Chapter 2109: Chapter 2109

The elven lady with the longbow gasped for air. After she regained consciousness, it seemed her long stupor had taken a toll on her health. The heaving breaths she took made Jenkins worry that she might fail to catch her breath and simply pass out again.

Fortunately, she quickly regulated her breathing and turned her head to look at her companion on this journey—an adventurer who, like herself, had stumbled into this accursed place.

She spoke in Elvish, her tone laced with surprise.

The elven lady's Elvish was of a rather ancient dialect, but her voice was gentle, like a soft breeze rustling through the treetops. While to human eyes, the difference between a half-elf and a human might be slight, elves could always discern a half-elf's identity at a glance.

"Since we are kin, let me tell you about this place..."

Her speech quickened as she gradually recovered her faculties, but she trailed off mid-sentence and gazed at the young elf before her with a hint of confusion.

She caught a peculiar scent—the scent of nature, the scent of her homeland. And whenever she smelled it, her instinct was to—

The elven lady bowed slightly to Jenkins. The bloodline of a World Tree priest couldn't be distinguished by scent alone—after all, elves weren't vampires—but the other scent was unmistakable.

The young elven woman's name was Leoni Silf. In the era when she entered the Mysterious Realm, the elven race had not yet migrated from the material world to the world of Prosperous Forest, which also explained her archaic grammar.

Miss Silf's last memory was of failing to defeat the monsters in the castle and dying unexpectedly along the way. And when she awoke again, the World Tree, in the guise of a half-elf, was standing before her.

In truth, Jenkins was different from the original World Tree, not to mention his power was far weaker than the main body of the World Tree at any point in its existence. To avoid any unnecessary misunderstandings, he explained his situation, but the elven lady didn't seem to mind.

"Since you are the second World Tree, acknowledged by the original, then to me, you are the World Tree."

Before entering the tower, the consciousness of the World Tree had given Jenkins a green leaf in a dream. This leaf was proof enough of his identity, so whatever he said was, in fact, unimportant.

And the elf, Leoni Silf, knew of the End of the Era. She was astonished to hear that the material world had now reached the 18th Epoch, but she quickly composed herself and decided to help Jenkins.

"Has so much time passed... Since I can accompany you onward, please make use of my strength. Perhaps I cannot walk with you to the very end, but even the slightest bit of help I can offer will breathe new life into an existence that should have ended here."

The reverence the elves held for the World Tree was beyond Jenkins's imagination. After confirming she was indeed an elf, he fully trusted Miss Leoni Silf. He was more curious about what role the Lord of Blossoms played in the eyes of the elves before they left the material world, but now was not a good time to ask. He didn't want his curiosity to displease a companion who was supposed to travel with him.

What the elf Silf had experienced in the Mysterious Realm some ten thousand years ago was almost identical to what Jenkins was encountering now. She too had met the old steward upon entering the realm—though he hadn't had a metal body back then—received the task of defeating four monsters, and been granted three additional aids.

However, of the three servants the elf had met, only the eldest, the church member, was the same one Jenkins had met. The young swordsman was someone she had never seen. This meant the young swordsman must have entered this place sometime between Leoni Silf's arrival and Jenkins's, and had also been trapped here permanently.

In Leoni Silf's telling, she had been even more cautious than Jenkins, forgoing the map and choosing only companions. The elven lady possessed a powerful ability that allowed her to track formidable "prey," even within a Mysterious Realm. Of course, she paid the price for her overconfidence. Even after successfully defeating the first three enemies, she lost her life by mistakenly entering a corridor she shouldn't have while searching for the fourth.

"If the contents of the Mysterious Realm haven't changed, then the first three enemies should be the Envious Banshee, the Arrogant Executioner, and the Heart of Wrath."

The elf stated, then added a clarification.

"But it definitely won't be the same. The companion I chose back then also provided information. He only defeated two enemies, and while those two were similar to the ones I faced, they were different." This update ıs available on NoveI-Fire.ɴet

"Will the locations of those enemies be different too?"

"Yes, they will be different too."

Hearing this, Jenkins opened the map in his hand. It was hand-drawn but remarkably detailed, with not only annotations but also various icons to mark the locations of different rooms and their corresponding dangers. The map depicted most of the castle's layout, with a few small sections blacked out and marked as "Unexplorable."

