Mysteries: Arcana Wars

The old signal facilities could not provide any reliable signals. The short signal lasted only ten minutes before it fell silent again.

Evan happened to be downloading something on his phone, and the sudden loss of signal made him a little dissatisfied. He patted the signal station with his calloused hands, but no matter how he operated, the old machine no longer responded.

“I’ve only downloaded half of it…”

He began to mumble weakly again, sighing dejectedly while reaching out to stroke the black cat's soft fur.

Klein guessed that Evan was probably just downloading some unhealthy videos for free. After living in such a depressing underground city for a long time, it was inevitable that he would need some outlets to vent. In the past few days, he had encountered several vendors selling pornographic memory cards on the streets of Evernight Harbor, and they seemed to be doing good business. Klein could understand this mentality. It was normal for Evan, who had been living in the underground city, to want to save some free pornographic movies on his phone.

"I'm sorry, Miss Christine, I didn't have time to download the movie you wanted to watch..."

"Idiot, don't say this kind of thing in front of outsiders!"

As the black cat said that, he kicked Evan hard in the face and screamed in frustration.

...So what you downloaded was a cat movie!

"Oh, oh, okay..."

Being blamed, Evan hid his phone again obediently, but his movements were as flustered as usual.

This farce also helped Fors to get out of that brief but intense emotion. She wiped away her tears, adjusted her mentality, and continued on the road with the others.

Due to some spiritual intuition, Klein has always kept his distance from the Internet, but there were moments when he really wanted to move the signal station away so that they could have a way to contact the outside world underground. But after thinking about it, Klein gave up. After weighing the pros and cons, he didn't have a deep understanding of the Internet at the moment, so it would be better to try to avoid leaving any traces of the Tarot Club on the Internet.

They climbed down the illegally built ladder in the well, passed three precarious platforms, and walked into a tunnel on the fourth platform, finally leaving this section of the well.

The rest of the journey was much easier. Klein could sense that Evan had indeed led them through many dangerous and fast tunnels, such as the abandoned and dilapidated well at the other end.

As Klein jumped off a rock, a thin string broke in his perception.

He lost contact with the safe house doll.

This was expected. For safety reasons, Klein gathered all the puppets he left on the ground in the apartment safe house when he set out for Hazel Street. This ensured that if he lost control of the ground, the puppets would be well preserved and would not cause any unnecessary trouble or the spirit insects controlling the puppets would lose control.

Don't throw away the secret dolls randomly. This is a virtue that every fortune teller should possess.

This is an important lesson that Klein learned from Leonard's story. During the period after waking up, Klein often asked Leonard about his story after Utopia Town, and Leonard would tell Klein everything he knew. But because Klein soon became the Old One, many things were unknown to Leonard due to the influence of his personality and the need for secrecy, so he could only give Klein a vague general idea. But Klein attached great importance to every piece of intelligence about his "future", and would even seriously summarize the lessons he had not yet experienced.

Therefore, Klein now has a good habit of using secret dolls. Previously, Klein left some of the secret dolls on the ground to collect wishes, maintain the persona of "unlucky wandering magician", and communicate to obtain intelligence. Some were left in the safe house of the apartment ready to swap positions at any time. The rest were brought to the underground city by Klein. They were all animal-shaped secret dolls, which were easy to use and hide.

But when the moment of losing contact with the safe house apartment really came, Klein still felt a lack of security. However, since he was here, he might as well make the best of it. Everything was arranged, so he went down boldly. He had also communicated with Emlyn, and Klein obtained the last ground supply for this trip to the underground city from him. The only reliable person was Mr. Pales. His mid-sequence clone that was shallowly parasitic on Leonard became the most reliable means of information exchange between the two and the ground world. It was a pity that Pales's real body was imprisoned in that small house by the Church of the Night.

Even if I leave the puppet's control range, I still haven't reached it yet...

It seems that Hazel Street is even deeper than imagined. Why would the Tesla family, who have already gained a certain amount of power in the surface world, hide so deep underground?

Evan and Miss Christine were very reliable guides. Just as the man and the cat had expected, they walked into a spacious tunnel at midnight.

These tunnels were older than the ones Klein had seen in the underground layer before, and the technology was even more backward. Huge and repetitive pipes were entrenched on the walls of the passages, hanging heavily, and the black wires were tangled into a mess, like a dirty and greasy flower exploding between the metal pipes. Rather than saying this was the glory of progress, it was better to say that this was the redundancy and chaos brought about by backward technology, which should have been abandoned by the times long ago.

