Chapter 9: The Sunken Town

At first light, Landon set out with the still-sleeping Helentine on his back.

Helentine had fallen asleep in the latter half of the night, but Landon hadn’t slept at all.

Without her sleep magic, he really couldn’t fall asleep.

Landon had a vague feeling he might develop a new kind of “drug dependency” in the future.

Shifting from dependence on drugs to a heavy dependence on Helentine’s sleep magic.

After securing the drowsy Helentine again in the gap between his back and his schoolbag, Landon started walking toward Whisper Town from memory at a slightly faster pace.

Whisper Town lay behind a low hill. On the gentle slope halfway up stood the church where Landon and Liana had spent the most time as children.

So Landon stopped caring whether Helentine was sound asleep. He climbed over fallen tree trunks, waded through muddy streams, and stepped on pottery shards that had no reason to be at his feet. At last he crossed the small hill from his memory.

But beyond it there was no familiar bell tower, no bustling market full of laughter. Only a vast stretch of broken walls and ruins embedded in the ground, barely worthy of being called “buildings,” held up by concrete and wooden planks.

Landon froze, then looked up toward the church in his memory. The gray-brick building with a pointed roof on the hill looked close. Was it because he had grown taller, so the church seemed shorter?

No. It was because the entire hill had sunk.

Landon immediately realized his perception had been off. The reason he had easily crossed the small hill was that almost the entire northern part of the West Ring City-State had collapsed into underground hollows.

As for the church, it was only because it sat halfway up the hill that it hadn’t fallen underground.

That counted as a stroke of luck amid misfortune.

For safety and efficiency, Landon should have gone straight to the church at once, left Helentine there, and asked about possible survivors.

But he didn’t know where the refugees of Whisper Town had been placed. He only knew that in the West Ring City-State’s disaster relief and reconstruction plans, Whisper Town ranked in the lower-middle of the priority list.

The reason was simple. The damage in the north was so severe that people could only enter by risking it on foot. There were even uncharted underground hollows and heretics.

So before the area around the West Ring City-State’s central district was mostly repaired, no one would come north.

The situation here was too severe, too dangerous.

And Landon was clinging to hope.

Landon gave up the idea of going to the church first. Still hoping for the best, he decided to follow his memory and head for the underground hollow.

He first found a large tree that looked sturdy enough. Its trunk was as thick as two people holding hands could encircle.

After setting Helentine down on the ground for the moment, he used magic to strengthen his body and rammed into it.

The tree didn’t budge.

Only then did Landon dare wrap the hemp rope he had brought around the trunk. After checking several times to make sure it wouldn’t break, he decided to go down.

What lay below the hollow was unknown. Based on earlier observations, it was definitely over a hundred meters deep, so Landon climbed down carefully, using both hands and feet.

“Too slow.”

But when he had carefully descended to about one-third of the rope’s length, he heard Helentine mutter through a yawn beside him. He turned and saw her walking downward on empty air.

She cut the air into stepping stones for her feet. She walked down slowly and stretched. Because she had just woken up, Landon saw a few tears squeeze out when she opened her mouth.

She descended much faster than Landon, but he couldn’t do the same.

He had studied runes, not spatial magic. How could he do that?

So he could only speed up a little. Just as Helentine was about to start killing time, Landon finally landed.

Fortunately, about a quarter of the three-hundred-meter rope was left. He needed to record that.

At that thought, Landon pulled out the small notebook tucked in the strap on his thigh and quickly wrote down data about Whisper Town’s collapse depth.

“Which way?”

Helentine watched Landon write down things like “walking distance” and “collapse depth,” then asked.

“Um… can you use magic to see which direction the bell tower is in?”

Landon actually mostly remembered. He should.

It was just that after several years, and with the streets, woods, and buildings in his memory now turned into a gray expanse of ruins, some places even stained with blood.

Landon had tried as much as he could to ignore those long-dried traces. They might belong to someone he once knew, or someone he had met once in Whisper Town.

Landon had tried not to think about those possibilities.

Helentine thought for a moment and didn’t rush to agree. She looked at the surrounding ruins with her bright eyes, then at the edge of the hollow nearly two hundred meters away.

“Wouldn’t this be faster?”

As she spoke, Helentine waved her hand and easily lifted all the broken walls and ruins within ten meters of her into the air at once.

A foul stench hit them immediately. Among the debris were cloth and sticky chunks of meat, squeezed out from the cracks of a wooden table and falling to the ground with a splat.

Landon immediately understood something was wrong.

Right after, a panicked jackal was slammed to the ground from two meters up. The brown fur on its face was soaked with a sticky liquid, and its color darkened a little.

The jackal hit the ground with a whimper, its limbs flailing. Just as it was about to stand and flee, a small knife flew in from the side and stabbed precisely into its neck.

Landon had drawn the dagger from his calf and thrown it with lightning speed. The carefully sharpened blade slid across the jackal’s neck, smooth as cutting soft paper.

The jackal fell again, limbs twitching. After struggling for a moment, it stopped breathing.

Seeing that, Landon drew the other dagger strapped on his other side and carefully scanned his surroundings.

He had followed the town guard on patrols since childhood and knew these jackals usually moved in packs, targeting lone prey.

So he was ready at any moment to deal with these beasts that had fed on his family.

Then Helentine tossed everything she had lifted up onto the cliff edge in one go. Whether there were still living things inside, or possible clues, Landon no longer knew.

But at least the area within ten meters was clear.

“Cough, cough, cough!”

Helentine inhaled the stirred-up dust and coughed violently. Landon saw her chest heaving, walked over in two or three steps, and gently patted her delicate back.

“Don’t do that again.”

Landon wasn’t actually worried about her. He had just seen the corpse of someone unknown, with only half a body left.

The half body thrown down by the excavated space was mixed with strange colors, white bone and brown flesh lying alone where it fell.

But thanks to Helentine doing that, Landon could barely make out a familiar path on the clean ground. It led to the mayor’s house, which meant it led to Liana.

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