Transcendent Gene
Chapter 236: Trapped [4]

Chapter 236: Trapped [4]

The cat was much faster than Gio expected it to be. He had to use his energy to keep up with its speed, but it wasn’t a bad thing. Rather, he had been worried that they wouldn’t move fast enough to avoid the next wave of destruction.

They moved without halting at all. For the first time since entering this realm, Gio was able to spend more than three hours without having to worry about the world at his back.

It had been almost two days since he woke up. However, in the last ten hours, he made more progress than he did in the thirty before it.

Following the cat’s guidance, he arrived at another complex of buildings that was easier called a collection of warehouses than a city. They walked through them until they were in front of a specific warehouse space.

The cat bumped its head against the purple material of the entrance, urging him to open the way.

Naturally, Gio did as he was asked and blew a hole in the door. The two of them strolled inside, and after the cat searched for a while, it put its nose to the floor at a specific location and started clawing at it.

"We’re going underneath?" Gio asked, to which the cat nodded.

"Understood. Step back a little."

As it did so, he let his aura loose, completely shattering the ground, The material wasn’t hard to begin with and its foundation was already unstable from being broken and put back together so many times.

He easily fell through the floor, feeling the cat landing on his shoulder as he hit the ground below.

’Now this...’

The tunnels below the warehouse looked far more familiar.

’If I showed a picture of this to anyone, they wouldn’t think I was in a Riftworld.’

They would think he was in some random hallway on Earth. It was that similar to human architecture. The only difference was the building materials, but the colors in this underground area were a mixture of whites and greys, making it hard to decipher the difference without feeling the floors and walls personally.

Gio’s brows stayed furrowed as he followed the cat through the hallways. He didn’t know what to make of it all.

’On one hand, none of it matters.’

At the end of the day, they were enemies. He had to exterminate them for humanity’s sake.

’But on the other hand, if they also have a common populace...’

What happened when he reached his end goal and wiped their armies from the universe?

’It’s too far away to even think about right now. Even if they have ordinary people in their midst, it means nothing. This Riftworld only exists to confuse me.’

Was it a part of their goal? Were they trying to make humans think they could be reasoned with? Did they want to lull humans into a sense of understanding that made them easy to bend and mold?

Gio couldn’t think of monsters as creatures who did anything without evil intent. He refused to consider this situation from another angle as well.

The cat’s lead took him through several winding corridors. He heard the ancient bell toll for the second time in its current run, however, it was at least two runs away from them. He didn’t have to worry about it finding them anytime soon.

They eventually reached a large door that looked like it was carved straight from the trunk of the most massive tree in the world. The wood was intertwined into itself, creating intricate patterns that surrounded a circular metal plate in its middle.

Said plate had a slot in its center that was also surrounded by runic symbols engraved in the plate. The cat walked up to the door and looked at Gio, nudging its head towards the slot.

"I see it, too, but what am I supposed to put in there?"

Nyah!

The cat made a sound of understanding and moved its body strangely, forcing something up its throat. It gagged several times before coughing out a ball that looked roughly big enough to fit in the slot.

"Usually, it would be made out of hair, I think..." Gio thought as he dried it off with energy and picked it up.

This ball was instead made of a crystalline material that made its insides flow with an aurora of light.

"If you’ve had this, why didn’t you go inside already?"

The cat rolled its eyes at the stupid question.

Nyah!

It meowed in annoyance, pawing at the door and telling him to just put the orb where it was supposed to go.

"I don’t like your attitude," he grumbled.

Though, he still followed its directions. When the orb was placed in the slot, it sank into the door and became a part of it. Energy flowed through the pathways in the roots and collected in the runic symbols on the metal plate, finally shining a strong light through the orb.

Rumble!

An ancient mechanism was put to work. The roots pulled away and the metal plate retreated into the floor, opening the path forward.

’Well, I guess that’s why it was a stupid question.’

He smiled wryly as he saw what was inside. It wasn’t that the cat never opened the door, but that there was nothing it could do when it went past that step.

It was simply because it was not a humanoid creature.

’Everything here was built for humanoids.’

Gio understood this room. There was a mixture of scientific equipment and ancient arrays and formulas powered by more magical properties. All of it seemed randomly meshed together as if the designer couldn’t decide if they were living in the future or the distant past.

’But it all has purpose. It definitely ended up like this on accident, but they didn’t let it stay a mess.’

Gio swept his eyes across the room as he explored it. Tubes let into roots that led into channels that connected to devices and arrays. Each one had its own line of power within the mess, but there was also a central system that brought them all together if one wanted to power everything at once.

’But why would that exist if everything wasn’t meant to operate together?’

HONG!

The world was collapsing again. In another four hours, this place would also be taken with the storm.

’Dammit.’

Vestiges of research like these were precious. Even when they came from humans, they were valuable, so one could imagine how priceless the research of the Monster Race would be.

’I can’t understand anything written here. The language has no similarities to anything in Earth’s present, but if I do research, I’m bound to find a link somewhere.’

He was thoroughly convinced that all language originated from the same sources regardless of "where" they started.

’First, I have to figure out how to leave. Once I’ve secured the escape route, I can use the rest of my time investigating before the storm starts.’

Discovering secrets was a good thing only when it was done at the correct time. Gio felt no joy from seeing things he could not comprehend within the scope of his knowledge.

However, one day, he would learn the context. As he delved deeper into the world of his enemies, the blanks would fill themselves in around what he learned here.

Therefore, it was still essential for him to digest as much of what he saw as possible.

The clock was ticking.

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