Almost the exact instant the stone shard left the corpse, the withered corpse stopped struggling. It stood frozen for a moment before crashing heavily to the ground, and silence returned to the stone chamber once more.
Lucia panted heavily.
Ryan looked down at the stone shard in his hand. It was only the size of a palm, its surface densely covered with extremely fine geometric patterns.
Ryan closed his eyes and slowly channeled his spirituality into the stone shard. A very faint, warm current flowed up his arm and into his consciousness.
In the next instant, Ryan felt his mind grow even clearer. Rather than a boost in mental speed, it was more that the information that had originally been jumbled together began to automatically seek out connections with one another.
“So that's how it is.”
Ryan walked over to the stone wall.
Lucia followed him.
“Teacher, what is it?”
“This isn't a dead end.”
Ryan pressed his hand against the third stone brick.
“There's a mechanism here.”
He pushed hard.
Boom!
The heavy grinding of gears echoed from within the stone wall.
Immediately after, a hidden door behind the wall slowly creaked open.
A damp, cold wind rushed out from inside.
The torch flame flickered violently.
Lucia stared at the bottomless underground passage and swallowed hard.
“What's... down there?”
Ryan didn't answer.
He simply picked up the tattered map.
The edges of the map were radiating a faint warmth.
And in the area of the map that had originally been blurred, a new line was now faintly emerging.
The line pointed directly into the depths of the passage.
Ryan put away the map.
“The exit.”
Lucia was startled.
“This is the exit?”
“At least, it's the path leading to the exit.”
Ryan held up the torch and stepped into the passage first.
Lucia quickly followed.
Chapter 44: The Watchman's Lantern
The heavy stone door slowly ground shut with the dull rumble of interlocking gears, completely cutting off the last sliver of morning light that had filtered into the passage.
The temperature in the air plummeted.
The passage plunged back into pitch-black darkness. Only the simple torch in Ryan's hand flickered slightly, casting their elongated, distorted shadows against the damp, slick stone walls.
Ryan did not move forward immediately. He stood in place, turned around, and brought the torch closer to the stone door that had just closed.
The door was cut from a single block of solid granite, its joints fitting together so seamlessly that not a single gap remained. Ryan ran his hand along the edge of the stone door, a cold sensation spreading from his fingertips. There were no mechanical structures or spiritual slots on the door's surface that could open it from the inside.
This meant that once they crossed this door, there was no turning back.
“It seems we can only keep going deeper.” Ryan's voice echoed in the narrow passage, sounding cold and steady.
Lucia squatted on the ground not far away, not responding immediately.
The young girl did not panic from being trapped like ordinary children would. Barefoot, she squatted gracefully before the first stone step, stretching out a fair little finger to lightly wipe the surface of the step.
Her fingertip was coated with a layer of fine, sticky grayish-black powder.
Lucia brought her finger to her nose to sniff it, rubbed it with her thumb, and then looked up at Ryan. “Someone used to light fires here often.”
Ryan looked down, using the firelight to examine the dirt beneath Lucia's feet.
Mixed in with the ashes were extremely fine charcoal particles, along with some fragmented bones that had long since weathered and yellowed with time. The jagged breaks on the bones did not look like they had been chopped by tools, but rather snapped by some blunt instrument or brute force.
“How long ago?” Ryan asked.
“I don't know.” Lucia shook her head, her small face looking somewhat pale under the firelight. “But definitely not recently. This ash has already settled deep into the stone cracks, packed tight by the underground moisture.”
She paused, her eyes narrowing slightly as her 【Grail】 perception of life spread forward along the ground like a thin film of water.
“And... people have walked through here,” Lucia added. “More than one person.”
There were several faint, long-blurred footprints in the dust on the stone steps.
Some of the footprints were very shallow and had a wide stride, suggesting a leisurely pace. Others were extremely chaotic, of varying depths, and there were even several distinct drag marks and stains dried to a dark black on the ground.
Ryan said nothing more, merely giving a barely perceptible nod. He raised the torch a bit higher, kept his footsteps quiet, and led the way down the descending stone steps into the depths.
“Keep close. Step in my footprints.”
“Understood, Teacher.” Lucia jogged a couple of steps to stick close behind Ryan, her bright, dark eyes warily scanning the walls on both sides.
The underground passage was deeper and more spacious than they had imagined.
As the two continued downward, the architectural style around them began to shift noticeably. The rough granite walls with their chiseled markings were gradually replaced by blocks of white stone polished perfectly smooth. The joints between the walls were extremely precise, so tight that not even a thin sheet of paper could be squeezed in.
