but now they could finally investigate the room. They rushed inside and split up, ready to scrutinize everything they got their hands on.
“Let’s see what information we can find here…” Soul Howl looked around the room with an orb of light at hand, then started turning over things close to him.
Accompanied by her own orb of light, Mira rushed to the back of the room. “Good, good. I was worried at first, but they left behind some paper documents.”
They positioned both their orbs of light to illuminate the entire office. In the middle was a large desk. Shelves surrounded it, and metal boxes were piled by the wall. Mira and Soul Howl didn’t know what was inside, but the boxes ranged from small to large. There was also a bookshelf in the corner, but with documents stuffing the shelves rather than books.
Given this facility’s cutting-edge technology, Mira had worried the office wouldn’t contain paper artifacts, but the researchers had seemingly understood the reliability of analog documents.
That said, paper documents only illustrated part of the story here. Investigating the cases on the shelf, Mira found that they were full of a cutting-edge recording medium called “crystal cubes.” The plates labeling the cubes revealed that they contained video and audio from experiments.
“Hrmm… If only we could play these…”
Crystal cubes had been used in modern Japan. Since Mira hailed from there, she’d held them before and even knew how to use them. The lack of a device to read them was the problem. Mira had pinned her hopes on the computer at the director’s desk, but naturally, it was broken. However many times she pressed the power button, the computer didn’t respond, leaving her no way to read the data within. She had to entrust her hopes to the paper documents.
“This is about meetings… And this one… Hm, this one too.”
The books on the shelf were actually all meeting notes. Research topics, methods, budgeting, priorities, and the like had all been discussed, according to those records. It was difficult to glean details of the research, experimental processes, progress, or results. However, the minutes at least revealed information on what kind of research they had performed here…or tried to reveal that. Understanding any of the records was tough in its own right.
“Hrmm… ‘Adjusting the atmosphere’s composition’… ‘Analyzing changes in the ether element’… ‘Observing unified thought density’… ‘Correcting interference of the’… Goodness, I don’t understand a word of this.” Mira had tried reading the documents from the left side of the shelf onward, but all the words were too difficult for laypeople. She understood that the research was complex, at least, but how did any of it relate to Fenrir?
Many more documents remained; surely there was something Mira could understand. Hoping that would be true, she checked the other materials. They seemed to be sorted into chronological order. As she proceeded from left to right, the dates gradually became more recent.
“Oh ho… ‘Conditions to change the properties of mana,’ ‘stabilization of the environment’… ‘On the existence of “monsters”’… What a range of research they conducted.”
As Mira reached the latter half, she found more and more research she understood based purely on the wording. Some were similar to the Linked Silver Towers’ experiments, piquing her interest further.
After inspecting the volumes one at a time for a while, she eventually reached the final one. What was the last round of research performed here? Expectant and excited, she looked down upon the book—and her face contorted in shock.
“What…? Were they saying such a thing is possible?!”
The topic of the document she was holding was the creation of an artificial god. If one took those words at face value, they meant making a deity using human hands.
Could such a drastic thing be possible? What made a god in the first place? Most of all, what had the results of this research been? So many questions, so much curiosity, and so much unease welled up at once.
“How did they research such a thing?” Mira was taken aback by the grandiosity of the facility’s final moments. At the same time, she hit upon a possibility.
Fenrir had claimed he came to the depths of the Ancient Underground City because he felt power akin to his siblings’. Meanwhile, Mira was here to do something about the power that had corrupted him. Its cause was something that could affect Fenrir—a being able to devour even gods. The research here was varied, yes, but Mira felt that a few experiments couldn’t possibly enable someone to stand up to Fenrir.
That is, until she found this supposed “artificial god” experiment. Whatever its contents, it was related to gods. That alone connected it to Fenrir, a god himself.
“If there’s a chance, surely this must be it.”
Of the research topics she’d found so far, this was by far the most suspicious. Upon discovering it, Mira ran over to Soul Howl—who was searching the other side of the room—and smirked at him.
Soul Howl hadn’t expected this either. When he saw the document Mira found, he muttered in astonishment, “Creation of an artificial god, huh…? They did some crazy stuff in here.”
The Spirit King and Martel were shocked as well. Despite their silence to this point, they were forced to speak up now.
“To think, a god created by human hands… And they attempted it so long before I was brought into this world…”
“People from the past had big ideas, didn’t they?”
The team’s apparently relaxed natures hardly led one to imagine such grand research, so the disparity alone took them aback.
