Sage was no doubt curious what Rocky’s jobs had been, nearly every time he would leave Sage somewhere and disappear under the ground. Sage wanted to follow him, but when Rocky was underground it was very hard to track him and Rocky seemed to find his Warp Worm very easily. Sage didn’t want to make trouble or jeopardize his relationship with Rocky or the Peak Master by not following orders. He was aiming to become a loyal underling after all, he couldn’t ruin that just because he was curious.

Now that Rocky gave him a task, Sage couldn’t help but to bow his head and walk towards the cave. Time for him to contribute. That day when he discovered the books on Seals he knew he was in a dangerous position. If he hadn’t been careful or had been strong enough to be threatening, he might have lost his life that day. As it was, his abilities were wide and varied yet he was too weak to be threatening. Perfect for use as a pawn, and here he was getting moved for the first time.

Sage walked into the cave and a few minutes later he finished exploring the cave. The seals were quite obvious to see, but Sage wanted to make sure he didn’t miss anything before focusing his attention on the seals. Unlike the Timeless Master’s cave which only had a single seal upon a large stone door, the seals here looked far different. Sage only had the chance to read a few introductory books on seals and a handful of techniques so he could only try his best to decipher the seals. A few hours later, Sage had only made a small bit of progress. It was some sort of compound seal with at least eight different parts. Sage had no idea what it could do, the best he could do was to decipher the general category for some of the component seals. He took out his Memory Forge and a blank Memory Sphere, making a record of the seal as he saw it. Afterwards he added in a bunch of notes on the parts of the seal that he could decipher before heading back out of the cave and returning to Rocky.

“Too complicated for me to solve. We can continue.”

Rocky was quiet as usual and just nodded before leading the two of them towards the next seal. In the meantime, Sage used a Charming Lance Beetle as a mount, the two of them sat on the Beetle’s back while Rocky pointed out the direction for them to head in. It couldn’t quite move as fast as Rocky’s full speed, but it was quicker than Sage’s walking or running speed and conserved their energy.

This process continued for a few more days, visiting a number of strange locations at the bottom of ravines, the peaks of tall mountains, behind waterfalls, deep in caves, and even at the heart of a volcano. Sage wanted to steal away some of the magma from the Volcano, but he couldn’t figure out a way to transport it safely. He even started making a little map and marking the location of the seals inside the memory sphere, turning that sphere into a full guide to the seals he’d researched so far. After they had visited a dozen different seals, Rocky finally spoke again. After the first seal, he had just been pointing towards somewhere obvious or leading Sage to the spot without saying a word.

“This is the last one.”

If this is the last one, will we be leaving soon? How do we leave?

He kept his thoughts to himself for now and focused on the task at hand. The location of this seal was different from the others as it wasn’t in some hidden or secluded spot. Instead it was sitting out in the open on bare rock. The rock was actually a massive plateau, easily a few miles wide and a half mile tall. When they approached it actually looked like a massive city wall, which grew even more astonishing as they got closer and Sage saw how big it really was. Once they scaled to the top of the plateau they moved towards what Sage was basically the center of the giant rocky plateau and there was a huge seal carved into the stone. The seal was inscribed into the surface nearly ten feet deep. From high above the pattern was obvious, but to someone on top of the plateau it would just seem like a series of depressions or small valleys. Only with careful attention would it be apparent that the valleys were completely smooth on the walls and the edges were perfect squares or straight angles. The accumulation of sand, crystal rocks, and crystal vegetation make it a bit less obvious, but they flew in from above so the Seal was obvious.

Sage chose to stay high up in the air as he studied the Seal, sitting on the back of the Beetle with Rocky and copying down the seal’s basic shape into his memory sphere. The most amazing part was that the seal was about three hundred feet in diameter, but far simpler in design than the others he’d seen so far in the Hidden Domain. Big, but simple.

“I might be able to open this one. Did the Peak Master want me to unseal everything?”

Rocky nodded to him, so Sage took them down to the ground near the edge of the seal and sat down with his legs crossed. He referenced all of the seals he’d learned so far and compared them to the giant seal on the ground in front of him. In the past he had compared array symbols to the letter of latin languages while seals were more like pictograms. With more study he found it was more complicated, seals were closer to phonetic compounds. Or at least that’s what he once heard them being called. It was essentially a combination of two symbols, one for how a word should sound and another related to what it was. Or, so he’d heard. The language of this world was similar, but Sage had a hard time evaluating it. When he awoke on this world, he already had all the memories of the young Lang Sheng which included knowing the language and how to read and write it. The knowledge was sort of automatic and studying the things he hadn’t been the one to actually learn was more difficult than normal so he had never bothered to try.

What was important was that the seals seemed to be compounds of different types of symbols that all represented different facets of something and were then combined into a singular seal. Sage held up his hand and brought spirit power to his fingertip, tracing out the shape of the seal in the air in front of him. As he did the spirit power accumulated in mid-air, drawing out the seal carved into the ground in much smaller scale. It was a glowing diagram of the seal in front of him, and like it was called the huge seal shot out a tiny beam of light, connecting with the diagram he’d drawn.

Sage watched carefully as the simple seal in front of him suddenly shifted. Seeming to come to life, the lines of the seal writhed and transformed constantly like a collection of rolling and swaying snakes. In the meantime, Rocky sat to the side, watching what he was doing, intrigued by the strange reaction. Sage continued to study, the lines would shift and move revealing other hidden lines and shapes. Ones which Sage could pick out and try to decipher, connecting them to certain variables and characteristics. A seal was a complete representation of something. A perfectly formed seal could utterly and completely contain nearly anything.

One day later.

The ground suddenly began to rumble, the rocks around the seal started to crack. In mere moments the mountainous plateau shattered. Huge crevices originated from the center of the seal and ruptured outwards in every direction like a huge spider web. The walls of the huge plateau fell outwards like the blossoming of a gigantic stone flower. Sand and dust blew into the sky like an immense explosion had just went off.

Sage entered the internal space of the Lance Beetle while Rocky jumped onto its back. They quickly flew away, but were caught up in the huge explosion of dust and sand getting carried off miles into the distance.

What have we done?