Ryan stopped in his tracks, his pupils suddenly contracting to the size of needle points.
In his expectations, the core that could serve as the spiritual anchor of this entire grassland realm—and even forcibly twist and interweave the rules of the two paths of 【Grail】 and 【Lantern】—should have been an extremely magnificent ruin. Perhaps a towering altar reaching into the clouds, a colossal tower covered in occult runes, or some high-level relic radiating a terrifying pressure.
Yet everything before his eyes shattered his deductions with an almost absurd anticlimax.
It was not a giant, towering structure radiating terrifying pressure.
On the contrary, it appeared very small, almost unremarkable. The stone door stood no more than three meters tall, its width barely enough for two people to walk through side by side. It stood bare in the center of the clearing, without any surrounding walls, pillars, or connected architectural remains, looking solitary and utterly absurd.
It was like a stone frame forgotten in the wilderness, left to the merciless ravages of time.
But it was incredibly ancient.
So ancient that the stone on the surface of the door had already weathered into a semi-powdered state; the slightest movement of air seemed capable of brushing away layers of dust. Most of the carefully carved occult patterns on the doorframe had peeled away and worn smooth, leaving behind only grooves of varying depths that carried an indescribable rhythm. Those grooves snaked along non-Euclidean trajectories, causing a severe sense of visual distortion at a mere glance.
Hum—!
The instant Ryan stepped onto this greyish-white clearing, the 【Echoing Lantern】 in his hand suddenly erupted with an unprecedented, violent tremor!
The harsh metallic resonance sounded like a sharp blade scraping across glass, so shrill it almost shattered his eardrums!
Inside the lantern, the cold white flame that had been stubbornly burning with a trace of foreign pollution suddenly went out... without any warning the moment they came within a hundred meters of the stone door!
Darkness instantly enveloped the lantern and the surrounding area of several meters.
However, only a second passed.
Puff.
A brand-new flame burst forth on its own inside the lantern!
It was no longer a simple cold white. The core of the flame actually presented an almost void-like pure white, while its outer flame emitted an extremely faint yet infinitely complex, multicolored glow. These colorful glimmers swirled along the edges of the flame, as if countless microscopic stars were being born and extinguished within it.
It no longer required Ryan to channel even a single shred of 【Lantern】 spirituality.
The lantern slipped from Ryan's palm and floated in midair on its own, its handle tilting slightly downward in a posture of near-submission and pilgrimage. That brand-new flame erupted with a blinding beam of light, like a searchlight in the dark, shining dead straight and fixedly upon the ancient stone door!
The lantern was in ecstasy.
The ruined patterns on the surface of the metal casing burst with a burning heat under the illumination of the multicolored firelight. This 【Lantern】 aspect relic, which had survived untold ages, changed hands multiple times, and suffered pollution throughout its long history, had completely activated all its rule circuits at this moment, finding the ultimate purpose of its existence!
“Echo...”
Ryan muttered subconsciously, his throat dry and burning.
Before he could even forcibly withdraw his mental strength, the lantern's spontaneous resonance brought a terrifying torrent of information, frantically pouring a massive amount of historical knowledge into his mind!
Tear—!
A dull sound, as if some high-dimensional fabric was being violently torn apart, seemed to echo in his ears.
The space before him twisted and collapsed violently. The greyish-white clearing and the deathly silent atmosphere faded in an instant, replaced by a grand silhouette forcibly dredged up from the depths of the river of time by the lantern.
Ryan “saw” images from hundreds or perhaps even thousands of years ago.
The sky was no longer the oppressive, gloomy grey of the present, but was blanketed by overlapping layers of bizarre halos. Multicolored auroras rolled across the dome like massive, endless ribbons. Over a dozen figures wearing ancient uniforms, their robes embroidered with highly complex stellar orbit patterns, stood solemnly before this stone door.
They showed no madness or despair, radiating an air of solemnity and reverence akin to martyrs. The spiritual fluctuations of each figure were as colossal as dormant volcanoes, far exceeding any extraordinary being Ryan had ever seen.
They did not attempt to push open the stone door, nor did they try to step inside.
They simply stood quietly before the door, forming a semicircle. Holding bone flutes and cold silver staves, they softly chanted a hymn in a tongue that did not belong to any mortal language, seemingly waiting for some unspeakable, grand moment to arrive.
Suddenly, without warning, the old man standing at the very front fell heavily to his knees before the stone door.
His knees struck the stone pavement with a dull thud. Spreading his arms, he faced the stone door, his hands gripping the patterns on the ground tightly. His lips writhed violently as he let out a sigh and wail that spanned thousands of years.
It was not sadness, but a despair and awe born of having one's cognition completely crushed in the face of boundless, supreme power.
A line of text condensed from ancient spiritual energy detonated deep within Ryan's consciousness. Though extremely blurry, it carried a power that struck directly at his soul:
“The door... is not for us to enter.”
