Fake Professor, Misunderstood As Strong - Chapter 197

Chapter 197: The Palace of Twisted Curses… Part-2.
‘Tch, evil spirits… one of the most annoying enemies in the game…’

Evil spirits don’t actually attack you physically; in fact, they don’t even appear in front of you and confront you head-on.

If you try to get close to them, they will run away and avoid you like crazy, so catching them is very difficult.

Their preferred method of fighting is to hide and use shockwaves to inflict mental and spiritual damage on the target.

Aside from the mental attacks, they constantly keep wailing and shouting with an extremely loud voice that is very irritating to hear. Long-term exposure to this voice can drive a person insane.

The best way to get rid of them is to use ‘Light Magic’ to shine bright purifying light everywhere and directly purify them altogether without leaving a single place for them to hide.

The second-best method is to use a legendary skill and pulverize them with the power of a law of the world.

There are other methods too, but they are less effective than the two mentioned above.

‘Mana Singularity is not the complete form of the legendary skill; I don’t have Mana Field, so it will be less effective in this miasma-filled place…’

Mana Field, or Mana Singularity, is one of the few legendary skills that gets tremendously suppressed in the presence of extremely dense miasma.

If Jareth had some other legendary skill, ‘Dao Rhythm’ for example, he wouldn’t have been this suppressed by the miasma; the same goes for ‘Sword Intent’.

‘Forget it, let’s use my newly acquired move…’

[Blessing of the True Flames!]

[Grade-2 Fire Magic: Pheonix of the True Flames!]

Jareth embedded his mana in the ground. A massive magic circle appeared on the ground. A gigantic phoenix made out of true flames burst out of the magic circle and flew forward.

The phoenix divided into several smaller versions, and all of them went in various different directions.

Jareth had already tracked down the locations of the various evil spirits that were bombarding him with mental attacks and were shouting loudly to irritate him; thus, it was easy for the phoenixes to track them.

*Boom!* *Boom!*

As if a plane were dropping bombs on the ground, the phoenix accelerated their speed and collided with the semi-transparent bodies of the evil spirits as if they were doing a Kamikaze attack.

Under explosions made by the true flames, those evil spirits got purified and burned on the spot with no chance to counterattack.

Moreover, Jareth was protecting his brain with mana singularity, so he was not affected much by the mental damage waves either.

With the evil spirits dead, finally the palace became quieter, and Jareth heaved a sigh of relief as he didn’t have to hear those irritating voices again and again.

He brought out a mana recovery potion from his space ring and gulped it down, then used mana singularity to absorb every last bit of it.

He repeated the process a few times, replenishing all of his mana, and then got ready to move forward once again.

Although clocks don’t work in the Abyss Altar Area, Jareth could feel that at least two or three days have passed since he entered the Abyss Altar Area.

Even with the help of so many tricks at his disposal, it still took him this much time to reach the palace; this just shows how massively vast the Abyss Altar Area actually is.

Even with knowledge about everything beforehand, Jareth still had to go through a lot of troubles along the way.

‘Finally reached the Hall of Heroes and Champions…’

Jareth glanced at the giant broken door fallen on the ground and noticed that it still had an inscription depicting the Forgotten City and golden Palace of the First King engraved on it.

Jareth stepped on the fallen door, jumped over the debris blocking the entrance of the hall, and finally entered the grand hall.

The grand hall was extremely big, and there were beautiful inscriptions engraved on the walls and the ceiling.

You can even notice a faint bit of gold still shining in those inscriptions here and there, despite most of them being covered with miasma and corruption now.

‘So these are the seats for the twenty heroes and champions that worked under the First King…’

In the history books, it’s mentioned that the throne room of the First King was very unique; there were twenty seats for the First King’s subordinates, and the throne was located on the highest platform of them all.

Each seat has its own ranking and hierarchy, as depicted by how much higher the platform was on which they were placed compared to the others.

