Lucia shivered and immediately followed closely behind Ryan.
The entrance at the back of the hall was hidden in the shadows of two stone pillars as thick as giant trees. It was not a door, but a long, narrow gap sloping down into the deepest depths of the earth.
Every step down the stone stairs felt like walking into the esophagus of some colossal monster.
The stone steps here were built with extreme precision, with almost no difference in the height and width of each step. Colossal stone slabs tens of meters long were embedded on both sides of the walls. Their sheer neatness made it hard to believe they were carved by humans using only chisels from the age of cold weapons.
As the two went deeper, the surrounding temperature began to drop sharply.
That cold was not the sudden biting wind of a harsh winter, but a dead, silent chill seeping from the depths of the rock crevices, sealed away for untold epochs. The air was outrageously dry; with every breath drawn into the lungs, the throat pricked with faint pain as if pierced by tiny needles. The place was filled with a musty aura tens of thousands of years old, as if the passage of time had stagnated and frozen here, and even the air itself had rotted.
Tap, tap, tap.
The footsteps of the two were stretched infinitely within the long, narrow corridor.
At first, the sound was merely a crisp friction. But as they continued down, the echoes of their footsteps began to sound extremely bizarre—the sound waves struck the stone walls and bounced back with a faint, hollow drone, as if countless overlapping phantoms were pressed against the steps beneath their feet, following them down step by step.
Lucia pulled her neck in, not daring to take her eyes off Ryan's back for even a second.
Ryan held the 【Echoing Lantern】 in his left hand, compressing the cold white daylight strictly to a range of two meters around them.
He did not let the light spread carelessly. In this unknown domain of death, an overly conspicuous light source was no different from a target in the dark. The cold white light illuminated the steps beneath their feet and brought the marks on both walls fully into Ryan's view.
As he walked, he naturally activated his 【Glimpse】 eye technique.
Within his vision, the rock patterns deep inside the walls were peeled back layer by layer.
The interiors of the stone walls were filled with long-weathered spiritual circuits. Those channels that might have once flowed with surging energy were now nothing but dry, pitch-black microscopic crevices, like necrotic blood vessels. Broken feather carvings could occasionally be seen on the walls—some smashed to pieces by some massive blunt instrument, others showing fine cracks as if they had endured some high-pressure explosion.
On the ground, the parallel scratches they had previously seen in the hall were still present.
They stretched all the way down the steps, deeply cut into the extremely hard black stone. This indicated that some colossal and heavy object had once been forcibly dragged along this steep passage to the deepest part of the underground.
“Teacher...”
Lucia's voice was very soft, sounding exceptionally thin in the empty corridor. She tugged at the hem of her clothes and whispered:
“Has... anyone really been here before?”
Ryan did not stop. His eyes remained fixed ahead on the stairs swallowed by shadows, his voice steady without a single ripple:
“Yes.”
“Then... why isn't there even a speck of dust here?” Lucia swallowed hard, her eyes drifting as she looked at the bare stone walls on either side. “Not only is there no dust, but there aren't even any bugs or moss... It's like... like it was thoroughly washed clean by something.”
“Because the spiritual aspect here is too high,” Ryan explained calmly. “In places covered by high-tier spirituality for long periods, ordinary creatures and particles simply cannot survive. Any dust entering would be directly vaporized, and bacteria and moss have no hope of growing. Do not be fooled by appearances. Just because there are no living things here does not mean it is safe.”
Lucia only half-understood, but she got the meaning of the last sentence. She bit her lower lip hard and whispered:
“Where do these stone steps... lead to? The temple's basement?”
Ryan turned his head slightly, sweeping his gaze over her from the corner of his eye.
“I do not know.” He did not directly voice his conjecture regarding "experiments" or "creations," merely saying flatly, “But obviously, the people who built this place put the most important things at the very bottom. Restrain your spirituality, slow your breathing, and do not let your mind wander.”
“Alright...” Lucia hastily held her breath, clenching her fists as she followed closely step by step.
They walked for another few hundred meters.
The sloping stone steps finally came to an end.
When they took the final step down, what met their feet was no longer the unevenness of stairs, but an exceptionally flat, unimaginably vast, and hard stone slab.
Their field of vision instantly opened up.