“It is to prevent the things outside... from seeing us.”
The moment the words appeared, the entire residual shadow shattered like a fragile mirror!
“Ugh...!”
Ryan groaned, his eyes instantly bloodshot, a trickle of crimson blood spilling from the corner of his mouth as he was violently ejected from the historical shadow. Pressing his hands hard against his pounding temples that felt as if they were about to explode, he panted heavily, his chest heaving violently.
“The door is not for us to enter...”
Ryan repeated the words in a low voice, the logical threads in his mind plunging into unprecedented chaos and turbulence.
If the door was not meant for entry, then why did it exist?
To seal something?
To isolate two completely different dimensions?
Or was this door itself... a sort of 'peephole' cast into this world by some supreme rule?
Ryan suppressed the needle-like pain in his head, wiped the blood from his mouth, and gathered his coldness and rationality back into his dark eyes. Holding the lantern that had returned to his hand, he suppressed his remaining spirituality to the absolute minimum and walked toward the stone door step by step.
He stopped five paces away from the stone door.
This distance was extremely dangerous, but he had to uncover the truth. Ryan took a deep breath, forced open his extraordinary vision, and began to carefully examine the stone door from the highly professional perspective of an extraordinary scholar.
However, the results of his examination only made his brow furrow deeper.
This was not a 'door' in the traditional sense.
It had no lock, no hinges, and there wasn't even a gap between the stone frames on either side. More bizarrely, it had no door leaf at all—the middle of the frame was just empty air. Looking straight through it, one could clearly see the greyish-white clearing behind the stone door, and even the few withered weeds at the edge of the clearing.
Physically, it was merely a stone frame standing in a clearing, thin and fragile.
But in his extraordinary vision, it was an entirely different scene, enough to overturn any occult theory.
In Ryan's perception, those two semi-weathered stone pillars were not stone at all, but two 'spatial anchors' that had been forcibly nailed into the physical world across dimensional concepts by some supreme power!
The seemingly transparent, empty air within the frame was actually packed with dense, overlapping dimensional folds. Those folds were stacked with a terrifying density, like millions of sheets of transparent paper compressed into a slit less than a centimeter wide. It was like an 'entrance' forcibly fixed in the physical world, tightly linking reality with a bottomless, indescribable alien space.
A certain indescribable aura was leaking extremely faintly through those dimensional folds.
That aura...
Ryan's breathing froze instantly.
He was all too familiar with this feeling!
Long ago, when he had just set foot on the extraordinary path and touched that mysterious extraordinary source deep within his consciousness for the first time, he had felt a similar aura!
It was... the aura of the 【White Door】!
No, that wasn't right!
Ryan quickly dismissed his own speculation.
Although this aura was extremely similar to the 【White Door】—likewise filled with a cold, pure, and high-dimensional 【Lantern】 spirituality—in its essence, it was far older, more bizarre, and even carried a sense of magnificence and predatory nature that made one's soul shudder!
If the 【White Door】 was the main gate of a cathedral leading to knowledge and revelation, representing order and guidance, then the thing behind this stone door was like the absolute forbidden zone hidden in the deepest depths of the cathedral—stripped of all hypocritical masks—leading directly to the bedchamber of a deity!
This was no place of revelation; this was... the source of truth, and the end of all things.
Ryan had absolutely no idea what this was.
In his occult knowledge base, whether in the open texts of academies or the forbidden manuscripts circulating in the underground black markets, there was no record of this stone door.
Yet, a primal alarm blaring from the depths of his soul was frantically warning him—
Do not touch it.
In his current state, he absolutely could not touch anything behind the door!
The dimension of that power was too high. It was so high that if he, at his current level, were to catch even a slight glimpse of the true face behind the door, his soul would instantly be crushed and evaporated by the colossal influx of information and high-dimensional spirituality, leaving him a brain-dead vegetable with only a living body!
“Back away.”
Ryan did not hesitate for a second, making a prompt decision.
Yet, the very instant his feet moved back half a step—
A sudden change occurred!
In the center of the quiet stone door, deep within the originally transparent, empty air, a hair-thin, extremely faint thread of pure white light suddenly emerged silently.
The line of light stood vertically right in the center of the doorframe. It emitted no heat or halo, yet it caused a highly visible indentation in the surrounding space. It was like a vertically slit eye... slowly opening!
Hum!
The 【Echoing Lantern】, which Ryan had forcibly suppressed and whose flame he had even snuffed out, completely broke free from his control at this moment!
The brand-new multicolored flame inside the lantern erupted with a blinding, intense light. The metal casing expanded violently. The light no longer tilted downward but transformed into a solid white halo, bridging the distance of several meters to shine directly onto that thread of pure white light!
Two sources of 【Lantern】 spirituality—originating from the same source yet entirely distinct—merged in the air. There was no explosion, only a maddening, low-frequency resonance.
