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It was almost instantly recognized by higher Tier cultivators, and the rifts were destroyed, people freed from the monster’s control.
Just as items in rifts couldn’t be used by people, most possessions weren’t able to bridge that gap.
Ruins didn’t have either restriction, and Travis and Keith, Liz’s brother and brother-in-law, explored distant and unsettled worlds, so they encountered more than their fair share of the things. More than a few of their stories were about dangerous items and monsters that only worked because they were in a ruin, and not a proper rift.
And Minkalla was made of thousands of ruins.
Not rifts.
It was entirely possible for them to be enthralled by one of the creatures inside its depths.
Luna hadn’t said anything about that, but then again, no one who was possessed would be able to leave.
All of them were a little freaked out, and they only started to relax when Matt handed out the disks.
They were a two-part enchantment. One was to detect anything approaching their heads that was alive, and a shield rune to activate if the first was triggered. In both parts, Matt had a mana-powered circuit as a first layer of defense, only triggering the stronger Genesis Energy portion if that initial layer of protection was breached.
Matt made each of them ten copies of the discs before feeling satisfied, and then created more underwater breathing enchantments.
If the ruin tried to drown them and force them to use the possibly cursed items, it wouldn’t be so easy now.
They had backups to their backups.
He even created a few sets of the enchantments with a different methodology, just in case the ruin could learn. It wouldn’t stop Minkalla if it decided to break the enchantment, but if it actually wanted them dead, they’d just be dead.
It took a few hours, but they were as prepared as they could be, and gathered their things to start pushing deeper into the palace.
New guards had replaced the fallen ones by the time they returned to the gate. Seeing that there were a total of sixteen guards, the four of them looked at each other, then to above the guards heads where they suspected the octopodes to be hiding.
Now that they knew the monsters were practically defenseless, Susanne sent out two [Mana Thrust]s where they suspected the octopodes to be hiding, and scored direct hits.
Knowing the monsters were connected by tentacles, their AI were able to calculate their positions fairly accurately. Or rather, everyone but Matt could. Their AI reserved Genesis Energy, while he needed to spend the precious energy to get any information.
The guards fell, dazed with their puppet masters dead, making them easy pickings for the four of them.
Blades descended, and blood flew.
Soon afterwards, all of the monsters were dead, and they were able to enter the palace grounds.
As Liz’s elephant lumbered past him, the treasure chest heavy on its back, Matt couldn’t help but marvel at the inside of the palace.
There was intricate topiary lining the path they traversed. He expected the bushes grown to look like animals to rise up and attack them, but they remained simple bushes.
Aster halted them with her tail poofing up and warned them. “Another set of guards are coming this way.”
They quickly moved off the path and hid behind a shrub grown to look like a whale belly flopping.
The guards passed by without issue, but Matt was less worried about them and more about the octopodes that floated above them, invisible. His attention never left the threats, but he was hyper focused on his enchanted anti-possession formation that hung around his neck and under his armor.
Nothing happened, but his nerves were still on high alert until the guards were well outside the mile range of his spiritual perception. They didn’t want to risk the fact that killing the guards would set off another alarm like when they had tried to climb the outer wall.
The palace entrance was a door fifty feet high and glowing with enchantments that Matt had no hope of breaking without bringing every guard toward their location. During his inspection of the runes, Liz herself found an oddity.
“Do you see this? Read the story of the mural.” She pointed to the bottom where Fishmen were being harassed and eaten by the monsters of the sea, before the octopodes came and uplifted them.
After their possession, they started to grow and prosper, but the mural grew dark and brutal.
The Fishmen were nothing more than food and hands for the octopodes, if the carvings on the mural were to be believed. Them being sacrificed and eaten to satiate the octopodes’s hunger was a normal end for the Fishmen. The scene was repeated a dozen times before a Fishman rose up and with a horn, taking a prominent spot in the center of the mural.
It blew that horn, and the octopodes exploded.
The mural then told the story of how the Fishmen became more prosperous and took the things that the octopodes taught them and used them for their own advantage.
The creation and raising of this island was one of their crowning achievements.
The mural finally ended with the Fishmen and their island rising out of the ocean and into the sky, where it joined the clouds.
It was an interesting story, but he wasn’t sure what the ruin meant by it. Were the Fishmen possessed because of an event that happened after this door was made, or was it just using the history of this place as a way to set the theme of the ruin?
There was no way to know, but he still found it interesting. Wanting to potentially reference it later, he set his AI to record the mural. After a few seconds of waiting, Matt frowned, then closed his eyes in embarrassment. Right, Minkalla blocked AI recording. Still, while it was analyzing the mural, his AI had noticed something that he’d missed in his studying. Inside the chest they had been carrying around, a portion of the carvings had started to gather Genesis Energy at some point.
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