It was a magnificent underground space sleeping in the deepest depths of the ruins.
Its sheer scale and emptiness far exceeded the common sense of human architecture.
Ryan held his lantern, its cold white light appearing exceptionally tiny in this space, utterly unable to reach the surrounding walls and vaulted ceiling. Looking up, there was only an eternal darkness and silence, with no supporting beams or rock layers in sight—it was as if the entire interior of the mountain had been hollowed out of thin air to form a colossal cosmic void.
There was not a breath of wind in the air, yet an extremely faint, barely perceptible spiritual shift was surging.
In the distance, several colossal stone pillars tens of meters high stood indistinctly. Some of them were broken, their massive blocks collapsed onto the ground, leaving deep craters. The ground was carved with countless giant radial patterns, all of which converged toward the exact center of this space.
Ryan stood at the edge of the stone slab, his 【Glimpse】 eye technique tracing those radial patterns all the way forward.
“Teacher... look over there...”
Lucia's voice carried a tremble. She raised her hand, pointing into the deep darkness.
Ryan did not answer, because he had already seen it too.
As the two of them stepped forward, the lantern's glow penetrated layers of shadows, and an indescribably massive outline gradually emerged under the cold white daylight.
It was a door.
A colossal stone door towering into the clouds, looking as if it directly connected heaven and earth.
It did not stand against any wall, but stood independently in the center of this underground space, flanked by vast, boundless shadows, its top piercing straight into the unseen, pitch-black vaulted ceiling.
The two door leaves were like two sheer, pitch-black mountain walls, imparting an unspeakable, cold sense of oppression.
There were no complex geometric patterns on the surface, no intricate feather carvings, and not even any decorative lines. The entire gate was as smooth as a polished mirror, except at the exact center where the two door leaves met, where an extremely simple yet supremely majestic ancient feather symbol was carved.
It was a feather outlined by just a few minimalist lines.
There were no details, no texture of the shaft.
But the moment Ryan's gaze landed on this symbol, his temples throbbed with a sharp, violent pain without warning!
The moment his 【Glimpse】 eye technique made contact with that symbol, what it fed back was not structure or spiritual trajectories, but a bizarre, distorted white void. The symbol was clearly carved on the stone door, yet in his spiritual vision, it seemed to exist outside this dimension. The closer he inspected it, the more it induced a wave of dizziness and nausea, as if his very soul were about to be sucked into it.
Ryan abruptly stopped ten steps away from the gate.
His face instantly darkened, and his right hand clamped down tightly on the handle of the 【Echoing Lantern】.
“Teacher?” Lucia stopped alongside him, looking at Ryan with a bewildered expression.
Ryan did not speak.
Deep within his black eyes, the cold white daylight flickered violently. Pushing his 【Glimpse】 to its absolute limit, he bypassed that eerie feather symbol and forcibly thrust his senses into the interior of the colossal stone door.
Behind the door lay an absolute darkness.
There was no blood flow of ordinary life, no rise and fall of lungs from breathing, no cries of a soul, and not even any spiritual circuits of extraordinary beings in operation.
It was like a void returned to absolute silence.
Yet...
Deep within that void, an extremely faint, incredibly muffled fluctuation flickered once, very slowly.
Silence.
Ten seconds later.
It happened again.
The fluctuation was incredibly weak. Had Ryan not possessed the absolute sensitivity of the 【Lantern】 aspect and the precise capture of 【Glimpse】, even high-tier extraordinary beings standing here would have merely dismissed it as some natural micro-tremor of the subterranean rock layers.
But Ryan knew exactly what it was.
It was not the shifting of rock, nor was it the ebb and flow of residual spirituality.
It was breathing.
It was the extremely slow, incredibly weak rising and falling of the heart and soul of a high-tier lifeform fallen into an infinite slumber.
It was... a genuine, undeniable life spirituality.
Something was alive behind the door.
Deep within this ancient ruin that had been abandoned for untold tens of thousands of years, beneath the foundation of this dead temple that might not even belong to their era, a living thing was quietly suspended on the other side of the stone door.
Ryan's spine tensed to the absolute limit in an instant. The 【Lantern】 spirituality inside him surged wildly, ready to tear through space and retreat at any moment.
This was entirely beyond the scope of "exploring ruins."
