Chapter 578: Chapter 571: Enshrouded

“Any success?” Ihuarah asked after waiting for a while.

“No… The mana here is really too thick, I can hardly perceive anything. Normally I can feel things like a good kilometer or two away if I focus, but here it’s hard to even see what’s in front of me.”

“And the locket is unresponsive,” Ihuarah added, “our best choice might still be to have you get closer and try to feel the essence resonance.”

“I still can’t even feel the essence you have, so that’s a bad start.”

“That is true, but we are starting to lack options. Should we proceed with the preliminary elimination?”

“If only identifying worked… Yeah let’s start taking the obviously wrong ones down. Keeping only Sorrow and Progress rune ones.”

“Certainly,” Ihuarah agreed, and he quickly got to work. Extending his arm several meters, he started grabbing the flying shrouds one by one, precisely plucking them out of the air. Whenever he touched one, it fell to the floor like a lifeless rag.

Sofia observed him work silently, when he was done, about 40% of the shrouds remained, which was still more than a thousand of them, but already a lot better. Out of those, about one out of twenty had a Progress rune while all others had Sorrow’s.

“Just going by the imbalanced quantity, I feel like we can eliminate the Progress ones as well. It is Sorrow’s artifact to begin with, but since it’s a set item with an artifact of Progress…”

“The quantities could be misleading. There is no reason to take that risk quite yet,” Ihuarah told Sofia, turning around.

“True… What else do we have to work with… Color, patterns…”

“Textile,” Ihuarah suggested, “it is not easily noticeable, but I can tell from the feel of all the ones I have taken down already, there are different kinds of threads. It stands to reason that the genuine one would be made of a rare and special textile. The weave is also different depending on the cloth, I think, but this is not something I am very knowledgeable about…”

“Good catch… But we can’t touch them without either picking or eliminating, so how do we even do this… Hmm… Can you try tearing up some of the ones that are already down?” Sofia asked.n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

“Certainly, but what do you have in mind?”

“What better way to observe the textile quality than to rip it apart?”

“Interesting… Let’s try.”

Ihuarah picked up some of the fallen shrouds and started effortlessly tearing them in two.

Depending on how hard it was to tear them, he and Sofia placed the halved shrouds into six piles. There were three types of thread and two types of weave. Out of those, two of the thread types ripped apart easily while the third required Ihuarah to actually try. The two weaves were actually easy to differentiate once one knew where to look, as one made the cloth smooth and silky, almost a bit reflective while the other one was just regular cloth.

“We might have noticed the silky weave earlier had we shone any light…” Ihuarah commented.

“We can both see in the dark so… At least now we know. If we think the artifact needs to be of the highest quality, then it can’t be the regular weave, right?”

Ihuarah had to stop and think for a second, his hand on his chin, playing with his short ‘beard’. “Perhaps. I am slightly wary, however, as I recall old tales of greed being the undoing of man, and these would often feature plain-looking artifacts hidden amongst piles of treasure. This place being so old, this trial could very well have been inspired by such tales.”

“I see exactly what kind of stories you mean, they’re still around, there was that one about a golden sword in a lake or something? And one about some vampire’s blood cup? How likely is it though? Who even makes divine artifacts? That could be a lead.”

“Well, people make them. Craftsmen, with the help of the divine. But leaving your personal mark on a divine artifact is frowned upon. A notable thing is that every divine item should have at least one kind of uniquely rare and powerful material to hold the essence, but in this case, a single string of sufficiently rare origin could do, so spotting it would be quite the feat.”

“What kind of string is that rare?”

“Royal Kleptran silk, perhaps…”

“Hmm… What would mom want? How about the locket, what is it made of?” Sofia asked.

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“I am uncertain… I would guess Adamian steel, but it is hard to tell without damaging it. The essence-holding material inside the locket is a small purple gem.”

“If it really is adamian steel then we could forget about this whole cheap-looking thing…”

After a while, and comparing with Sofia’s adamian-steel-reinforced scepter, they decided that the locket was probably indeed adamian steel, and chose to try to eliminate the low quality shrouds.

Eliminating those with the wrong weave was quite easy; they just needed to shine some light and observe the reflectiveness of the cloth. Except that the ambient mana was so thick and turbulent that it actually distorted light, making things a lot harder. The elemental candle solved the issue, as although it had a very short range, its light was unhindered by the mana. Ihuarah just held the candle up near the flying shrouds, and whenever one was non-reflective, he picked it out.

