The Guardian System: The strongest Summoner's quest to save his family Chapter 387: A City Like a Corpse (4)

Reidar stayed crouched behind a pile of jagged basalt, focusing on the [Overmind Consciousness] link. The twelve Vorathid Sky-Hunters, shrunk to the size of wasps, moved through the palace's interior.

The first few rooms were empty. They looked like storage chambers, maybe, or offices where the furniture had rotted away or burned, leaving only ash and scorched stone. That actually happened to most of the rooms, so the Sky-Hunters moved on.

The visual feed was dim, but his summons allowed Reidar to map the hallways easily as they passed under high ceilings and through corridors lined with the sa darkness.

The more the Sky-Hunters checked around, the more the palace seed to be an administrative hub of sorts; plus, the architecture reflected a higher social tier of the sort, or at least sothing belonging to the rich. The governnt wasn't excluded.

The summons went through the building without problems, which reassured Reidar there were no monsters, until one of the summons found a staircase leading down. It descended into the basent. The insect flew down the steps, and at the bottom they found a corridor lined with heavy doors.

The Sky-Hunter pushed through one of the doors. Inside was a large chamber filled with shelves and tables.

Materials were scattered around: tal ingots, crystal fragnts, and bundles of wire. There was much more, of course, but most of it was stuff Reidar couldn't even na, and he had no idea what it was used for. However, there were various degrees of degradation there. So of the items were intact, but most of them were ruined.

Reidar imdiately saw traces of Mara, as she left boot prints on the ash covering the floor of the building, weaving between the shelves and stopping at the center of the room.

But there was sothing else.

In the center of the room, drawn on the floor in white chalk, in an area cleared of ashes and debris, was a magic circle; It was almost complete. The lines were drawn as if Mara used a ruler or sothing like that; the anchor points were filled with materials: chunks of tal, fragnts of bone, and other small things Reidar didn't know what they were.

On Earth, the Church of Unbinding used thousands of human and monster sacrifices to provide the raw mana needed to bridge the gap between worlds. Here Mara was alone. She didn't have a "battery" of followers to fuel the spell.

Reidar looked at the failed circle. Even though Mara was getting stronger by absorbing the planet's dense and abundant ambient mana, she was still too weak to get fresh materials from monsters, and that was why she was still trying to find the materials by scavenging, rather than getting the mana abundant materials from creatures.

Even if she could kill them, she had no way to do enough in a short amount of ti. On Earth, she had infrastructure and people helping her.

Here, she only had what she could find.

His high A.C.U.M.E.N. and not a scant amount of F.L.I.P. helped him. Though Reidar didn't know how much it was because of his ability to predict correctly what she did or simply because of dumb luck.

However, while the magic circle interested him, there was sothing else that he put his eyes on. On a central tal table, the Sky-Hunters spotted a rectangular object—a diary made of a grey material Reidar didn't know.

Reidar made the summons check the palace again, but since everything seed to be ok, he pulled his focus back to his own body.

It was a stupid idea, but that diary… Maybe it was important, maybe not. Curiosity was killing Reidar, and since it looked like there was nothing around, going to check it wasn't a bad idea.