Chapter 126. Underground Temple
On the other side, Natsume had already reached the depths of the forest.
"What is that little Diglett trying to do?"
Natsume felt puzzled.
Diglett have the habit of planting Berries and fertilizing them with their own droppings.
That much Natsume knew perfectly well.
Yet along the way, every Berry the little Diglett planted had a huge bite taken out of it.
Some seeds had even been bitten clean in two.
Those Berries would never sprout.
No wonder the Diglett colony said this Diglett was eccentric by nature.
Deeper in the forest, the farther in he went, the fewer muddy pits there were along the path.
By the end, a tight carpet of cobblestones even appeared under Natsume's feet.
On the tall trees to both sides, a torch hung every so often.
Curious, Natsume quickened his pace.
At the end of the path stood a stone temple draped in green vines.
Outside the temple were two statues.
They had clearly weathered for some time, with many parts eroded away, leaving them a little abstract.
Natsume walked up to the one that was still roughly intact.
Stone grain cracked like scales.
Its tail curled into a question mark in wind-scoured ripples, and only the back ridge still held a stubborn, myth-like arc.
Studying it closely, Natsume could faintly recognize from the posture and that long tail that this was a statue of Mew.
Was this the ancestral ground of the Laramie Clan?
Natsume remembered that last night, after the old clan chief swore his oath, a group from the Laramie Clan had gone into the forest with ritual offerings.
"If that's the case, then the so-called god of bounty and the hunt…"
Natsume shifted his gaze and, with interest, looked toward the other statue.
Unfortunately, this statue seemed to be even older than the Mew statue.
Most of it had weathered away and was overgrown with moss.
The only distinct identifying feature was at the statue's tail, which had a protruding spike like the stinger of a Beedrill.
Natsume searched his mind and still couldn't think of any Legendary or Mythical Pokémon with a Beedrill-like, thick, long stinger.
"Forget it, find the little Diglett first," Natsume muttered.
The gods worshiped by many local clans aren't necessarily Legendary or Mythical Pokémon.
Some clans even venerate Pokémon like Arcanine or Volcarona.
Maybe this was simply a Beedrill statue.
Natsume took out a flashlight, and with a clang the temple's interior was lit up bright as day.
At the same time, his telekinesis spread out, his eyes and mind sweeping everything within.
Inside the temple, beneath a stone niche, Oran Berry pits lay shriveled, and a bronze censer held a half-burned stick of incense.
Green bricks were stamped with messy footprints, and faded coins were embedded in the gouges of the offering table.
Aside from that, Natsume found nothing.
"How odd…"
Natsume murmured.
The little Diglett's droppings had clearly disappeared right here.
Suddenly, Natsume's expression sharpened.
In his perception, there was a fairly large open space beneath the temple floor.
"What is this?"
Natsume probed with telekinesis, but couldn't get close, as if something were blocking him.
The researcher's curiosity piqued, Natsume left the temple and sent his telekinesis searching around.
There had to be an entrance somewhere to the underground space.
He searched for a long time, and by the time a faint ache throbbed in his head, Natsume still hadn't found any entrance.
He had tried things like Teleport as well, but couldn't lock onto a landing point at all.
"I can't just dig a huge hole in someone's ancestral ground, can I?"
Natsume pulled out an iron shovel.
So he planned to dig a small hole.
Just as the shovel touched the ground, as if remembering something, Natsume raised his head on a whim and looked toward the Mew statue at the entrance.
He came up to the statue, and under his telekinetic scan, nothing about the Mew statue seemed abnormal.
"How could the tail possibly still be intact?" Natsume narrowed his eyes at Mew's slender tail.
By rights, a part like this should be the weakest and the first to snap off from weathering.
Yet here, the Mew statue's tail was the most intact.
It defied common sense.
Even the Beedrill statue next to it, which had nothing left but its rump, would cry at the sight.
Natsume reached out, felt Mew's tail, and gave it an experimental twist.
"Click!"
With a crisp sound, the ground dropped away beneath Natsume's feet and he fell straight down.
"Thunk—"
The tail reset, and that small cobblestone section of the path sprang back into place.
All around fell silent, as if nothing had happened.
"Zzzzt~"
A ghostly blue light flickered in Natsume's eyes.
During the rapid fall he quickly stabilized himself.
"Clang—"
The high-power flashlight snapped on, and the once-dark space turned bright as day.
Natsume was in a narrow passage, surrounded by basalt.
He passed through a winding basalt corridor sloping downward, where the air suddenly compressed into a throat-searing aridity.
"It's so dry in here," Natsume said to himself.
Before him the space abruptly opened up, and the beam of his flashlight filled the entire chamber in an instant.
Standing before Natsume was an even larger temple!
A twenty-meter-high domed main hall was held up by eight honeycomb-patterned rock pillars, each pillar's surface etched with ancient reliefs of swarms of Beedrill encircling a pink glow.
"So it really is Beedrill?"
Natsume paused, guessing this might have been left by the Laramie Clan's forebears in very ancient times.
Leaning in, he found that whatever had been inlaid at the tips of those stingers had all been gouged out, leaving pitch-black, honeycomb holes like hollowed eye sockets.
"It's been a while—older even than the temple above."
Natsume glanced at the honeycomb structure inside one of the holes and tapped the stone pillar lightly with his hand.
A large chunk came away at once, and the interior showed the same honeycomb pattern.
On the central altar, a serpentine stone effigy of Mew hung down from the dome, its tail coiling into a spiral.
At the break of the statue's left forepaw, a honeycomb-patterned inner cavity was exposed.
Here, Natsume found some suspicious alloy fragments.
Twelve bronze lamp pillars stood in a ring around the hall, and in the nearest lamp's dish there was still a tiny cigarette butt.
Natsume picked up the butt.
Perhaps the air was simply too dry in here; with the lightest pinch it crumbled to dust.
Looking up, he noticed half a Snorlax energy bar wrapper stuck to the charred lamp wall.
Everything he found told Natsume that Giovanni had long since sent people to haul away anything valuable down here.
Even so, the temple itself possessed considerable historical value.
"Tch, what a shame it's buried underground like this."
Natsume shook his head.
For the moment he wasn't in a rush to look for the little Diglett, and instead wandered around the true temple.
Who knows—he might get lucky and find a leftover clue.
Natsume ignored the gigantic Mew statue and walked straight toward the cluster of Beedrill statues.
Anything related to Mew, Giovanni would certainly have taken away without leaving a drop.
But Beedrill was different; maybe something had been left behind.
In front of the largest Beedrill statue, the researcher's sensitivity made Natsume stop.
For some reason, a crown had been deliberately carved into the crest of this Beedrill's head.
More importantly, there was a stone-carved high stand before the statue.
On that stand was a semicircular recess.
Whatever had belonged there had already been removed.
Natsume looked at the recess and thought for a moment.
After a short while, he took out a Poké Ball and set it into the recess.
A perfect fit.
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