Chapter 34: Academy Main Building (2)

Whether morning, noon, or afternoon, the sky in the fog zone remained perpetually overcast. The gray mist blocked out the sun, making it nearly impossible to tell the time.

I pulled my gaze back from a shattered window and focused on the wide marble corridor stretching before us.

Felice and I had already infiltrated the academy’s main building.

‘Infiltrated’ might be overstating it; we’d simply bypassed the front gate and climbed in through a window.

The interior design of the main building was much the same as its exterior.

We now stood in a long corridor paved with marble. The walls were built from pale gray stone that gave off a cold, sterile feeling, but every ten meters or so, there was a large, once-beautiful mural. Most were badly damaged or peeling, though a few remained intact enough to make out what they depicted—scenes from the lives of the scholars who once worked here.

Between the murals stood busts, mostly of elderly men, some of elderly women, each with an aura of wisdom that practically screamed ‘academic.’ Looking up, we saw towering ceilings hung with old-fashioned chandeliers, groaning softly with each draft, as if ready to crash down at any moment. Naturally, Felice and I stuck close to the wall as we moved forward.

“Yuhong, corner’s clear. How’s the rear?”

“All clear. Keep moving.”

We advanced step by step, nerves taut as wire. Every corner, every shadow was inspected with precision.

We continued deeper into the main building, maintaining full alertness. And yet, to our surprise, not a single fog fiend had appeared. No monsters, no traps—only a silence so oppressive it felt like it was pressing on our eardrums.

Too quiet.

And—

“Huh?”

One of the murals on the wall looked wrong.

Where there should’ve been a painting, there was only a bare patch of pale stone. At first glance, that wasn’t unusual—many of the murals had worn away. But this one was different. The scarring on the surface wasn’t random. It wasn’t the jagged erosion of time. It looked like the mural had been deliberately scraped off by force.

Why this one? Why only this mural?

Who had been depicted here?

==========

He was unwelcome, the misfit among the senior professors. No one accepted his ideas, and he never sought the approval of shallow, mundane minds.

==========

“Ugh!?”

The sudden emergence of information in my mind nearly made me gasp. It was just like when I encountered new monsters and instinctively received data about them. But this time, something was off. The message didn’t specify who it was referring to, and it felt fragmented, like a sentence ripped from the middle of a book.

I turned to Felice. She’d received it too; her face was tight with confusion.

“Let’s keep moving.”

“Yeah.”

…

…

…

Beyond the outer corridor, the inner halls held classrooms and laboratories.

“Tch, tch…”

I pushed open a heavy door to reveal a large room, shaped like the stepped lecture halls back on Earth, complete with a chalkboard—though the board had long since fallen from the wall. Despite the ruin, a somber academic atmosphere lingered here. It was a kind of gravitas that belonged only to the highest halls of learning.

“No abnormalities between desks, let’s move.”

After confirming no fog fiends were hiding beneath the furniture, Felice and I exited through the door on the other side. Many classrooms and lecture halls here were connected. The architectural design was thoughtful, even elegant. If this existed back on Earth, it would surely be praised as a model of campus construction.

…

…

…

“Another empty one.”

We had already passed through three, maybe four classrooms. Felice glanced over the vacant room and spoke softly.

“No fog fiends either. That’s something, at least.”

“But what about bodies? If they were brought here from another world, their corpses shouldn’t just vanish into mist, right? So where are they?”

“Uh…”

That puzzled me, too.

This had once been a thriving academic institution, a beacon of intellect. So where were the students? The professors? The researchers? They were likely human, just like us, and the fog fiends were monsters native to their world. If the people here had been attacked, shouldn’t there be remains? Or did they evacuate quickly enough to escape?

Just as I was pondering—

“This place is… huh? A lab?”

Another large room stood before us; this one was far more cluttered. Rows of stone tables filled the space. Metal racks held bottles and flasks of every shape and size. Massive quartz crucibles large enough to stuff a human into were set in each corner. Chairs were buried under piles of thick, dusty tomes. On the tables and racks sat a chaotic array of vials—some no larger than a pinky, others half the size of a person—each filled with vividly colored liquids I had no desire to touch.

It looked like something out of an eighteenth-century European alchemist’s lab, as reimagined by a modern madman.

I only meant to check the room for fog fiends.

But something on the closest lab bench stopped me cold.

A “person.”

A human “corpse.”

It was a naked male body, face down on the table, limbs pinned in place with thick steel spikes. The flesh on his back had been crudely flayed, exposing raw muscle and the white curve of his spine. Over a dozen scalpels, scissors, clamps, and syringes were stabbed into his back—some jammed straight into the back of his skull. His skin was coated with a translucent film, like the antique sheen of aged relics. Whatever this substance was, it had preserved the body perfectly—no rot, no decay. Just the frozen moment of death.

A violent wave of nausea surged up from my gut.

Felice immediately turned away, refusing to look. The shock hit harder because we’d spent the entire time up to this point without encountering any monsters or gore. The contrast made this scene all the more jarring.

I forced myself to breathe deeply, fighting the urge to vomit, willing my eyes away from the corpse and toward the surroundings.

“Research notes?”

Beside the body was an extremely old notebook. Its pages were brittle with rot, and though the gods’ blessing allowed me to read the local script, it was still tough going.

“Experiment… base subject… too weak… injection of… tch!”

It was a mess of obscure terminology and cryptic procedures—spinal extraction, nerve injection, peeling and harvesting. Just reading it made my spine crawl. I skimmed through it quickly. There didn’t seem to be anything directly useful. Until…

In the corner of the cover, a faint signature had been scrawled in loopy, near-illegible cursive. I turned the book sideways, upside down, squinting.

If I wasn’t mistaken, this notebook belonged to Ian.

==========

The path to perfection demands sacrifice. All of it is worthwhile. Ian has staked his entire life on his ideals and aspirations. These short-sighted commoners, these petty men obsessed with fame and gain, they should feel honored to serve as stepping stones on the road to truth.

==========

A new message surfaced in my mind.

Ian. That name again.

Judging by the corpse, the lab notes, and this new fragment… Ian was most likely a researcher here. An outcast among scholars. Someone willing to sacrifice everything in pursuit of his ideals. A mad scientist? Or maybe a mad alchemist?

“Yuhong! Over here, look at this!”

“What? …Ah!”

On the far side of the lab was another door. It was half open.

Just outside it were a chaotic scattering of footprints and handprints. Blurred, distorted—but unmistakable.

No human left these marks.

They led through the open door, vanishing into the darkness beyond.

We’d found it.

The boss’s lair.