Chapter 151 – Abnormal Discovery

It wasn’t completely free from people, however. There was a small village at the bottom of the mountain, comprised of no more than twenty houses. I was too far up to see what species lived there and didn’t plan to get closer to them.

Now, I could continue to teleport to stay in the air repeatedly but there was no point in wasting sel for no reason. I teleported to the ground closest to me and immediately took warm clothes from my storage to cover myself.

The goal was to find a good location, ideally a grotto or cavern inside the mountain. At first sight, there wasn’t any such place, but the mountain range was huge. For the next few hours, I teleported around, checking any site that could suit me.

This search was something every spatial mage did and I knew some of them even had multiple emergency shelters. I had received some tips from my predecessors and one of them corresponded to my situation. An old spatial mage told me to check behind every waterfall because there sometimes was a cavern hidden behind them.

I did just that but didn’t get lucky, unfortunately. Or maybe that person lied to me because there wasn’t a single cavern behind any of the waterfalls I investigated. As time passed, I adventured further inside the mountain range until I was truly in the middle of nowhere.

This was the sort of desolate place where no one would ever come without any good reason. It was cold and barren, high in altitude, with nothing to see except ice, snow, and rocks. I turned my head in all directions when something attracted my gaze. On one side, close to a mountain wall, the snow was piling up strangely. It created a slight depression, around fifty centimeters deep, and I wouldn’t have noticed it if I wasn’t paying a lot of attention.

I approached it and removed the snow on top. As expected, there was something a bit different here. The stone had a crack in it, the size of my arm, and I could feel a minuscule airflow coming out of there, telling me there was some empty space behind the rocks.

I took a selnic torch out of my storage and illuminated the dark inside through the crack. There was indeed some room there. However, it was much larger than I expected. It was spacious enough for me to stand, so I just teleported inside to see what it was all about.

I arrived in a vast cavern, around two times the size of Suuru’s house. I turned my light in all directions until I suddenly stopped on a specific object toward the depth of the mountain rocks.

There was a door, something that I would never have expected in such a place.

‘What the heck?’

I came closer to inspect it and was startled once more. It wasn't just any door, but a very sturdy-looking one, made of what seemed to be metal or some sort of metal composite. Its design was also very different from what was made in the area, seeming quite modern. The last strange detail was that it didn’t have a handle, which made it even more suspicious.

After a few hits and pushes, it became obvious that the door was as sturdy as it seemed. I checked all around the cavern to see if there was a mechanism to open it but couldn’t find anything.

After hesitating for a moment, I made up my mind. A door, no matter how solid it was, could never resist a spatial mage. My space cutter literally cut through space, meaning it could go through anything material. Of course, it wasn’t all-powerful either. It still couldn’t go through sel stronger than itself, for example, a rank 5 sel shield or sel armor.

I was too curious to stop here, anyway. A door inside a mountain in the middle of nowhere was way too intriguing not to investigate. I sent four space cutters, one in each axis, creating a nice rectangular opening, and a last one in the middle to destroy its integrity, allowing me to go through.

There, two elements astonished me simultaneously. First, the door's inner structure made it clear it was made to slide up and down, entering the ground and ceiling, in a way sci-fi doors would do in my world’s movies. Then, what appeared behind was a straight corridor whose walls were completely plastered with smooth metals, a clear sign of advanced technology that I didn’t believe could come from the current medieval outer world. At regular intervals were ceiling bubbles that I guessed must have been lighting, similar to the selnic lights that were everywhere in my world.

My imagination was already starting to go wild, and I wondered if this was a sort of ruin of an ancient civilization with levels of technology much more advanced than what was available today.

My noisy intrusion didn’t incite any sort of response from the place, making it feel like it was long abandoned. I continued forward, soon arriving in a series of rooms. The equipment and furniture made it feel like a high-tech laboratory, with large glass containers, computer-like terminals, various tools of all sorts, and even plastic packs of what could have been food and water.

I went through the whole installation, carefully scanning everything I came across. Some rooms were dormitories, while others looked like cafeterias. I found one area that had a large machine that could have been a generator, but I had no idea if it could still function or how to turn it on. Some other rooms felt like labs, workplaces, or even classes.

There was no doubt anymore. Plastic didn’t even exist inside the domes, much less in the outer world. This place was very out of context with the rest of the world. Whether aliens inhabited it long ago or some ancient civilization roamed the planet, it was hard to say.

One thing was certain: this planet’s history was much longer and more complex than it appeared.

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