The morning twilight pierced through the thin mist, spilling thinly and coldly across the meadow.
Ryan opened his eyes, clarity returning to them in an instant. He did not get up immediately, but remained in a prone position. The 【Lantern】 spirituality inside him circulated through his limbs and bones like flowing water, confirming that the concealing arrays around them were still intact before he slowly pushed himself up from the ground.
Not far away, Lucia was still wrapped in her thick blanket, sleeping soundly against the hollow rock wall. Her breathing was faint and even, her face pale from their prolonged travels, looking no different from any other overly frightened young student.
Ryan gave her a deep look, his dark pupils showing no emotional ripples. He then withdrew his gaze and turned to the 【Echoing Lantern】 resting beside his hand.
After experiencing that “reverse observation” in the underground ruins last night, this once-exquisite 【Lantern】 aspect relic now looked somewhat dilapidated. The bronze frame was covered in dark mottling, resembling an ancient artifact corroded by hundreds of years of time. A faint grey haze coated the inside of the glass cover, as if a layer of indelible pollution remained.
Ryan stretched out his pale, slender fingers, gently brushing over the cold, hard edge of the lantern.
Inside the lantern, the spiritual halo that was once as warm as a pure white flame had now become extremely weak, like a dying candle that could go out at any moment. However, as Ryan channeled a strand of extremely pure 【Lantern】 spirituality into it, the internal structure of the lantern erupted with an incredibly bizarre rhythm.
It was neither necrosis nor silence.
After an entire night of silent analysis and deduction, Ryan reached a somewhat surprising conclusion—although the lantern had suffered from foreign spiritual pollution, causing an irreversible distortion in its internal spiritual circuits, its core occult function, “Echo,” was not entirely ruined.
On the contrary, because it had absorbed some high-level spiritual residue originating from the depths of the ruins, it seemed to have developed an unprecedented, unique reaction.
Ryan was in no hurry to wake Lucia. Resting his hand on his sword hilt, he stood at the edge of the camp, gazing as far as his eyes could see across the vast sea of grass that rose and fell like golden waves in the morning breeze.
Retreating the way they came?
Ryan rejected this plan in his heart. The route they had taken to get here was already teeming with violent, mutated plants and unstable spiritual nodes. More importantly, after last night's events, Ryan knew very well that walking along their established path would highly likely lead them straight into another carefully laid rule-based dead end.
If the 【Echoing Lantern】 could read the spiritual traces left behind in the past...
Ryan stared at the lantern in his hand, a profound light flashing deep in his eyes.
The principle of the lantern lay in capturing the faintest historical echoes in the environment. Since it could illuminate the deathly residual shadows of those researchers from decades ago, then as long as a powerful extraordinary force had passed through a certain location, or a major occult event had occurred there, it would inevitably leave behind a deep historical imprint.
Walking along these imprints was equivalent to moving along a “safe path” forged by predecessors. The lantern could even warn them in advance of any perilous lands harboring terrifying pollution.
“Lucia, wake up.”
Ryan turned around and kicked the remaining ashes of the campfire.
“...Teacher?” Lucia rubbed her blurry eyes and sat up, the blanket slipping from her shoulders. Her gaze was clear, carrying the typical confusion of someone who had just woken up. Then, as if recalling the terrifying experience from last night, her body shrank back slightly, and she hurriedly stood up to pack her bags.
“Get your gear ready,” Ryan said flatly, lifting the 【Echoing Lantern】 in his hand. “We are not taking the path we came from.”
“We aren't going back the way we came?” Lucia was taken aback, slightly surprised. “But Teacher, even though the original path is dangerous, at least we're familiar with it...”
“In this grassland, ‘familiarity’ often means death.”
Ryan did not explain further. Pressing his fingertips slightly, he channeled the 【Lantern】 spirituality within his body like a steady stream into the 【Echoing Lantern】.
Hum—
The lantern emitted an extremely faint metallic hum. Inside the glass cover, the dim, cold white flame flickered violently, the grey mottling of pollution writhing like a living thing under the illumination of the fire.
The flame did not emit a blinding halo as it usually did, nor did it point to an exit leading to the outside world.