Just as countless contingency plans flashed through Ryan's mind and he was about to tell Lucia to retreat—
“Gasp...”
Lucia suddenly let out an extremely faint gasp behind him.
Ryan whipped his head around!
Under the lantern's glow, Lucia was clutching her chest tightly with both hands. Her face was so pale that not a trace of color remained, her eyes were wide with dilated, dazed pupils, and her lips trembled violently, yet she could not even squeeze out a single coherent syllable.
And even more terrifying than her expression—
Beneath her clothes near her chest, a black circular feather pattern, several times clearer than the one in the corridor, lit up brilliantly through her body like a reviving lantern!
The black light was not blinding, yet it carried an ancient, vast, and absolute authority. It penetrated her clothes, making Lucia's petite frame look like a light source possessed by a god!
The instant the black light illuminated—
A violent resonance boomed through the air!
Boom!
It was not an acoustic boom, but a violent tremor in the spiritual concept of the entire underground space!
In the originally dead, windless space, an invisible spiritual gale swept up! The temperature instantly plummeted below freezing, and those ancient, long-dried and useless spiritual pipes deep within the surrounding stone walls actually lit up with intermittent, faint white light at this moment!
The radial patterns on the ground revived one after another, the flow of spirituality reversed, and all the energy surged along the surface like a wild tide toward the colossal stone door!
Reflected by the black light, the originally minimalist feather symbol at the center of the giant door seemed to come alive, beginning to fold and squirm slightly on the stone surface!
Ang—
From within the ancient giant door that had been silent for untold epochs, a muffled, grinding metallic sound suddenly echoed!
It was the sharp, bizarre noise of massive stones weighing tens of thousands of tons being forcibly pushed after ages of being sealed, shaking the entire underground space and causing gravel to patter down!
Along with this heavy friction, the originally weak, sleeping life spirituality behind the door abruptly opened some invisible eye at the exact moment the mark on Lucia's chest lit up!
An unimaginable, colossal pressure seeped out bit by bit through the gap of the door.
Lucia's delicate body trembled violently, her eyes completely losing focus. She took an uncontrolled step forward, seeming to walk toward the giant door.
“Do not move!”
Ryan barked, the sound waves striking like a heavy hammer deep within Lucia's mind!
He did not make the slightest hesitation. Stepping forward, he blocked the path between Lucia and the giant door. Raising the 【Echoing Lantern】 with his right hand, he slammed down the mechanism at the top of the lantern!
A blazing, intense cold white light erupted!
Colorful flames burned frantically inside the glass casing. The cold white daylight transformed into an absolutely flat curtain of light, forcibly wedging itself into the air between Lucia and the giant door! The core "revelation" and "peeling" rules of the 【Lantern】 aspect operated at full capacity, forcibly severing the invisible thread of spiritual resonance!
The black feather pattern on Lucia's chest suddenly dimmed. Her entire body went limp, as if drained of all strength. Ryan swept his left hand out, catching her shoulders with precision and pulling her firmly behind his back.
Ryan half-knelt on the ground, holding the lantern with one hand, his dark eyes staring unblinkingly at the giant door ahead, which had not budged. The spirituality within his body was squeezed to its absolute limit.
He made an exceptionally precise judgment:
The mark on Lucia was definitely not some ordinary extraordinary potential.
This ruin recognized this mark.
The colossal lifeform behind the door that had slept for ten thousand years recognized this mark as well.
Its awakening was not due to the arrival of intruders, but because "it" had finally waited for the appearance of this mark!
The giant door did not open any further.
After Ryan forcibly severed the spiritual connection with the 【Echoing Lantern】, the heavy grinding sound from within the door slowly ground to a halt. The spiritual pipes that had just lit up deep in the stone walls dimmed once more, and the patterns on the ground returned to a dead silence.
But the lifeform behind the door had already awakened.
The weak rising and falling that resembled breathing had vanished. In its place was a conscious, incredibly colossal gaze. It felt as if a giant eye was pressed against the gap in the stone door, quietly watching the two of them outside.
Immediately after, an extremely hoarse, incredibly distant sigh, sounding as if it had traversed endless wind and sand from the end of time, drifted out from the gap of the stone door:
“...Finally...”
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