Chapter 63: The Tall Figure

The tunnel was completely silent now, save for the weak groans of the sleeping cultists probably having a nightmare behind me and the heavy, ragged breathing of Miguel.

"Are they going to wake up?" Miguel rasped out, his voice shaking.

"Not anytime soon," I replied without turning around. "Their cores are resting. Yours should be too if you want to stay alive."

Miguel stared up at me with wide, bloodshot eyes. He tried to raise his right hand to grab my ankle, but as soon as he gathered a tiny thread of mana, his chest heaved, and he let out a sharp cry of pain. He collapsed back against the cold stone, clutching his ribs in agony.

"Don’t bother," I told him, not even looking down as I reached out to touch the surface of the double doors. "The more you fight against a locked valve, the tighter it squeezes. If you keep trying to force your mana energy through a closed pipe, you are going to burst your own core."

"Who... who sent you...?" Miguel whispered, his voice trembling with a mixture of pain and terror. "Was it the Novaria Academy? The Duke’s shadow guards? Tell me! No common child could possess such precision..."

"You have a worse listening skill," I said, placing my hand flat against the heavy iron latch in the middle of the doors. "I am just a local locksmith. I told you that already. You people kept throwing broken, corrupted magic cores into districts, making a mess of the streets. It is bad for business."

"Business?" Miguel choked out a bitter, raspy laugh. "You destroyed an entire operation because of business?"

"It ruins my sleep. Victoria nags at me for looking tired. So yes, it is very bad for business."

I focused my attention on the lock mechanism holding the grand double doors shut.

Locksmith’s Eye.

The internal structure of the door’s lock appeared before my vision. Unlike the complex spatial vault door I encountered, this inner lock was purely mechanical, forged from heavy black iron and brass tumblers.

It had five primary pins, two safety levers, and a small needle trap designed to stab anyone who tried to turn the handle without the proper key.

"At least this lock was made by a decent craftsman," I muttered, inspecting the brass tumblers. "Just simple, sturdy, and clean."

"You cannot open that," Miguel rasped, his face pale as he watched me reach into my belt. "It is sealed by ancient methods."

I pulled out a standard tension wrench and a thin iron pick from my magic pouch. I did not even bother using my golden mana or my spatial key for this.

Using magical skills on a purely mechanical lock felt like using a sledgehammer to crack a small nut.

"Watch me," I said casually.

Clink.

I inserted the tension wrench into the bottom of the keyhole, applying a steady, light pressure with my left index finger. With my right hand, I slid the iron pick into the keyhole, feeling for the first pin.

Click.

The first pin set smoothly into place.

"You... you are actually picking it with iron tools?" Miguel gasped from the floor, watching my hands in total disbelief. "That is an enchanted dwarven lock! It requires a blood-sealed key!"

My eyebrow arched up. I looked at Miguel and back at the door. I already encountered dwarven locks before. They are real and complex locks that was unknown to anyone in this kingdom. This door is totally fake.

"Who sold you this door, Miguel?" I asked, shaking my head slightly.

"What?" Miguel blinked, caught completely off guard by my question.

"Did your cult leaders buy this door thinking it was authentic dwarven work?" I chuckled, moving my pick slightly deeper into the keyhole. "Because if you paid real gold for this, you guys got scammed big time."

"That is impossible!" Miguel shouted weakly. "The blacksmith swore it was forged in the deep dwarven halls!"

"Dwarven locks are nice, but they always leave too much clearance in the second tumbler slot," I explained casually, feeling the second pin resist. "They rely too much on heavy iron and forget that precise tolerances matter more than thick metal."

Click.

Click.

The second and third pins bound and set.

"And as for the blood-seal enchantment," I continued, feeling the spring resistance of the fourth pin. "It is just a simple mana trick. If you bypass the internal trigger lever, the magic never even realizes the lock is turning."

Miguel looked confused. All this time he believes that this door is extraordinary, but it’s not. It’s just a decent craft of human.

"Come on, Miguel. If I opened this myself? It’s one hundred percent fake," I said and continue working.

"You lie..." Miguel muttered, though his confidence was completely shattered. "You are just bluffing..."