Mira agreed. “I was surprised as well. I never expected them to be doing such research here…” She had to wonder to herself—were all researchers mad scientists, or was this facility’s team the exception? “Now, how do we investigate this?” she asked Soul Howl.
“How do we, huh? I think it’d speed things up if we could play these crystal cubes, but…”
The many crystal cubes sitting on the shelves could store vast quantities of data for an indefinite duration. Based on the number of them here, and the words written on the boxes, it seemed as though all the research carried out in the facility had been preserved in this very room.
The inception of an artificial god, the process, the data the experiment yielded, the results, how they tested it, why they did it, and most of all, whether they’d succeeded… The existence of this world’s gods was a great mystery. Information was so close at hand, yet so far away due to its unreadability.
“Well, there isn’t much point hanging around here, is there? Shall we go to the B3 laboratory this document mentioned? They conducted all the experiments there, so they may just have left more artifacts.”
Mira was curious about the experiment’s results, but as things stood, she wasn’t about to learn those. Thus, she had to prioritize uncovering and resolving the cause of Fenrir’s corruption. She quickly realigned her focus and departed the director’s office, though she left much curiosity behind.
“Fair enough,” said Soul Howl.
However many interesting tidbits they found, they couldn’t forget their original goal. If they could create a god, harnessing even some of that power would surely help save that religious woman faster. But Soul Howl shook off that thought and followed Mira for now.
The two couldn’t head straight to the laboratory at that point, since “B3” meant nothing to them. They had to go back to the elevator bay first.
“Oh, here it is. Hmm… ‘Cultivation room.’”
The map didn’t just include rooms and their numbers; it also included information on what each room was for. There were sterile rooms, organic and inorganic chemistry labs, a microbial biochemistry lab, a genetic biology lab, a paranormal science lab, and more. The team had seemingly used different rooms, depending on the research they were doing.
The document Mira and Soul Howl had obtained said that creating the artificial god was tested in the cultivation room labeled B3. Such a grand undertaking must surely have required a wide range of experiments, yet the documents described no work in other rooms.
An artificial god’s cultivation—the madness of these researchers was only growing more pronounced.
“Cultivation room… I feel nervous about this…” Mira noted the location and began to walk, frowning at what they might find.
“Oh, yeah. Same here,” Soul Howl agreed, but his steps were oddly jovial. He was surely imagining the same horrors as Mira, but apparently found them worthy of excitement rather than fear.
***
Carefully proceeding down the hallway, they arrived at the cultivation room—a place Mira remembered well. “Urk… This just had to be it, didn’t it…?”
This was indeed the very room where the unidentifiable abomination had been. Mira timidly approached the door, setting her sights on its window.
The Spirit King’s and Martel’s voices echoed in her mind.
“Slowly, Miss Mira. Slowly.”
“Take it slow, Mira!”
They were just as wary of that horror-movie monster as Mira was.
“I know, I know,” Mira replied and carefully peered into the window.
The room was as dark as ever, but knowing it was the cultivation room where they’d researched artificial gods made it even creepier. In order to focus on looking into the room, Mira had a holy knight stand next to her to protect her in case of attack.
Was there anything lurking in the corners? Anything moving? Where was that abomination? She carefully sought the answers. Just then, the door abruptly opened.
“Whoa!” Is it attacking?! Mira hurriedly jumped back, but someone looked at her in exasperation.
It was Soul Howl. He’d gotten tired of watching her fool around in front of their objective and opened the door himself. “What are you doing? Let’s get in there and investigate.”
“I just told you, didn’t I?! I saw some kind of abomination, and I swear to you, it was in this room!” Mira warned, flustered, and hid behind her holy knight. “So? Is it safe?” she demanded.
“Man, you could’ve told me that before we got here, instead of just messing around…” Soul Howl grumbled, creating a wall-like golem and sending it into the room. He followed up by making a knee-high golem to scout. When it found living things or objects that moved, that golem would send signals only its master could detect. In a way, it was like a motion sensor. “Hmm… I’m not getting any response. Either it’s staying still, or it’s gone. I’m guessing it escaped and started roaming, like you said. Or you just thought you saw it when nothing was there to begin with.”
Confirming that his search hadn’t found any hostiles, Soul Howl released his wall golem and entered the cultivation room.
“No, that can’t be. I saw it with my own two eyes!” Mira wouldn’t mistake something like that. Her Biometric Scan hadn’t reacted to the creature, and it didn’t seem to be a normal monster, but she knew it was there.
