Titan: A LitRPG Adventure (UnderVerse Book 4) Jez Cajiao (top ten books of all time TXT) 📖

Sections were brighter, or dimmer, but the small pagoda in the center, the structure that that I’d been circling, shone like the sun. I stared at the building, before seeing movement out of the corner of my eye.

I looked over to my right and lifted my eyes upward, then froze as a feeling of existential dread filled me.

The ability showed that which was hidden, and right now, what it was showing me, amongst other things, was that the dark walls of this place weren’t walls.

They were glass, or something like it, and the darkness was caused by a combination of being underwater, a buildup of scum slowly growing across the glass over the centuries, and because an enormous creature currently slumbered against the side of the city.

I couldn’t make out much beyond long tentacles, teeth, and a humped body that looked like a mix between a dragon and a bulldozer. The thing was easily as long as a football field, without counting the appendages.

I turned back from looking out, and stared at the Vault, determined that I would get inside this thing and escape the goddamn place fast.

“What’s up, boss?” Grizz asked causally, looking out at the darkness and lifting the magelight he wore attached to a hoop around his neck. He started waving it, trying to make out what I’d seen, when I hissed at him.

“Stop it, you goddamn fool!” I snapped, and he looked hurt.

“I was just…” he started, and I shook my head putting my finger to my lips and glaring at him. As soon as he stopped, I nodded and whispered to him.

“There’s something out there, and it’s about the same size as the fucking battleship. It’s asleep and pressed up against the walls. They’re also not ‘walls,’ so much as teeny fucking tiny windows… so let’s not wake it up, okay?” I said, and he blanched before nodding firmly and starting to quiet people down.

I turned back to the Vault and glared at it, stamping closer from the chair. Clearly something, presumably the Lich, had sat here staring at the Vault for a huge amount of time. There were shattered bones everywhere, and bonemeal, the ground-up bits of bone, scattered around, so he’d tried brute force, and until now, at least, that’d not worked.

I circled it again a fourth time, and finally, I noticed something different.

There was a small indentation on the side, scratched and battered and familiar. I stared at it, wondering and trying to figure it out, until I started to hear the sounds in the distance that indicated the gnomes were approaching.

I looked to Grizz in horror, and he nodded, turning and sprinting for the exit.

I turned back to the recess, knowing instinctively that it was there for something to be attached. I squinted at it, ran my fingers across the edges, and swore as it nicked me. I lifted my finger away and saw no blood… but I could have sworn…

No.

I stopped myself, looking from my uninjured finger to a single glimmering, silvery drop that slowly vanished into the recess.

It wasn’t a wound I’d felt, it was a drain.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The missing part was a manawell, like those back at the Tower, similar to the wells I’d found when I first met Oracle and the others. There was a missing section designed to hold the manawell, and it looked to have been torn off in a fit of rage.

I spun around, scrutinizing the floor, searching.

“Boss, you okay?” Stephanos asked carefully, still watching the prisoners.

“No,” I said firmly. “You remember the manawell from the Tower?” He frowned thoughtfully, then shrugged.

“Sort of? I mean, I saw one, I think, once?”

“Dammit. Okay, you’re looking for a bowl; just think of it like that, a damn bowl, and one we need to find right goddamn now!” He gestured at the prisoners in question. “Leave them,” I said simply, then raised my voice, figuring if the creature out there had ignored the fight earlier, a moderately loud voice was unlikely to get its attention now.

“If any of you move, you’re dead,” I declared, and then I started searching.

A few minutes passed before Yen and several others arrived, the horror that was clear on their faces making me grimace over my lost forearm all the more, until they too started looking in earnest. Yen jogged up to me and nodded in respect.

“Bane’s alive,” she said without preamble. “Whatever you did, his wounds have closed. The last time Arrin hit him with a heal, they just sealed up like normal. He’s unconscious, still gravely injured, drained, and in no fit state to be upright for a month, let alone fight anytime soon, but he’s alive and stable. Arrin’s unconscious as well, although I think that a combination of overuse of mana channels and exhausted relief.”

“Thank god,” I breathed, pausing and clasping her shoulder. “Well done, Yen!”

“It’s my job, Jax, that’s all.” She shrugged but looked pleased with the words.

“Well, I need you again…” I admitted, gesturing around the detritus-strewn space. “I need to find a bowl; it’s a manawell, but it’s most likely that you’ll recognize it as a bowl, about this big…” I explained, miming the size with my hand and stump, “and we need to find it fast.”

She nodded to me, then sprinted back to the gaggle of gnomes and our team, who were peering cautiously into the room.

She spoke quietly for a minute, gesturing and clearly passing on the rough dimensions I’d given to her… then the group scattered, gnomes sprinting away from each other at high speed.

It was found balanced atop a skull on a spike after a few minutes and brought to me. Once I pressed it to the side of the Vault, I felt a crunch, then a click, and the faint glimmer of the building shuddered, growing duller as it magically reattached the manawell.

Congratulations! You have found a wisp manawell. Mana required to reawaken the wisp: 10/1000.

“God dammit!” I growled, then grabbed the edges of the