Jareth glanced at the highest platform, and sure enough, the throne was missing from its place.

Then Jareth glanced at the center of the ceiling of the throne room, and sure enough, the staff of the First King was also missing from there.

‘As expected, the False Dome’s goons already took them both…’

Jareth shook his head and spread out his mana detection throughout the whole palace to see if there was anything that was different from what he remembers from the game.

And sure enough, Jareth immediately detected a hidden teleportation altar located right behind the wall where the throne was placed.

Sensing the presence of that altar, a frown appeared over Jareth’s face.

‘Was that really there in the game? If it really was, some player should have already discovered it by using a simple glitch that could help you see through the walls…’

Jareth racked his brains, but he didn’t remember any player ever mentioning the existence of a hidden altar behind the throne of the first king.

‘Maybe they never discovered it…’

The number of people who had reached the golden palace was already very few; most of them were speed runners and hardcore gamers who only cared about completing the game in the shortest time possible.

They didn’t give a sh*T about exploring the place in such great details; their main goal was to walk through the area as fast as possible and reach Konda’s boss fight area in the shortest time possible.

‘Sigh… Let’s see what’s so special about this Altar…’

Jareth jumped on the empty platform and punched the wall hard.

*Boom!* *Crack!*

He shattered the wall, creating enough space for him to easily walk inside.

Jareth embedded his mana in the altar and examined its magic circle carefully for a while before finally coming to a conclusion.

“Tch! They already destroyed the main nodes of the magic circle; this magic circle is completely unusable now… They even purposely spread miasma in it’s magic circle to destroy it thoroughly!”

A disappointed look appeared over Jareth’s face after seeing that the altar was completely useless.

He was actually thinking of using this altar to directly teleport into the headquarters of the ‘False Dome Cult’ and then lay siege to their home; he would have slaughtered every single member of the cult if he was able to go there.

But alas, the members of the cult took precautions against this; they likely destroyed the node of the seal, and after completing all their work, they destroyed the altar too.

‘But wait, someone from their group must have stayed behind to destroy the magic circle on the altar after everyone left the place…’

‘And as this altar is of quite high quality… Only a grade-2 or above-level mage would have been able to destroy it so thoroughly…’

‘And as the members of the cult are likely already infected with miasma, surviving here on their own is not a big deal…’

‘Which means… I might still be able to find that last member of their party…’

Jareth got up and stopped observing the altar; true flames appeared on his hand as he immediately strangled and burned an evil spirit that was peeping on him.

As he was burning that evil spirit and thinking about finding the last member, a villainous smile appeared on his face.

‘I see… I can sense you, little guy… You stayed behind, but I can sense your unique miasmic fluctuations that you left behind… You won’t be able to run from my grasp… hehe…’

Ignoring the matter of the altar for the time being, Jareth came back to the throne room and grabbed those twenty chairs to align them all in a straight line.

Once the chairs were aligned in one straight line, the ground suddenly trembled, and a staircase leading downwards appeared in the grand hall.

‘I never understand why the developers are so obsessed with making these kinds of lame puzzles…’

Jareth sighed to himself while thinking about the game; he took another glance at the grand hall and then went downstairs without hesitation.

The deeper he went, the denser the miasma became, and the more ominous the environment became.

No one above ground knows about it, but the sole entrance to the node of the False Dome seal and the place where Konda was imprisoned is located right below the throne room of the First King.

It’s such an irony that the place that people thought was heaven was itself built atop hell, where immense evil was hiding in the dark.

As they say,

{Sometimes the brightest and purest places in the world are the ones that are hiding the darkest and most evil secrets…} (Source: Trust me bro…)

Jareth has long known how much the developers of this game liked to make the story as ironic as possible.

Almost all beautiful locations and places in this world are hiding sinister and dark secrets beneath them, and if the place looks dark and sinister from outside from the start, then the secret it’s hiding is even more darker.