"Don't be in such a hurry, I'm feeling a massive source of negative energy here, a lot of resentment and anger is buried in this soil" Nicola announced, the Heavenly Darkness Essence that he merged within his body had a very strong affinity for the energy of souls and of death, after all it was nurtured by a graveyard of monsters, so it pulsed inside Nicola's dantian warning that there was something wrong there.
The door Tuatha had seen was actually a great rock passage sealed by runes that glowed in alternating colors between blue and green.
Nicola quickly removed two pills from his dimensional ring, the first one was bitten and released a strange show, pink smoke laden with particles entered Nicola's body and turned into a kind of mist just above his pores, the protective layer moved as if carried by the wind, if you looked closely you could see the smoke forming runes of protection, healing and detoxification around his skin.
The other pill was directly broken along with Tuatha's core, causing his ethereal body to take on a pink hue with the same characteristics as Nicola's.
This was one of the new pills he developed, a combination of alchemy and runesmithing. This time the recipe was for a detox pill that was formed from runes of healing and protection, creating a cloak that prevented him from being easily poisoned.
"What happened Nicola?" Tuatha asked still confused, everything happened so fast he didn't have time to figure out what was wrong.
"Pay attention, look around that door, a kind of poisonous mist is leaking from inside that place. And this hall is filled with an aura of death and resentment. If I were to bet, I'd say the miners and villagers up there they were killed by what inhabits this place, we must be careful when entering." Nicola said and then called the remaining emperor beetle from inside his space artifact and sent him back through the tunnel.
Kin and Gin should be safe from the toxic mist as they are from the race of spiritual mushrooms, in fact it could even strengthen them. But still Nicola decided to warn them, in case something went wrong.
"Tuatha, get ready, we are entering." Nicola warned and activated his demonic power, absorbing all that drenching resentment in the ground to strengthen himself. And then he used a pulse of light magic to analyze the runes that formed the door's seal. They didn't look very potent as they leaked this poisonous mist from the cracks. It even looked like it had been opened before, but sealed again.
Realizing it had no hidden traps or secret dangers, Nicola decided to destroy the door with a frontal attack. Adept at using mind over brute strength, Nicola used his tails to activate nine small lightning spells targeting specific runes, causing the entire arrangement to break and lose the energy that held it.
The door was unlocked, crumbling to dust as if it had been properly preserved all that time just because of the runes that sealed it. Moss and dirt fell from its rubble, kicking up a lot of dust.
"Oh shit!" That's what Tuatha spoke the moment they could see what awaited them behind that passage. What they saw was not a city, a village, not a shelter. It was made up of cubic buildings that all looked the same to each other.
They were constructed of some unknown pale blue material that was not like any rock or metal they knew, but very much like the Thrillium ore they had both seen in the tunnels before. It emitted a brilliant luminescence that made the entire area around the buildings as bright as day.
Each cube had only one access sealed by a greenish matrix. It was shaped like concentric squares inscribed with unknown runes and fed by mana crystals to maintain its power.
The two advanced into that space, the roads connecting the buildings seemed to have not been used for a long time and were covered by a layer of dust several centimeters thick. It proved how no creature, living or not, had walked them around in the last few decades.
"It looks like we have some work to do trying to find out what was here" Tuatha stated. "From what I've read, it's not very unusual to find this sort of thing buried here in the forest, ancient records from hundreds of thousands of years ago say there was an ancient kingdom here with many secrets buried after its destruction."
"I've heard about it, to be honest that was why I decided to venture into the forest at first. There are many secrets and treasures to be dug here, but there is no free lunch in the world, but danger," Nicola replied, sending messages to the beetle outside, updating the brother and sister.
"Let's go into one of the buildings and see what we found, maybe we can find out what this place was" Nicola suggested heading to the nearest building. He used the same technique to destroy the arrays that were sealing that door, they looked much more elaborate than the ones before, but for the time they'd been here, they barely had the energy to sustain themselves and were on the verge of breaking.