Sofia held her breath every time Ihuarah picked out a shroud, but without fail, the shroud fell limply on the floor. They had guessed correctly, the correct shroud was made using the silky weaving technique.

This thinned the number of shrouds by around half, and now there were few enough left flying around that Sofia could actually start to guess accurately how many that was.

“We still have about seven hundred of them to sift through…”

“Thus the obvious next step is to get rid of the two inferior textiles,” Ihuarah said, stretching his arms as if they were sore from all the grabbing.

“So far we can only tell which is which by touching so that’s not going to work.”

I wish Cinthia was here right now… Or her [Weaver] mom…

“How about I try to get a look from the spiritual realm?” Sofia suggested after a while.

“I fear this might be dangerous, considering the current environment,” Ihuarah warned.

“Hmm… Well, I don’t have to go myself.”

Sofia summoned the graveyard. The ambient mana was messing everything up, yet Sofia still managed to summon a few graveyard skeletons; they were horrifyingly deformed, but their function was seemingly intact.

“Boys! Observe the shrouds from the spiritual plane, don’t touch anything, just raise a hand if you notice anything out of the ordinary.”

The skeletons unanimously raised their hands almost instantly.

“Well, it’s worth going to take a look,” Sofia reacted with a small laugh.

Ihuarah nodded, “Be quick.”

To do things properly, Sofia walked to the center of the room, laid down on the ground not too far from the sarcophagus, and let one of the skeletons grab her head into the spirit realm.

She instantly understood what the skeletons had seen, some of the shrouds very glowing like miniature white suns in the spirit realm, maybe ninety out of the remaining seven hundred, and many more that were already on the floor.

She could only observe this for about a second before she was forcibly pulled out of the spiritual realm, or rather, her head became twisted and deformed like the graveyard skeletons, and it became a dead limb, no longer able to perceive anything.

Sofia was suddenly alone with only her thoughts, her crippled mana senses, and her sense of touch.

Ugh that FELT disgusting.

How do I fix this? I might still be able to see through the tokens but they’re not able to see in the dark… I can’t cut it off and heal because of the unlife runes, so no choice but to die, right?

Hopefully the mana here doesn’t mess with the runes too much…

Sofia grabbed the dagger from the hole in her chest and lined it up to stab her mana heart.

Warm hands caught her wrists before she could kill herself.

Ihuarah?

Sofia stopped trying to stab herself, waiting to see what Ihuarah wanted to do. Without warning, he picked her up and started walking. At least that’s what it felt like. It was when he pulled her into the narrow tunnel of the mana leyline that Sofia understood what was going on. Ihuarah had exactly the same concern as her, so to make sure the revive would go unhindered by the extreme environment, he was bringing her out. After exiting the leyline, he jumped a few thousand meters up the hole, until the mana was back to a still high but not extreme level, and put Sofia’s hand in position. She stabbed herself.

She came to life back three seconds, her demonic head as good as new.

“Thank you. That could have been dangerous to do down there…”

“I know,” Ihuarah said, tapping her on the shoulder, “let us get back to it. Discover anything?”

“I did but… It’s going to be hard to use until we’ve narrowed down the number a lot more,” Sofia said before explaining what she had seen.

Ihuarah and Sofia went on to find a way to remove the low-quality shrouds, then they started to focus on the colors, removing all shrouds which were dyed or embroidered with something not in Sorrow’s colors, which were gray, black, white, and purple. After a few more rounds of such eliminations, including one making use of the spirit plane information, there were only about twenty shrouds remaining.

Now, out of those, Sofia and Ihuarah already knew which to remove, it was extremely simple, as they had noticed one last thing the more shrouds they eliminated. All shroud embroidery patterns were in the room in three identical copies.

Out of all the shrouds that were left, only one embroidered design had its three copies remaining, surviving all other elimination rounds until now.

Sofia and Ihuarah were uncertain, but with no better option after a lot of thinking, they decided on eliminating all other designs. Ihuarah’s hands trembled in dread and anticipation every time he grabbed a shroud.

They had been correct.

“Almost there,” Ihuarah said with a tired sigh of relief, looking up at the three sole remaining shrouds flying in circles around the sarcophagus.

Sofia gulped. “Now it’s one in three.”