Click.

The fourth pin clicked loudly.

I felt the subtle vibration travel up my iron pick, indicating that the anti-tamper needle trap was about to spring.

"Here comes the trap," I noted out loud. "A real dwarven trap would use hidden spatial needles. This one just uses a basic copper spring. See?"

I gently lifted the fifth pin while tilting my tension wrench by a fraction of a millimeter, catching the trap lever before it could release its spring.

CLACK.

The heavy iron latch inside the double doors disengaged with a solid, satisfying thud. The entire picking process took less than fifteen seconds.

"How did you do that?" Miguel whispered, his voice sounding completely hollow.

"See?" I said, pulling my iron tools out and sliding them back into my belt pouch. "No blood key needed. Just a little patience and the right touch."

Miguel just stared at the doors in stunned silence. His mind could not comprehend how an eight-year-old boy had casually dismantled hours of defensive preparations with a piece of bent iron.

I placed my palm against the cool surface of the left door and pushed it open.

"Wait," Miguel called out weakly from the ground. "What are you going to do inside?"

"Find out who is running your little show," I replied without looking back.

The heavy double doors swung inward smoothly, sliding over the stone floor without making a sound. A waft of cold, stale air blew out from the dark room beyond, carrying a strange mix of scents.

It smelled of burnt parchment, damp stone, and copper.

But strangely enough, the heavy, suffocating pressure of dark mana that I had felt earlier was almost completely... gone.

I stepped over Miguel’s leg and walked through the doorway, keeping my eyes sharp and my hand resting lightly near my magic pouch.

"Hmmm. Let us see what is hidden here," I whispered to myself.

I stepped into the grand inner hideout, half expecting to find a room full of armed cultists, glowing dark arrays, or giant tanks of boiling dark mana like the ones in the fantasy comics and web novels that I once loved reading in my previous life.

Back in my old life, whenever the main character finally broke into the villain’s secret lair in those stories, there was always some grand spectacle waiting for him.

There would usually be glowing red runes carved into the floor, dramatic dark altars pulsing with evil power, or at least a few robed guards standing around waiting to give a long speech about their master’s great plan.

Instead, I was met with complete, echoing silence. The quiet in the room was heavy and suffocating, broken only by the soft, rhythmic sound of my own breathing and the quiet scrape of my shoes against the cold stone floor.

The chamber was massive, built like a grand underground amphitheater with high, vaulted stone ceilings supported by thick stone pillars. It looked like the kind of place that had taken years of backbreaking labor to dig out beneath the city streets.

Large iron braziers were attached to the stone walls at regular intervals, but the fires inside them had long died out, leaving only thin wisps of gray smoke curling lazily into the cold, dark air.

The smell of burning wood had already faded, replaced by the damp, metallic scent of stale underground air and old ash.

The floor was littered with piles of white ash, torn leather book bindings, and shattered glass vials that crunched softly under my shoes whenever I did not watch where I was stepping. It was clear that someone had been working down here in a serious hurry, sweeping things off tables and tossing anything important straight into the flames.

I took a slow, careful walk down the center aisle, my small footsteps echoing loudly off the high stone walls. Every sound seemed to bounce back at me twice as loud, making me acutely aware of just how small my eight-year-old body really was in a place this big.

To my left, three massive iron tubes sat embedded deep into the stone ground. They were huge, heavy structures, reinforced with thick brass bands and dark iron rivets.

They were the exact same tanks used to refine liquid dark mana and inject it into subterranean monster cores. I had seen smaller versions of these setups before, but seeing three massive industrial-sized ones lined up in a row really put things into perspective.

Right now, the tanks were completely empty, their heavy drain tubes turned wide open and wiped clean with lime powder to neutralize any remaining energy traces.

I walked over to the edge of the first tube, holding my hand out near the open rim. I did not touch the metal directly, but I brought my face close enough to catch the faint lingering smell.

"Well, at least someone down here actually knows how to clean up after themselves," I muttered under my breath, shaking my head. "Lime powder mixed with saltpeter. That is a classic trick to neutralize residual dark magic so it does not leave a scent trail for tracking hounds."