“Teacher...”
Behind him, Lucia suddenly let out a low, dream-like murmur.
Ryan whipped his head around, his pupils contracting sharply!
Lucia, who had previously behaved in an extremely timid, exhausted manner and even relied entirely on him to survive, had now lost all focus in her eyes. Her pupils dilated, reflecting the pure white thread of light, looking like a puppet that had lost its soul.
She slowly raised her foot, walking stiffly and stubbornly toward the stone door step by step!
The corners of her mouth even curled into an extremely eerie smile that carried a sense of sacredness and liberation, yet two trails of clear tears flowed from the corners of her eyes.
She wanted to get closer to that light! She wanted to throw her flesh and soul entirely into those dimensional folds!
“Don't go near it!”
Ryan bellowed. His body lunged like lightning, his muscles instantly tensing as his large hand gripped Lucia's wrist like an iron vise, forcibly dragging her back behind him!
Thud!
Pulled by this massive force, Lucia stumbled and fell heavily onto the greyish-white ground, her elbow scraping against the surface and leaving a shallow trail of blood.
“Ah!”
She cried out in pain. The blankness and sense of sacredness in her eyes vanished instantly, replaced by the clarity and fear of a young girl. She stared blankly at her fallen self, then looked up at Ryan, whose face was grim and mouth stained with blood. Her eyes were filled with terror and grievance. “Te... Teacher? What happened to me? Just now... I felt like I saw a white sea...”
“Shut up and stand there. Don't move.” Ryan blocked Lucia firmly behind him.
The two stood one behind the other before this ancient, bizarre stone door.
The thing behind the stone door did not rush out.
Only an extremely distant, immensely grand spiritual fluctuation—one that was utterly impossible to comprehend using human language or logic—swept gently across this deathly silent clearing along that hair-thin thread of light.
That fluctuation was not an attack, nor did it contain the slightest hint of killing intent.
It was more like a... 'gaze down' from high above the clouds.
Like a giant beast slumbering at the bottom of an endless abyss, turning over slightly in its long sleep and unconsciously casting its gaze toward two ants nesting on its scales. It did not care about the ants' survival, nor did it care about their awe. It was simply there, existing.
Ryan stood in the light, his spine straight. Cold sweat slid slowly down his temples, soaking the collar of his shirt, icy cold.
At this moment, all the puzzles in his mind clicked together like scattered jigsaw pieces, and he finally, completely revised all his deductions.
A corner of the truth had been peeled back, revealing its cruel and absurd undertones.
The true core and greatest secret of this seemingly peaceful yet actually mutated grassland realm did not lie in that underground creation laboratory filled with madness and tragedy at all!
The 【Grail】 aspect pollution in the underground laboratory, the mutated monsters forcibly stitched together, the 'perfect creation' that attempted to challenge the boundary between life and death... were nothing more than a crude workshop built by those self-righteous human scholars decades ago after scavenging a few scraps of divine miracles near this ancient stone door!
They thought they had mastered the code of life, believed they had touched the domain of gods, and had not even hesitated to use the entire grassland as nourishment for their experiments.
But in reality, everything they did was nothing more than playing with mud at the foot of this 【stone door】 that had already stood for untold thousands of years! They had not even truly understood the existence of this door, merely absorbing a trace of negligible spiritual radiation leaking from the gaps of the door, yet it had triggered a decades-long disaster affecting the entire realm!
This stone door had stood quietly here long before humans set foot on this continent, long before those ancient civilizations were established.
It was the true 'anchor' of this grassland realm, and the sole reason this space could exist independently of the physical world.
Flick.
The very instant Ryan was struck by the shock of this ancient truth, the flame of the 【Echoing Lantern】 in his hand suddenly tilted... once again, extremely weakly, toward the interior of the stone door.
From the very beginning, the lantern's purpose in guiding Ryan here was not to help him find an exit to escape the grassland.
It was to bring this successor of the 【Lantern】 path to witness the existence of this door!
The lantern's duty was to 'illuminate' and 'record.' It guided the successor to find the boundaries of the world; as for whether the successor had the courage to push open the door or flee in panic, the relic itself did not care.
Ryan did not open the door.
His rationality and coldness were pushed to their limits at this moment—before possessing absolute power and a wealth of knowledge, any active exploration of a high-dimensional existence was no different from suicide.
Yet, just as he slowly raised his head to take one last look at the faint white thread of light in the center of the stone door, preparing to forcibly withdraw with Lucia—
An extremely intense intuition—so strong it made his spine turn cold and his soul shudder—struck Ryan's mind like thunder.
He felt that...
The distant and grand existence behind the door,
at the moment the lantern's halo shone upon it,
and at the instant Lucia was drawn to it,
was also, across endless dimensional folds, across vast expanses of time and space, extremely clearly... sensing his existence.
“Go.”
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