Ruins

Werther had rested on the ship for more than ten days when he discovered that his injuries had actually healed.

That was right—after only ten-odd days, the wound on Werther's waist and abdomen had mostly scabbed over and healed. Years of training in the Lightning Stimulation Method were finally beginning to show results.

Moreover, Werther discovered that his Thunder Core had recently been growing stronger and stronger, and his body's lightning abilities were steadily improving as well.

It seemed that all those years of effort and sweat were finally about to bear fruit.

How many times had he trained his physical skills until he collapsed on the ground, unable even to stand back up?

How many times had intense sword practice left him unable to hold his chopsticks steadily at mealtimes, forcing his senior brother and master to feed him?

How many times had he activated his lightning abilities, only for their violent currents to torment him until he wished he were dead?

Combined with the intense battles of recent days, Werther knew that the peak period of his strength's growth was about to arrive.

As Werther sensed the changes in his body, he suddenly wondered, Where had that Rabbit gone? He had not seen it all morning.

He had lived with the Rabbit for more than ten days, and they had become quite familiar with each other. The clever Rabbit could already understand some simple words.

After searching the ship for a while, he found the little fellow lounging in a deck chair on the deck, holding a carrot in one hand and juice in the other as it basked contentedly in the sun.

Smiling, Werther went to the dining room for a glass of juice and headed toward the deck.

When the Rabbit saw Werther approaching, it sat upright in the deck chair before Werther could even sit down, then began gesturing wildly.

After several days together, Werther could roughly understand it. The general meaning was that the Rabbit wanted to take him somewhere.

"Huh? Where to?" Werther asked the Rabbit in the simplest words he could manage.

The Rabbit pointed toward Black Iron Rock Island. Werther started the ship and sailed toward the island, returning to its shore before long.

Then the Rabbit launched into another round of hand signals that nobody else could possibly understand.

This time, not only could no one else understand it, but even Werther was lost. He could only shake his head, indicating that he could not understand rabbit language.

The Rabbit stopped gesturing and jumped directly onto the island, signaling for Werther to follow.

Seeing the situation, Werther could only follow behind the Rabbit.

After running across the island with the Rabbit for around ten minutes, Werther discovered that he had arrived in a stretch of iron ruins.

These ruins should have been the ancient relics Ferdinand had mentioned.

Before him stood a vast cluster of iron houses. Every one of them was tall and spacious. Their doors and windows had likely not originally been made of iron, so they had vanished beneath the erosion of time, leaving only the buildings' frames behind.

Perhaps due to long-term washing by lava, every iron house had turned black and was covered in dark red rust, giving the place a heavy, desolate feeling.

The Rabbit entered the sprawling ruins. It seemed very familiar with the terrain and walked into one of the houses. There was nothing particularly special about that house.

After following the Rabbit inside, Werther found it constantly knocking on the wall, striking a different spot each time.

After more than a dozen knocks from the Rabbit, the wall let out a series of clicks, and a hidden compartment opened in it.

Werther walked over curiously to see what was inside. After one glance, he was speechless. It was actually a pile of tree bark from the island, all of it the tender portions.

It seemed that after spending more than ten days eating and drinking well on Werther's ship, Rabbit wanted to repay his hospitality.

Rabbit took a piece for itself first and happily put it into its mouth.

But after taking a few bites, Rabbit opened its mouth wide and spat out the bark in one gulp. It stared at the bark in surprise, unable to understand why the bark that had once tasted delicious was now so awful.

How could Rabbit know that it had only found bark tasty before because it had been eating even worse food and had grown used to it?

The vegetables and fruits on Werther's ship were all high-end ingredients. For a foodie like Werther, the supplies in his kitchen had to be the finest available—there was no room for negotiation on that matter.

Seeing that the food it had offered Werther was actually so terrible, Rabbit lowered its head in disappointment.

Werther saw Rabbit's dejected mood and immediately understood. He picked up a piece of bark and began eating it in large bites.

To be honest, it was tough and carried a sulfurous taste. It was awful, but Werther still wolfed down a large piece in just a few bites, for no reason other than to make Rabbit, which had once saved his life, happy again.

Just as Werther was about to return to the ship with Rabbit, he noticed that the hidden compartment in the wall held more than just a pile of bark. There was also a black stone inside, roughly half a meter long and over ten centimeters thick, seemingly a stone tablet.

Driven by curiosity, Werther stepped forward for a closer look. After only one glance, his pupils contracted sharply.

He recognized the writing on it. That alone would not have meant much, but the words were actually the ancient script his master had taught him.

Calling Rabbit over, Werther removed the stone tablet from among the bark and carefully deciphered it.

Werther was not particularly proficient in ancient writing. He could only manage to decipher it, and doing so took quite a long time.

After nearly two hours of deciphering, when Rabbit beside him had become so bored that it started playing with its own exoskeleton, Werther finally worked out the general contents of the tablet.

This unknown stone tablet had quite an origin. If Werther's guess was correct, its material was the same kind used to carve Poneglyphs.

The content was simple as well. This stone tablet was the key to a forbidden ground in a nation that had nearly been wiped out several centuries ago. Its last surviving people had entrusted the Kozuki Family with making this tablet to ensure that their civilization would not be completely forgotten.

As for the reason their people had been exterminated, the tablet only gave a brief explanation because its size limited how many words could be carved upon it.

It seemed they had refused recruitment by other royal families, and their country possessed an extremely advanced technology that those royal families wanted to use to defeat certain enemies.

It also contained an extremely important passage.

"You will not obtain Pluton, nor will you use our Wisdom Fruit to do those things. Even if you succeed, how will you face the people of the entire world? The organization you founded does not even dare possess history. Your history is filthy, despised by the people. Just wait and see, you arrogant royal families. One day, someone will rise up and resist your ****! Your descendants will surely be cast into the abyss by the people amid their pride and sins."

After reading those words, Werther realized that there had once been a nation here. Because it had refused to join the alliance of royal families and possessed a technology highly suited for war, it had been destroyed. He did not know whether that technology still existed.

Only after seeing the final passage did Werther finally learn the location of that nation's forbidden ground—and it was somewhere he saw every day. It was at the very bottom of the artificial volcano in the center of the island.