The fact that they took the time to scrub the inside of the tubes meant they were not just running away from a fight. They were actively erasing their manufacturing footprint.

To my right, several long wooden worktables were overturned and smashed against the stone floor. Drawers were pulled out, thrown to the ground, and completely stripped of any tools, journals, or research notes.

Small brass screws, empty ink bottles, and plain wooden handles were scattered across the floorboards, completely picked clean of anything useful.

"They cleaned the house neatly," I muttered, crouching down near one of the smoldering braziers. "But not entirely."

I reached into my tool pouch, pulled out my iron tweezers, and reached into the warm ash pile. I carefully picked up a piece of charred parchment that had managed to escape the center of the flame.

The paper was almost entirely destroyed, turning black and brittle around the edges, but near the bottom corner, I could still make out a tiny fragment of a written diagram.

It showed a crude circle drawn with intricate location coordinates, but the text beneath it was scorched beyond recognition.

I turned the burnt piece over with my tweezers, studying the faint ink marks under the dim light.

"This was not a panic move," I thought out loud, speaking softly into the quiet room. "Nobody packs up this smoothly when they are scared out of their minds. When people panic, they knock things over, drop important papers, and leave whole books behind on the table."

This was not a panicked retreat. This was an organized, systematic cleanup.

The moment I began picking the outer vault door, or perhaps even earlier when the capital site was raided three days ago, someone inside this room had systematically burned every document, drained every tank, and packed up every single piece of valuable equipment.

Lord Miguel and his guards outside were not meant to win the fight. They were just sacrificial pawns left behind to slow me down while the main operation packed up its things and vanished into the night.

"They really don’t trust their own people," I said, tossing the burnt scrap back into the warm ash brazier. "Miguel was out there acting like he ran the whole show, screaming about dark gods and sacred ground, and he didn’t even realize he was just a glorified doorstop meant to buy five extra minutes."

I stood up, dusting off the knees of my brown trousers, and activated my Locksmith’s Eye once again.

My vision shifted instantly, filtering out the physical darkness of the room and replacing it with the hidden framework of energy.

I began scanning the dark corners of the massive room, looking past the broken furniture and empty tanks.

Even if a group cleans a room in a hurry, they almost always leave behind structural traces.

People focus on packing papers, collecting gold, and wiping down their tools, but they forget that magic leaves a permanent physical residue in the stone itself. Mana is like oil or grease. When you run high amounts of it through a room for months, it seeps deep into the pores of the rock, leaving faint trails that do not wash away easily.

As my vision shifted to reveal the golden energy lines of the room, I noticed something strange about the far wall of the sanctuary.

The stone pillars lining the side walls all carried faint blue mana trails from the building’s original foundation magic.

You could see where the original builders had channeled light earth magic centuries ago to keep the heavy ceiling from collapsing under the weight of the city above.

But the stone wall at the very back of the room was completely dead. There was no foundation magic, no ambient energy, and no natural moisture in the rock whatsoever. It was completely cold, dry, and disconnected from the rest of the cavern’s natural framework.

It was a false wall.

"There you are," I whispered softly to myself, a small smile tugging at the corner of my lips. "You can burn all the papers you want, but you cannot hide a structural gap from a locksmith."

I walked toward the back of the room, keeping my footsteps light and balanced as I stepped over broken glass, shattered vials, and overturned chairs. My eyes stayed locked on the dead stone wall ahead.

As I drew closer, the faint shadow near the center of the wall began to take a clear shape. I noticed a tall figure standing motionless right in front of the stone wall.

My body tensed instantly. The casual, relaxed feeling in my chest vanished, replaced by a sharp surge of focus. I reached into my pouch and gripped my keys, my golden mana flaring around my fingers in a quiet, steady pulse.

The figure did not attack. He did not draw a weapon, raise a staff, or reach for a magic scroll. He was just standing there with his back turned to me, completely unbothered by my approach, quietly looking at a small object resting in his hand.

He was dressed far too neatly for a sewer hideout, wearing a dark suit that looked completely pristine despite the dust and ash floating through the air.

"You are surprisingly quiet for an eight-year-old," a calm, deep voice whispered through the empty room.