Under Ryan's calm gaze, after freezing for two seconds, the tiny flame eerily and slowly tilted toward the left... toward the deeper hinterlands of the grassland.
The tip of the flame even stretched out an extremely thin, needle-like thread of light, pointing dead straight toward that unknown, desolate sea of grass.
Ryan's brow furrowed instantly.
Pointing deeper inside?
This was completely contrary to his goal of leaving the grassland realm.
“Has the pollution inside the lantern become so severe that it's misleading the wielder's perception?”
A trace of coldness flashed through Ryan's dark eyes. He curled his fingertips slightly, preparing to forcibly cut off the spiritual flow and abandon this now uncontrollable relic.
However, the very instant his spirituality was about to withdraw, Ryan's highly acute perception suddenly noticed something off.
The lantern's tilt was not a chaotic frenzy, nor was it a malicious pollution attempting to lure him into a trap.
Following the direction of the flame, tiny ancient runes faintly emerged on the bronze base at the bottom of the lantern. After absorbing the faint, free-floating spirituality in the air, they were emitting a rhythmic, resonant pulse.
It was not a random tilt.
The lantern was “capturing.” Like a hound that had caught the scent of prey, it was piercing through vast stretches of time and heavy layers of space, searching for and locking onto an ancient spiritual trace hidden deep within the grassland!
An extremely pure, incredibly ancient trace of the 【Lantern】 aspect, even older than the creation in the underground ruins.
Ryan stared at the elongated flame, falling silent for a full five seconds.
He raised his head and looked in the guided direction. The mist there seemed thicker than elsewhere, and low hills loomed in the dense fog like silent tombs of giant beasts.
“Teacher... the direction the lantern is pointing seems to go deeper into the grassland,” Lucia murmured, stepping closer to look at the oddly tilted flame. “Aren't we looking for an exit?”
“The exit is at the end of the traces.”
Ryan withdrew his gaze, his eyes returning to a dead, silent calm. Gripping the lantern, he took a long stride forward, taking the lead into the deep mist and sea of grass ahead. “Keep close. Do not step even a single inch out of the lantern's halo.”
“Oh... okay!” Not daring to say more, Lucia quickly trotted to keep up, staying close behind Ryan's side.
One after the other, the two journeyed through the boundless sea of grass.
Guided by the flame of the 【Echoing Lantern】, the surrounding scenery began to undergo a bizarre transformation.
The golden waves of grass that once covered the hills gradually thinned out, replaced by patches of bizarrely shaped black lichens that formed unnatural geometric patterns.
Along the way, hand-carved traces began to appear frequently.
Stone pillars as thick as giant trees jutted diagonally from the soil, their surfaces carved with grooves that had been almost entirely eroded by wind and frost. Collapsed archways lay half-buried in the sand, wrapped in twisting vines that emitted a faint fluorescence. In a sunken hollow, Ryan even saw the ruins of an ancient building constructed entirely from some cold, hard white stone.
A civilization had once existed here, or rather, a grand extraordinary stronghold far larger than anything in the current era.
“Teacher, these stone pillars...” Lucia looked warily at a broken stone pillar standing ten meters high by the roadside. The top of the pillar seemed to have once been carved with a massive avian head, but now it had weathered down to nothing more than a grotesque outline.
“Do not look directly at the patterns on them with your bare eyes.”
Ryan warned without turning his head, while simultaneously increasing the spiritual input into the lantern once more.
“Echo.”
A cold white halo rippled out from the lantern, sweeping across the architectural ruins like an invisible wave.
In the next instant, the surrounding light abruptly dimmed. Mottled colors wildly intertwined and restructured before their eyes. This was no longer the reality of the present, but fragments of history forcibly pulled from the depths of time by the lantern!
The cold light condensed into blurry phantoms.
Ryan saw that hundreds of years ago, or perhaps even longer, a flat stone road as wide as a highway once stood upon this now desolate grassland.
Several figures wearing intricate robes flashed through the phantoms. Their faces were blurry, but the spiritual fluctuations radiating from them were incredibly powerful. In the hand of one of them was a bone lantern that was strikingly similar to the one Ryan held, though even more primitive.
The images rapidly tore apart and shifted.