When she protested, the Spirit King and Martel piped up as well, though Soul Howl couldn’t hear them.
“That’s right. I saw it too!”
“Yeah! It was clear as day!”
“The most likely conclusion is that it’s out in a hallway, huh?” Soul Howl muttered.
It was very possible that the unidentified being had already escaped the unlocked door and was wandering the halls or hiding somewhere. Reaching that conclusion, Soul Howl created an orb of light, as he had earlier, and looked around the cultivation room. Just in case, he checked desk drawers and other areas his golem couldn’t search.
“That must be it. It couldn’t have been an illusion,” Mira insisted. There were three witnesses; it had to be real. She bolstered her defenses with more holy knights before entering to search the cultivation room.
They used their orbs of light to illuminate the room. Apart from the many tables, they spotted things like microscopes, devices typical of chemistry labs, vials of mysterious substances, and sturdy metal containers scattered around. After their thorough search of the room, nothing stood out as a potential cause of Fenrir’s corruption. All they found were crystal cubes, trivial notes, and a door to another room.
“Well, I guess that room is all that’s left,” Soul Howl said.
“I suppose so.”
Although they hadn’t turned anything up in the cultivation room, the door in the back seemed unusual. It wasn’t the kind of high-tech door installed everywhere else in the facility; it was a common household door, knob and all.
On either side of the door, shelves extended all the way to the sides of the room. The metal boxes stacked atop them reached the ceiling. It was clearly suspicious.
“It seems like they split a room in half, doesn’t it?” Mira muttered, looking around the cultivation room again.
The room had seemed cramped at first glance, and there was far too much equipment for such a small chamber. She and Soul Howl had even had trouble walking through some spots, making it feel even more cramped.
It was then that they’d noticed the door and shelves. What if the researchers put those in the middle of a larger room to halve it? In other words, this side might be cramped because everything from the other side had been moved here.
What remained on the other side, then? What had been worth going to all that effort to put over there?
“Okay. Here we go.”
“Right. Be careful, now.”
This door’s presence meant that the abomination might be behind it. Going through it was fine for a human, but it was hard to get their tanks—the larger golem and holy knights—to fit, so Soul Howl first sent the motion-detector golem through the slightly open door.
“No reactions in there…” It seemed that nothing lurked in the room beyond, so Soul Howl threw open the door and charged in. “Oooh…!” he gasped, seemingly more amazed than aghast.
“What? What’d you find?” Wondering what he had seen, Mira rushed in behind him. She simultaneously saw both Soul Howl’s elation and what he was looking at. “Could this be…a gravesite?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
In this space, which the researchers had intentionally split the cultivation room to build, was a pile of what appeared to be coffins. It wasn’t yet clear whether anything was inside them, but there were quite a few.
What influenced the pair’s impression of the room most strongly were the things placed in front: a seemingly handmade shrine, a carved wooden Buddha statue, and a tombstone constructed from metal plates and the like.
Given the materials and surrounding environment, this gravesite had evidently been slapped together with things on hand. Still, any Japanese person facing the sight would immediately recognize it as a place to mourn the dead. As such, the room’s atmosphere was tranquil.
Mira gently put her hands together in prayer, then walked toward the tombstone standing in the center. Letters were etched on it, surely related to the people resting in the space. “Something’s written here. This seems to say…‘unworthy gods,’ I believe.”
The rudimentary tombstone, handmade from various materials, was labeled A grave for unworthy gods.
“Unworthy gods, huh? I think that tells us everything about what’s in here.” Soul Howl’s head poked out from behind Mira. When he saw the text, he gazed at the gravesite with a look that couldn’t be described as either joy or sadness.
“You may be right…”
Unworthy gods… Falling short of godhood… Considering the research and experiments performed here, the meaning of that quickly became clear—for what purpose those beings had been born, and for what purpose they had died. Mira put her hands together in remembrance of their unfruitful suffering.
“This is…a whole lot more than I expected,” Soul Howl said while Mira was steeped in sentimentality.
When she looked over at him, he’d already begun opening the coffins. “I can’t believe you, opening those without blinking at a time like this…”
Where had his melancholy expression from before gone? Now, he dug through the coffins like he was searching for buried treasure.
Soul Howl probably had misgivings himself, but as a necromancer, corpses were a direct power source for him. Plus, he had a thing for undead girls, so nobody could keep him from his equally outrageous and productive deed.
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