My Wife and I Became Sages in Another World
Chapter 363: The Pit

Chapter 363: The Pit

The following day, after camping with the two hundred villagers, we walked for a few more hours until we reached the foot of a mountain.

It wasn’t as prominent as the other mountains we had seen in the north, but that didn’t mean that it was small.

"The entrance to The Pit is at the summit of this mountain," said Rio as he guided the group through a path that led us up.

I thought that the trail would take us to the entrance, but at one point, we were facing a rock wall that had a couple of strings leading to the top of it.

"Umm, are you guys expecting the old villagers to use this rope to go up?" I asked the two DD members.

Honestly, many people would have had trouble going up, even if they were in good shape.

They were asking the villagers to climb about forty meters with a rope and with no safety measures, so I was wondering how the other survivors even made it to The Pit.

Still, they weren’t done explaining and said that they had a small platform at the top that they used to carry the people.

Rio was about to use the ropes to climb up, but I saved us some time and flew us to the top, where they had a wooden slab with two holes on the sides for the rope to go in. Basically, it was some sort of primitive elevator that they had to pull up manually.

’Well, this is much better than what I expected...’ I thought.

To make everything go quicker, Rio and Lampart were pulling up some of the villagers while me and my companions flew some of them to the top.

If we waited for all of them to use the elevator, we were not only going to end up with muscle pains, but we would have wasted hours in doing so.

Once everyone was safely transferred to the top of the rocky wall, we had to walk for a few more minutes to get to the Pit’s entrance.

Just like the name implied, the Pit was quite literally a massive, circular hole at the top of the mountain that seemed to go all the way down to the ground.

The hole was at least fifty meters in diameter, and when I peeked my head down, I noticed that the outer rings were hallways, and I could see a few people walking around.

It was like a tower had been built inside the mountain, and instead of entering from the bottom, we had to enter from the top.

Rio and Lampart directed their words at all of the villagers, giving them a brief explanation of what rules to follow inside The Pit.

There were ten floors, or ten "rings," which is how they called them.

The top floor was where all the DD members and northern warriors were staying, as they were kept close to the entrance in case they needed to defend it.

The villagers were staying on rings two to eight, where they had tents and small firepits to keep warm.

The ninth ring was the area where they stored all their food and resources, and the tenth ring was being used as a prison.

"A prison?" I wondered aloud after hearing Rio mention it.

"We’ll show you later..." he replied, going back to his instructions.

Rio said that anyone who felt like they could fight should join them on the top floor with the other warriors. The rest would be free to choose which ring they wanted to stay at, as long as it wasn’t too crowded.

To go inside the pit, they had a wooden staircase that they had to fold open from the inside of the ring, and once all the villagers went down, they folded it back to its closed and compact state.

Honestly, I was pretty surprised at the engineering they used for the stairs. Basically, if nobody inside folded the stairs open, then they wouldn’t be able to enter unless they jumped down, of course.

’A devil could easily get in here, but no soldier is stepping into this place if all that awaits them is a two-hundred-meter fall...’ I thought.

The first ring that we arrived at was the top one, where all of the warriors who resisted the mind control were staying, along with half of the DD members who got here quite a long time ago.

I sent them here right after the war in Kalusia, and seeing all the work they had done made me feel pretty guilty since I could have been faster in joining them.

The northern warriors who were accompanying them had a similar body build to that of Bjorn and Magnus—tall, burly, with long hair and beards that resembled Vikings.

In fact, as our group walked to the staircase that led to the bottom floors, the two warriors said they would stay on the top one as they had seen some familiar faces and wanted to catch up.

The rest of the villagers were allocated between rings two to eight, and they were able to choose whichever floor they liked the best, but most of them stayed around the third ring.

Rio and Lampart showed me all of the floors inside The Pit until we reached the ninth ring, which was pretty much a deposit for them to keep food and weapons.

Since nobody was staying there, the floor was much colder than the others above it, but that was a good thing as it kept the food from expiring.

"Are you going to show us the prison?" I asked Rio and Lampart, who were silent when guiding us to the bottom floors.

"It’s not so much about showing you the prison, but a prisoner..." Lampart replied.

"You see, we managed to capture one of the brainwashed soldiers a few weeks ago, but we haven’t been able to talk to him much," he continued.

"Hmmm, that’s good, though. I was already thinking I needed to study Baelzor’s mind-control powers, so this could play in our favor..." I commented while holding my chin.