In the next residual shadow, a viscous, dark rain poured from the sky. The entire grassland trembled violently. Countless extraordinary beings, their faces filled with despair and madness, were escorting several massive metal crates, retreating frantically along the stone road deeper into the grassland.
Battle cries, chanting, the roars of monsters, and the thunderous crash of some colossal object hitting the ground intertwined into a deafening din.
At the end of this chaotic shadow, a tall figure draped in a black robe suddenly whipped around, shouting urgently to the companions behind.
Although no sound carried over, Ryan accurately deciphered the repeatedly mentioned word from the figure's exaggerated lip movements and gestures:
“Door!”
“The door... run to the door!”
Boom!
The residual shadows shattered instantly. The cold white halo retracted into the lantern, and their surroundings reverted to the silent, dilapidated ruins.
Ryan stood in place, a vein faintly throbbing at his temple.
Reading this fragment of history had indeed taken a significant toll on his mental strength. Yet, an unprecedented gleam erupted in his eyes.
A pattern.
He had found the pattern behind the lantern's guidance!
These ruins, stone pillars, and roads long lost to time scattered across the grassland did not exist in isolation. They formed an incredibly tight defensive line, or rather... an escort route leading to a certain destination!
All the remaining historical fragments, all the ancient extraordinary beings who had once bled, fought, and retreated here—the final direction of their advance pointed directly to the deepest part of this grassland!
This was by no means a coincidence.
The underground life laboratory jointly established by the two paths of 【Lantern】 and 【Grail】... Ryan rapidly pieced together the clues in his mind, his logical map restructuring itself frantically. They were not the first masters of this grassland at all.
They were merely subsequent occupiers, perhaps even just opportunists scavenging the ruins of their predecessors!
Long before that underground laboratory was built, and before this grassland was thoroughly polluted by the 【Grail】 life substrate, a terrifying and massive extraordinary structure had already existed here!
Deep within the grassland lay a secret far more ancient and of a higher dimension than that “creation.”
Ryan's breathing grew slightly heavy.
As an extraordinary being who pursued knowledge and rationality, this ultimate secret hidden behind the fog held an unspeakable allure for him. He did not know what the secret was, nor could he possibly associate it with the legendary, ethereal 【Peacock Gate】—at his current rank, he was not yet qualified to even touch taboo concepts of that level.
But he could clearly perceive that it was an existence capable of overturning his current understanding of the occult.
“Teacher? Are you alright?” Lucia's voice came from behind, tinged with concern.
Ryan turned his head to look at her.
Lucia's small face was slightly pale, her gaze somewhat unfocused, and she looked dazed and sluggish.
“I'm fine,” Ryan said, pulling his emotions back and asking flatly. “Can't hold on much longer?”
“A little bit...” Lucia rubbed her hands together sheepishly. “For some reason, the further we go inside, the dizzier I feel. It's like there's a constant buzzing in my head, but when I listen closely, there's nothing there.”
Ryan gave her a deep look.
In his view, this was entirely a normal manifestation of mental strain. Lucia was merely a student who had only recently come into contact with the extraordinary. Her 【Grail】 aspect was naturally highly sensitive to the life fluctuations in the environment. Walking through these ruins, which were filled with high-level spiritual residues and historical echoes, her mind was bound to bear a massive load.
“Grit your teeth. We are almost there,” Ryan commanded coldly, showing no intention of stopping to rest.
“...Yes, Teacher,” Lucia nodded obediently, trotting to keep up.
The two continued deeper.
At some unknown point, the sound of the wind around them vanished completely.
The tall, mutated plants that once covered the hills seemed to have hit some natural forbidden zone here. They grew scarcer and scarcer, until finally, they disappeared entirely.
Even the black lichens and weeds beneath their feet were no more.
In their place was an absolutely flat, deathly silent clearing that presented a bizarre greyish-white color.
The clearing was incredibly vast, its ground as smooth as a mirror, appearing as if it had been carved from a single massive, unknown meteorite. The air here was frozen solid like ice, and with every breath, one could even hear the rustling sound of their own blood rushing through their veins.
Right in the center of this absolutely silent, grey-white clearing stood a structure.
A stone door.
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