Transcendent Gene
Chapter 226: Ruin Exploration [4]

Chapter 226: Ruin Exploration [4]

The fall was much shorter than some others Gio had been forced to experience since regressing.

The group of them fell at different rates. Gio intentionally didn’t speed himself up despite seeing most of the others doing the same.

’It won’t do me any good to be a part of the biggest crowd.’

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Gio could already hear the sounds of combat, and most of them hadn’t even reached the ground yet.

’They’ve already formed groups and created problems. If I don’t want to get caught in the middle of it...’

Gio sent energy into his eyes. His perception blackened and filled with color at the same time.

The ground several tens of meters below was covered in them. Gio’s body would be torn apart the moment he landed if he followed a conventional route.

’This ruin’s record wasn’t created because it was explored through official means. It was made after the fact. There was a big fight after the original explorers left the ruin because they all wanted to take each other’s finds.’

It was normal for ruin expeditions that weren’t overseen by a governmental entity, however, it was only a problem when it got big enough to alert people who shouldn’t have been alerted.

’I thought it was a little strange when I was looking over it in the [Memory Book], but I get it now.’

There was bound to be chaos during this ruin expedition.

’Because the one who organized it is an asura.’

The aura of an asura couldn’t be missed if one knew how to spot it. Most of them kept it extremely hidden to keep their positions in society, but the man who met them in the clearing was different.

He displayed it openly to people who could not care less. There was something brewing that Gio had to be wary of.

’But my main priority is still to get stronger. As I am now, I’ll die if I get involved in this matter.’

That wasn’t to say he couldn’t do anything. He would never leave someone who sold their soul to monsters to their own devices.

Nevertheless, he had to focus on himself first, and he currently had a slight problem.

Gio didn’t have all of the information that would come from an official expedition. He roughly understood how the ruin was structured, but he didn’t have anything like a map.

Moving in the dark, he had no choice but to improvise.

Whoosh!

As he saw the ground getting closer, Gio summoned his energy and kept himself in the air. His eyes swept across the earth around him in search of any sort of secondary pathway.

’Our architecture takes after theirs. If there’s an entire compound hidden underground like this...’

There was a shaft under the clearing. It was made as an entrance before they ever found it.

’It has a foundation.’

Bang!

Gio slammed his fist into the densely packed dirt and rock, burrowing a hole into the side of the shaft. As he expected, his knuckles ran into the unmistakable feeling of metal.

Bang!

He threw his fist forward again. The empowerment of Aether filled his arm with power, smoothly tearing through the steel. With his hands gripped on the edges of the hole he’d made, he pulled, ripping it wider until it was big enough to crawl through.

’Good.’

Gio felt a bit of relief. If his assumption was wrong, his only choice was to stay in the air until the ground was calm enough to permit his landing.

Luckily, his fist blasted through the steel and into the open air. He didn’t know what, but there was something behind that wall.

With a burst of energy from his back, Gio flew horizontally into that space and held up a ball of light, confirming the existence of a floor he could stand on.

"Phew..."

He let out a sigh and shook his head as he landed.

’For all of them to be in the Adapted State...I thought the level would be a bit lower since the report was classified as something unimportant.’

Every time a Sequencer evolved to a new State, the aura they gave off would change. In the Adapted State, one’s aura was far fiercer and more volatile than it was in the Nubile State.

Many, like 46, could reign it in and make it difficult to see where they really stood.

This crowd wasn’t like that.

Gio found himself in a corridor surrounded by the remains of what used to be wiring and pipes. They went into the metal that supported the entrance shaft and up through the ceiling into places unknown.

’No immediate danger.’

There also wasn’t time to waste. He may have entered the ruin unconventionally, but he wasn’t anywhere important.

’From what I know, it’s only like a labyrinth in the same way most buildings are when you first visit them. There are a lot of different paths and corridors that lead to different branches of the same building that we obviously don’t know the order to, but there are some core truths that will never change.’

For instance, the fact that both their society and the new one functioned on energy that needed to be transferred through physical mediums.

’These wires lead somewhere.’

He followed them with a goal in mind. Electricity was the predecessor to Aether. The wiring used for its travel wasn’t made for the new energy, but it was a conduit nonetheless.

’Electronic devices that were charged with Aether were the reason why humans were able to prove its usefulness as a near-infinite energy source.’

Many artifacts of the past era’s "digital age" had been carved into this world with Aether.

Weren’t the holographic windows present everywhere an example?

If he was being honest, Gio didn’t know exactly what he was looking for. He didn’t have the ability to sense energy during the times when he’d been able to see examples of the "essence" he searched for.

He had to move based on nothing more than a description he’d heard countless times.

"I don’t know what you want me to tell you, Gio. It’s hard to explain these kinds of things to normal people without sounding like a psycho."

He heard sentences like those often. In the end, the best he could get was a quote from a past friend:

"Think about it like glass art. Have you ever seen glass art? It looks like someone created a shard of glass with more facets than a diamond and then illuminated it with a shitton of chromatic lights. Now picture that, but you find it inside some random cigarette butt you saw on the side of the street. It’s that kind of thing."

Gio ran through the corridor in search of his cigarette butt. He arrived at a wall where the corridor split left and right. Following his instincts, he chose to go right and continued down the path of the wiring on the wall.

It took him to a stairwell where he descended to a lower floor. The wiring disappeared into the walls at that point, making it more difficult to move with the same speed.

Still, as long as Gio sent Aether into the wall, he could bring a bit of life back to those wires and feel their existence.

Whenever he found himself at a branching path, he searched within the walls until he found a common route between all the wiring and chose the direction that was best.

He was moving mainly in two directions. If he was still judging the distance he’d traveled properly, he was moving parallel to the paths available from the main entrance through the shaft.

But unlike the rest of his competition, he was moving in corridors that remained hidden from most people even when this building was actively being used.

Minutes passed, populated by nothing but the sound of Gio’s rushing footsteps until he finally reached a door that was secured by several locking mechanisms that broke centuries ago.

It opened with some slight force, and finally, he reached the place he’d been searching for: the main electrical room controlling this section of the facility.

He didn’t even have to look for it once he was there.

In fact, the moment he stepped into the room, he understood why everyone looked at him with such wry expressions when he pressed them to explain exactly what the "essence" looked like.

Really, it was a question that could only be asked by someone with no ability to sense energy at all.

Like the most faceted glass one could possibly imagine being illuminated from the most perfect angle by the most diversely chromatic light in existence.

Like that glass was somehow emitting its light from within a random set of cables, filling the otherwise dull room with a hazy aurora.

’That’s what I’m looking for.’

Seeing progress this early was truly an amazing feeling.