Aetherios System [Slow Build OP MC, Isekai LitRPG/Cultivation] Chapter 153: Book 3: Chapter 9: Stone Silence

Read chapter 153 of Aetherios System [Slow Build OP MC, Isekai LitRPG/Cultivation] by TTReynolds on NovelPedia.

Book 3: Chapter 9: Stone Silence Book 3: Chapter 9: Stone Silence [Time Remaining: 622 Days, 9 Hours, 07 Minutes] The next morning arrived with the reluctant drag of gray clouds and a damp wind that carried the subtle stink of urine from the night before. Or maybe that was just the bacon-leftovers that Tom-Tom inexplicably had buried under the wagons; Alex wasn’t going to investigate to find out for certain. Regardless of the reason, he could tell once he had woken up in his bedroll the next morning, the forest had changed. Not in the dramatic, trees-on-fire, or vampire-castle-revealed-in-the-fog, sort of way. No, this was a quiet shift, like the entire woods had tensed its shoulders. Looking around, he could see that the others felt it too. Everyone moved differently, their eyes anxiously darting about every so often, even the mercenaries and merchants had a different sort of countenance about them, as if waiting for something to happen. Henry was the first to say something. He crouched by a patch of disturbed earth near the roadside, fingers brushing across deep, chaotic claw marks in the mud. Not neat trails, no slow stalker-beast pacing, these appeared as frantic, fleeing tracks, like every creature in this part of the forest had been given a very convincing reason to run away, and run fast . “Something’s wrong,” Henry said simply, standing and brushing his off his hands. Alex frowned. “Define ‘wrong.’ On a scale from ‘bad weather’ to ‘doomsday snake cult,’ where are we landing?” Henry just looked deeper into the woods, where even the birds seemed to have lost interest in chirping. He bobbed his head back and forth, as though chewing over the question methodically for a moment. In the end, Alex never really got an answer, as Henry eventually just shrugged and continued on after the wagons. It was an unsettling thing. Henry was usually a man of few words, but this felt different, as if just speaking the worries out loud would somehow make them real. He never knew Henry to be a superstitious kind of man, so it was strange to see him that way. Strange enough for Alex to take what he had said, and hadn’t, to heart. As the caravan creaked onward, the forest got weirder. First came the strange scales littered about the forest floor. It wasn’t armor, or discarded gear, but dull, dusty fragments of what looked like cracked stone serpent scales. Lizard-like in shape, serpentine. The kind of scales you would expect to find from a molted snake, but far too thick, too pristine, and apparently carved from stone. There were no accompanying bodies to signal what made the items was dead. There was also no signs of sentient races in the area recently, to say they were dropped or left behind be a different merchant caravan. In the end they had to just accept the strangeness and move on. Next came the rocks. Or rather, not-quite-right rocks. Just like the scales before, these seemed to be stone objects in the shape of animal body parts. One looked like it had started life as a deer head, carved from stone, antlers curled upward in spirals. But the carving was cracked down the middle, and discarded like a failed art project. Another of the rocks appeared to be the half-formed claw of something with too many knuckles. Garret poked one with a stick. It cracked apart like brittle shale when he prodded too forcefully. “Ten copper says this forest is haunted,” Cole said. Peter, walking beside him, shook his head. “Nothing haunts forests this creepy. You get haunted by forests this creepy.” Which received a curt nod of acceptance from Cole, as well as the others. Even Ghrukk, who usually regarded anything not on fire as a mild inconvenience, walked closer to his team, his gaze sharp and his hands secured tight around the haft of his weapon. Alex kept his [Aether Sight] active on full bore. He couldn’t deny the worry that was creeping its way into his mind from the reactions of everyone else. Something wicked this way comes. He couldn’t stop the phr