On the stone walls on both sides of the passage, a metal lamp stand cast from heavy dark iron could be seen every ten paces or so. The design of the lamp stands displayed an elegant geometric symmetry, though the oil inside had long since dried up, and the wicks had turned to black ash.
This level of neatness and sophistication was definitely not that of a temporary shelter dug out by fleeing refugees.
It meant that in the distant past, a group of highly organized people had established a long-term base and occult facilities here.
The two walked through the long corridor for about ten minutes, the stale, musty smell in the air growing heavier and heavier.
Finally, at the end ahead, a heavy, half-open stone door appeared.
The stone door was a grayish-brown, and above the door frame, a line of long-blurred Ancient Common was deeply carved with some sharp, hard object.
Ryan stopped and shone the light on the lintel.
The processing power of 【Lantern】 operated at high speed in his mind, comparing the grammatical structure of Ancient Common to translate the crooked handwriting word by word:
Relic Storage Room.
Lucia poked half of her small head out, peering into the pitch-black doorway, and whispered, “This shouldn't be where they usually lived. There are no traces of everyday utensils.”
“Yes.”
Ryan placed his left hand on the edge of the half-open stone door, the muscles in his right arm tensing slightly as he pushed forward.
Creak—
The harsh sound of scraping stone echoed through the dead silence of the passage, and a heavy metallic odor mixed with the sour stench of decades of oxidation instantly rushed over them!
Ryan sidestepped to block Lucia behind him, waiting for the pungent odor to dissipate slightly before holding up the torch and stepping over the threshold.
The room was not particularly large, about thirty to forty square meters, and square-shaped.
A dozen heavy shelves made of dark ironwood were lined against the stone walls on both sides, but most of them had cracked and collapsed in the middle under the erosion of time. Numerous wooden boxes weathered to powder, broken glass reagent bottles, and ritual ornaments that had lost their spirituality lay scattered across the floor, covered in a thick layer of dust.
And right in the center of the room, leaning against the innermost stone cabinet, sat a corpse.
The corpse wore an old-style expedition suit that had long since rotted away, its buttons rusted over. Its skin was withered like dark brown tree bark, clinging tightly to the skeleton. Its head hung low and its legs were curled up in an extremely defensive, protective posture, hands clutching tightly to its chest.
In its arms, a palm-sized black metal box was locked tight.
Lucia did not rashly approach.
She stood at the doorway five paces away from the corpse, her bright, dark eyes locked onto it as her 【Grail】 perception silently sifted through the air for any remaining traces of vitality.
After a moment, Lucia whispered, “Teacher, he didn't die here.”
Ryan turned to look at her. “Why do you say that?”
“The soles of his shoes are very clean.”
Lucia pointed to the cracked leather boots on the corpse's feet. “We walked all this way, and the dust in the passage and outside is very thick. But no one has walked in this room for a long time. Aside from the parts of his soles that touched the floor, there's no white stone dust in the crevices of his shoes. This shows he wasn't someone who lived or fought in this room for very long.”
She then pointed to the corpse's hands, which remained locked in a death grip:
“And he held that box tightly to his chest until the very end, never letting go even after his joints stiffened.”
“And so?” Ryan raised an eyebrow.
“He knew he wouldn't survive,” Lucia said, her tone as calm as if she were stating the most ordinary fact. “He was fatally injured outside and fled all the way here. He fought his way to this sealed room just to hide this box, or to leave it for whoever came in after him.”
Ryan looked at Lucia, a flicker of approval flashing in his eyes.
“Good deduction. Your observation skills have improved.”
Ryan praised her, then walked over to squat beside the corpse.
There were no obvious blade cuts or gunshot wounds on the corpse, but when Ryan inspected it closely, he found that the deceased's right finger bones were entirely shattered into tiny bone fragments. A large patch of oxidized, blackened, and iron-stiff brown bloodstains also remained on the leather clothing over his chest. This was the result of coughing up a large amount of blood after his internal organs had collapsed from a heavy blow.
Ryan did not immediately try to pry open the black box in the corpse's arms.
Instead, he first searched along the crevices of the stone cabinet the corpse was leaning against. Eventually, in a pile of overturned wood shavings and dust behind it, his hand brushed against something hard.
It was an irregularly shaped leather notebook, heavily moldy, with one corner gnawed by rats.
The cover of the notebook was made of some corrosion-resistant dark beast hide, with only a single name neatly written on it in black ink:
Adolf Klein.
Ryan flipped to the first page of the notebook.
The paper was yellowed and brittle, and the handwriting inside followed the standard log format of an old-era expedition team, with dates tracing back several decades:
“June 12th. We discovered it in an underground ruin deep within the sea of grass.”
