Calen wiped off his sweat as his training came to an end, and smiled a little – the results were quite impressive, the last time he checked his capabilities was back in Mountainfall, before the Krakee nest and the Greyfang den, and the difference was astonishing.
Now strengthening the flame had a greater effect on his body, and as if that wasn’t enough it also massively boosted his abilities.
His strength increased so much that he could now bend thick beams of steel with relative ease, no need for a powerful punch with a wind-up.
He could also run for hours on end at speeds that far exceeded what an average person was capable of.
Calen has undoubtedly reached the lower spectrum of being superhuman, and that was without his significantly enhanced senses.
The only problem with that was the fact he would have to find some external means of his body sooner rather than later – his integration with the flame hasn’t quite reached the point where his body naturally kept up with the divine power.
It wasn’t that big of an issue though, he was certain that he could learn about a few ways to do it in a castle full of people dedicated to enchancing their bodies.
But that’s for later, for now he needed to clean himself and find Elira.
Just as he approached his room, Elita came out of hers.
"Oh, are you done with your training?"
"Yeah, I was about to take a quick bath and join you." Calen nodded. "Did you find out anything about this place?"
"Not much unfortunately, this place is as big as it is irrelevant to history." She let out a frustrated sigh. "I can wait for you here and we’ll go ask about the library together."
"Sure, I’ll be done in a few minutes."
Twenty minutes later they were standing in the abandoned bathroom where the secret passage was located – but they had a tiny problem.
"Any idea how do you open the passage from this side?" Calen scratched his head. "I don’t see any torches to twist or anything like that."
"Look for anything that looks... interactable?"
They knew there must be a way to open the passage from this side as well, after all it was a secret tunnel built into the castle and not a hole dug by some prisoner to escape.
The problem was that there weren’t many things in the bathroom to begin with – it was gutted of most necessary things when it was abandoned, leaving exposed piping in many places.
"Why would they destroy a room just because it wasn’t used?" Elira mused as she tapped various stones in hope they were actually hidden buttons. "It doesn’t make much sense."
"Maybe they thought that the place was haunted or something." Calen shrugged while poking one of the few remaining faucets.
"That’s stupid, ghost aren’t real and even in stories they haunt entire buildings, not just rooms. Destroying a bathroom wouldn’t help in any way."
"I mean, not that I disagree with you, but we’re talking about people who get their food from a giant statue in exchange for offerings and have lived for centuries in a giant castle that was inexplicably almost empty when they arrived – you can’t fault them for being a little superstitious."
"Besides, we don’t actually know if that’s the reason – maybe it’s just that the plumbing here is screwed up and they didn’t know how to fix it, so they scavenged what they could to reuse it somewhere else, or some other mundane thing like that."
Elira’s eyes narrowed.
"Now that I think about it, why the hell does this place even have plumbing? It was built way before it was a common practice, and even if it wasn’t, the cost of lining a place as big as this with pipes would be enormous."
"I have no idea." Calen grabbed the faucet he was playing with, and twisted it upside down. "But maybe Nickolas will know.*
Something in the wall clicked, and a large fragment of the door opened, revealing the passage.
"Ladies first." He gestured at the opening.
"I heard Leo did something stupid again." Nickolas looked rather unimpressed. "He wouldn’t tell me what, but the round table put him on instructor duty for a week."
"He led us on an unauthorized hunt." Calen informed him. "But that punishment doesn’t sound particularly heavy...?"
"It’s not." Nickolas confirmed. "The only reason they even consider this a disciplinary action is because Leo is absolutely terrible with teenagers, and he’ll have to wrangle a bunch of them on his own."
"How many kids are we talking about?"
"Thirty four, not counting Alfred and Morgan, ranging in age from thirteen to seventeen."
"Maybe they’ll at least help him."
"I don’t know about Morgan, but Alfred will most definitely not – I’d wager he’ll encourage the chaos and actively disrupt him."
"Let’s hope Morgan is more level-headed than him then."
"Let’s." Nickolas agreed with a chuckle. "What brings you here anyway? Not that I dislike company, but I doubt it’s just to chat."
"We want to learn more about this castle." Elira stated. "And I’ve heard theres a sizable library somewhere in the castle, but we don’t know where."
"Not a very popular facility I’m afraid – Cal, hand me a pencil and paper from the desk over there, I’ll draw you a map."
Calen fetched the necessary things, and Nickolas started drawing.
"You’ll certainly find a lot of information in there, but I must warn you that it’s not quite like regular libraries."
"I don’t want to spoil the surprise, so let’s just say that it’s a rather advanced reservoir of knowledge, just like other things in this castle."
"Yeah, we’ve noticed that just before coming here actually – why does this castle have so many things that it shouldn’t considering its age?"
"Tharion." Nickolas shrugged. "A few days before he left he told us that he’ll ’enhance’ all of our facilities to be on par with the peak of humanity."
Once again, the answer was the Shadow.