Looking at the map, the place seemed less like a castle and more like a dungeon filled with traps. Jenkins couldn't imagine what kind of person would install rolling boulder traps and pressure-activated black powder traps in their own home.

"You should set off as soon as possible. You must complete your task before the lord returns, or his wrath is not something I can bear."

The old steward urged them on.

"Do you know anything about the lord here?"

Jenkins turned and asked the elf, but she shook her head; she had died long before the time limit was up.

"Then when you came here, was that moon in the sky?"

The elf followed Jenkins's pointing finger and looked up, letting out a muffled grunt before immediately lowering her head. Jenkins quickly reached out a hand to soothe her agitated spirit, and then he understood.

"Oh, sorry, I forgot you're different from me... You didn't see this when you arrived?"

The elven lady groaned in pain, but Jenkins's healing was effective, and the brief glance hadn't caused her too much harm.

"I really can't imagine what this Mysterious Realm has to do with the primordial moon. That must be the primordial moon, right? I've only heard about it in childhood stories, a bright yellow moon~"

This at least proved that the so-called lord wasn't the Devouring Moon Spirit Cat, which meant that, unlike the last Mysterious Realm, this fourth one wouldn't feature a true Beast of Calamity.

Having gathered the basic information, the two of them officially set out. The elf had little luggage aside from a small pouch at her waist; her beautiful longbow was her most important weapon. It was a pity the bow wasn't a Numbered Item, or their journey might have been a bit easier.

Inside the ancient castle, the musty smell was even thicker than outside, and the power of shadow was more potent.

Standing in the grand hall, the two iron doors shut behind them with a grating screech. Jenkins took out his candle for light, and the elf produced a bottle from her small pouch. The bottle seemed to contain a firefly, which provided ample light.

The light from the candle and the bottle illuminated the path before them. Jenkins and the elf looked up together at the hall's furnishings and oil paintings. The paintings were mostly covered in cobwebs, and the visible portions were dark and grimy, making it impossible to discern what they depicted.

"Let's go to the kitchen on the first floor first."

Jenkins pointed at the map, saying,

"It's the closest. I need to get a feel for the enemies' strength before I can make a plan for what comes next."

"The enemies aren't strong, but they are very strange. Not only can they affect the emotions and consciousness of adventurers like us, but they also have some special abilities."

The elven lady explained, then pointed a slender finger at the map.

"There's more than one path to the kitchen. Which one should we take?"

The castle wasn't a simple series of corridors connecting all the rooms; it was a complex maze. It even had inexplicable rooms like "half-floors" between two levels, and sometimes, to get to a room on the first floor, you had to go up to the second floor and then find a way back down.

That was just the basic layout. According to the map, there were even phantom walls, but their specific locations weren't marked, only that such walls did exist.

Jenkins looked at the "maze map" in his hands. They were currently on the first floor, slightly left of center, while the kitchen was in the upper right corner. To avoid unnecessary battles, he first ruled out rooms where they might encounter other monsters, then eliminated paths that looked obviously unsafe. That didn't leave many choices.

"I have a feeling that finding the monsters might be harder than defeating them."

Jenkins muttered under his breath, then signaled for the elf to follow him.

"Your feeling is entirely correct. After all, I didn't die at the hands of a monster, but on the path to one."

A look of regret flickered across the elf's face, but she quickly composed herself.

The castle was gloomy, but compared to the hellscape-like corridors of the "Nightfall Manor" Jenkins had once experienced, this was nothing. He led Miss Silf along the corridor to the left of the main hall. The corridor was slightly sloped and curved. At the first corner, they pushed open the door to a broom closet, tossed out the cleaning tools inside, and slipped through a trapdoor behind the cabinet into a new hallway.

They carefully dodged a suit of animated iron armor that patrolled the new corridor with a long spear, then found a room with a red door marker. After opening the door, the elf and Jenkins cleared out the poisonous spiders inside, moved a heavy, solid wood wardrobe to reveal a hole beneath it, and climbed down a rope into the basement.

The safest way to reach the first-floor kitchen was to take a detour through the basement.