“It looks like nothing more than an ordinary, oddly shaped lantern, with no magical fluctuations whatsoever.”
“But when we lit it according to the protocols, it did not illuminate the darkness before us. Instead, it illuminated... the past.”
Ryan's finger paused slightly as he turned the page.
A ripple of 【Lantern】 spirituality arose in his mind, and he continued reading.
The subsequent records had clearly lost their initial calm and neatness. The handwriting began to slant and grow sloppy, a clear indication that the writer's emotions had been in a state of extreme shock and unease when recording these entries:
“June 14th. First attempt at channeling spirituality. The coverage of the lantern's light is extremely small. We can only see things that occurred about three seconds ago within the halo—it was the residual shadow of our team member Karl walking past the table.”
“June 19th. Second successful experiment. The duration has been extended to eleven seconds.”
“July 2nd. Seventh experiment. When the channeled spirituality reached a critical threshold, we actually saw traces left behind in this stone chamber a whole day ago!”
“It seems to continuously absorb and preserve the 【Lantern】 aspect spirituality emitted by the user, storing the faint spiritual residues left by the surrounding world like a mirror.”
“We are beginning to suspect that the true purpose of this relic is not illumination, nor is it combat.”
“It is preserving the traces of this world that once existed.”
Seeing this, Ryan's gaze gradually grew extremely serious.
Preserving traces, recreating the past.
Ryan put away the notebook, then reached out his right hand and placed it on the black metal box in the corpse's arms.
The clasp had long been damaged during its former master's struggle. Ryan applied pressure with his fingertips and gently popped it open.
Click.
The heavy metal lid opened.
The inside of the box was lined with black velvet that had weathered and grown moldy, and in the very center of the velvet lay a lantern quietly.
The body of the lamp was entirely an extremely deep, profound black, neither metal nor stone, its octagonal frame embedded with several dim, thin crystal plates.
However, the moment Ryan brought his palm close to the lantern and his own 【Lantern】 spirituality drifted out unconsciously—
At the core of the lantern, that clump of cold white crystal, which had originally resembled a dead object, suddenly trembled slightly.
Immediately after, a faint, pure, completely heatless white light quietly lit up inside the lantern!
It was pure spirituality.
An absolutely rational, extremely pure 【Lantern】.
Ryan did not hesitate. He reached out his right hand, his fingers precisely gripping the pitch-black ring at the top of the lantern.
Boom!
A warm and pure surge of spirituality flooded into his body through his fingertips!
This spirituality blended seamlessly with Ryan's own transformed 【Lantern】 intellect, and his slightly fatigued mental strength was completely replenished in an instant!
Countless chaotic, blurry fragments of light and shadow swept through his mind like lightning—
A vast, boundless, desolate grassland.
Bloody crowds running in panic through the waves of grass.
A massive bonfire soaring into the sky.
And a tall figure from behind, dressed in ancient robes, holding this exact same black lantern...
Whoosh!
The images suddenly shattered and fell apart.
Ryan opened his eyes.
The torch in his hand was still crackling, and the stone chamber remained as quiet as death.
But the black lantern in his hand was now completely lit. A very faint, soft halo of cold white light spread slowly outward from the lantern, enveloping half the room in its bizarre glow.
Standing at the edge of the halo, Lucia stared unblinkingly at the lantern in Ryan's hand and whispered, “Teacher... it recognizes you.”
“Yes.”
Ryan responded, his voice calm, betraying no emotion.
He flipped to the final pages of the experimental notebook.
The further back he turned, the more distorted and broken the handwriting became. He could even see dried bloodstains on the pages:
“We have finally seen... the true past of the sea of grass.”
“There were none of these disgustingly overgrown plants we see now, nor were there those man-eating monsters.”
“The grassland was once a dead, desolate desert.”
“And in the center of that desert... there once existed a city of gargantuan proportions.”
The records broke off here for several pages, seemingly torn out with great force. It was not until the very last page of the notebook that a single warning written in blood remained, deeply carved into the leather with a fingernail:
“Do not observe yourself.”
Ryan stared at those four words for a long time.
“Do not observe yourself...” Ryan muttered under his breath, his expression cold. He then closed the notebook and tucked it into his robes.
“Let's go.” Ryan stood up, holding the black lantern.
Lucia glanced at the withered corpse on the floor and whispered, “This person... left behind something very important.”
“Yes.” Ryan glanced at the deceased. “He succeeded.”
“Did he?” Lucia looked up in confusion.
“At least compared to those who died in the waves of grass, whose bones were eaten clean,” Ryan said, walking out the door with the lantern held high, “his success lasted a bit longer.”
The master and disciple left the storage room, stepping into the darker passage ahead.
Rate on N.U.