The light tubes on the pipes were very bright, illuminating every inch of the ground under Klein's feet. Perhaps because the equipment was old, the light tubes flickered a little. Although they were electric lights, they created an atmosphere similar to candles. Under the swaying lights, a row of huge Nixie tube clocks indicated the time. Time was the only standard used by the dungeon to distinguish between day and night. Of course, without the guidance of sunlight, some people's lives were very chaotic.

For a moment, Klein felt as if he had traveled back to the Electrical Age of the Sixth Epoch, a time when sophisticated motors and the brilliance of electric currents were making their mark in history.

The black cat jumped off Evan's shoulder and walked to the end of the aisle. After a while, it came back and jumped onto Evan's shoulder again.

"I think we have it, guests."

This is a very old iron gate, much older than the gate of Yongye Port. The overly simple motor crouches on the iron gate like an octopus, and the flickering indicator light is like the eyes of an alien. The old brass button has been well maintained, and long-term use has made it covered with a layer of oily sebum. The red Nixie tube display is embedded in the middle of the iron gate, showing a row of square Loen letters.

【Normal passage】

This meant that the heavy electric door was functioning normally. However, the buttons on the door had been erased after thousands of uses, so Klein couldn't tell at a glance how to use them.

But what concerned Klein the most was a metal plate with strange inscriptions engraved on it under the Nixie tube display.

The metal plate was welded to the door as a whole and looked very thick. The inscriptions were carved very deeply, and severe corrosion and deformation could not erase these deep inscriptions.

The strange thing is that these inscriptions are clearly in Rune letters, but the words they form are not Rune language at all. Klein tried to spell them, and they didn't look like translations of other languages ​​such as Feynaport or Intis - or in other words, Klein could be sure that this was a translation of a certain language in the Rune language, but he couldn't read it, which language it came from.

Familiar memories came to my mind. The usage of these characters should be the same as the inscription on Leonard's stone slab. Both were transcriptions of the language, and maybe they were from the same source language.

Just as Klein was trying to divine how to open the iron door, he suddenly felt his whole body lighten.

This is not a very specific feeling of floating as if your feet are off the ground, but a sense of unreality as if all your senses, including vision, touch, hearing, etc., are rising upwards and dragging your heavy spirit away from reality.

Klein immediately recognized this familiar feeling. He opened his old pocket watch and the minute hand moved two small spaces outward.

A two-minute vision captured him.

After confirming that he had fallen into an illusion again, Klein was no longer panicked. He looked around and didn't see anything that shouldn't appear in reality. Just as Klein was feeling strange, a hurried sound of footsteps came from behind him.

"Okay, Klein, let me see how I can help you today. Time is short, so I'll leave the problem for next time."

Phantom Melissa quickly walked past Klein, then looked at the iron gate in front of her, then looked back at Klein. She immediately showed an expression that said "I know what you want me to do for you now", and then she quickly pressed several keys in sequence with her fingers.

With a shrill doorbell ring, the door unlocked. Melissa pushed the door open, turned around and smiled smugly. After demonstrating how to open the door to Klein, she closed the door again, clapped her hands, patted Klein on the shoulder, and turned to leave.

It was a particularly brief encounter, as if the phantom Melissa, who was doing something else, suddenly fell into Klein's world, so she came over to see if she could help. Time was not abundant, so she simply left after helping and went back to her work, like an office worker who accidentally fell into the sewer, and after climbing out, she continued to be a social animal.

Klein already roughly knew that the phantoms could not control when they appeared, how long they appeared, or in which illusion they appeared.

"Oh, by the way, I thought you might want to know this."

Phantom Melissa seemed to remember something, turned around, raised her hand and touched the ancient inscription board.

"[Tlo je tri hiljade?etiri stotine dvadeset i sedam metara ni?e, ono je na?a usamljena svetla vodilja]"

She read it in a language Klein didn't recognize, then in Loenese, and finally turned around and read it to Klein in Roselle.

"[3,427 meters below the ground, is our lonely shining guiding light]"

The pointer returned to zero, and the hidden phantom Melissa turned into a ball of black flame and dissipated in Klein's sight in the blink of an eye.

“It’s Serbian.”