The colossal door did not launch an attack, nor did it unleash a violent, extraordinary impact.
However, the rumbling boom of the heavy stone doors—weighing tens of thousands of tons—sliding open to both sides was like a heavy, blunt hammer smashing directly into the vast, dead underground space.
Ryan stood ten steps away from the threshold.
He did not take that step. His left hand tightly gripped the 【Echoing Lantern】, his knuckles turning a sickly white from the sheer force of his grip. The cold white daylight was compressed tightly within three chi of his body, casting his face in a silence as cold as ice.
He did not act rashly, because Lucia, standing directly in front of him, had already undergone an extreme aberration.
At some point, the girl had broken free from the spiritual protective membrane emitted by the lantern. She hovered rigidly in the void directly in front of the colossal door, her eyes wide. The human luster and focus in her pupils vanished in an instant, leaving behind only a dead, pitch-black silence like an abyss.
The black feather patterns that had originally been hidden beneath her collar now crawled outward from her chest like reviving, cold vines. They crept over her slender neck and finally onto her pale cheeks, solidifying beneath her skin into ancient, cruel geometric markings.
Ryan's eyes narrowed slightly in the shadows as his 【Glimpse】 eye technique quietly activated.
Within his vision, Lucia's own spirituality had not been wiped out. Instead, it was forcibly suppressed into the deepest depths of her soul, as if weighed down by an incredibly massive, heavy, condensed liquid. Right now, she was nothing more than a rigid, conductive medium being controlled from a great distance.
For the first time, Ryan truly confirmed the logic behind this aberration.
Lucia had never been any sort of key to opening the temple.
She was a tool.
She was a door-opening tool, controlled from afar across vast stretches of time by the entity behind the door.
“Lucia.”
Ryan's voice was low and cold. His fingertips were already resting on the lantern's core deconstruction rune.
The girl did not respond, nor did she shift her gaze toward him even a fraction.
Like a puppet pulled by invisible strings, she mechanically raised her petite right hand and pressed her slender palm against the minimalist, ancient feather symbol at the center of the colossal door.
Boom!
At that moment, the entire underground space vibrated with a faint resonance.
The seven stone pillars surrounding them lit up with a dim glow simultaneously. From the radial grooves on the ground, which had long since dried and weathered, a tide of black spirituality surged. That spirituality flowed along Lucia's arm, drilling straight into her physical body.
Lucia's body shuddered violently, her spine arching in a rigid curve.
Then...
Her lips parted.
It was absolutely not the voice of a young girl. It was an ancient, grand, and bizarre tone blended from countless overlapping tracks, vibrating directly through the air:
“The door...”
“...open.”
Ryan's face darkened like iron. The 【Echoing Lantern】 let out a crisp clicking sound as the cold white daylight transformed into a blade, slashing straight toward the long spiritual threads connecting Lucia to the stone door!
However, it was too late.
Under the spread of the black spirituality, the two towering, heavy stone doors had already slid completely open to both sides.
Amidst the rumbling booms, the true face hidden behind the colossal door was finally exposed without reservation under the cold white daylight.
The world behind the door was revealed.
There was no magnificent altar as one might have imagined, no neatly lined rows of ancient puppets, and no mechanical instruments belonging to an ancient civilization.
Behind the door... was a vast expanse of flesh and blood.
What appeared before them was not the inner hall of some building, but a flesh-and-blood manufacturing facility that had been operating continuously for tens of thousands of years.
Massive walls of flesh replaced stone bricks and rock layers, covering the ceiling and walls of the entire space. They were coated with a moist, viscous membrane, and countless blood vessels as thick as tree roots dug deep into the flesh walls, pulsing with an extremely muffled, slow rhythm.
The air was thick with an odor that blended strong acid, bone marrow, and a heavy, metallic scent of iron.
Active tissues resembling cardiac muscle grew all over the walls, squirming unconsciously and secreting a translucent, semi-solid mucus.
And in the deepest depths of this colossal flesh-and-blood space...
A massive heart hung suspended in midair, slowly contracting and dilating. It provided fundamental life and vitality, acting like an ancient power pump that allowed this entire flesh-and-blood sanctuary to maintain its capacity for proliferation and repair across epochs.
What made their spines tingle even more was that beneath the proliferating flesh membranes and blood vessels, a large number of semi-finished structures resembling human organs were embedded—
Underdeveloped lung lobes breathed along with the rhythm;
Countless closed slits of flesh wrapped around turbid eyeballs;
Deformed bones, only half-grown, protruded beneath the flesh membranes;
There were even human faces that had not yet formed features, showing only blurry outlines, pressed against the surface of the flesh walls, rising and falling with the rhythm.
They were wrapped within this mass of flesh, like an ancient factory fallen into some state of derangement, trying over and over again to piece together and shape some perfect “vessel.”
Ryan stood outside the door.
On his face, which had always maintained absolute calm and rationality, his gaze was cold to the extreme.
“This is not a temple...”
He whispered those few words, pushing his 【Glimpse】 eye technique to the absolute limit his physical body could endure at this moment.
His vision tore open with a crash.
Under his spiritual vision, the surface of the flesh walls, blood vessels, and organs in front of him was instantly peeled away, transforming into the lines of the most fundamental extraordinary laws.
Ryan's pupils contracted sharply.
Deep within that boundless flesh-and-blood structure, there was only one kind of power that determined the essence of this sanctuary.
The pitch-black, freezing, and supremely shaping instinct of the 【Grail】.
Here, the 【Heart】 was nothing more than low-tier firewood captured and squeezed dry, serving merely as bottom-level nourishment to provide flesh-and-blood vitality, proliferation, and repair. The supreme power that truly dictated the direction of the flesh, carved the shapes of the organs, and reconstructed bones and blood vessels was solely the 【Grail】.
It was desire, it was indulgence, and it was the right to define the reconstruction of flesh and life.
The entire flesh sanctuary was constantly reorganizing flesh according to some incredibly ancient template.
Those seemingly deformed organs and human faces were not meaningless pollution. Rather, it was because of the lack of a core “template” that this factory could only repeatedly make failed attempts over the long ages.
They were waiting for a specific body.
Ryan slowly lowered his head, looking down at his hand gripping the lantern.
Under his 【Glimpse】 vision, his own palm also exhibited a bizarre spiritual origin—beneath his skin, at the very bottom of his bones and meridians, lay an extremely concealed structural rule of the exact same origin and essence as the flesh sanctuary before him.
It was the 【Grail】.
This was not an aspect he had obtained later through extraordinary cultivation.
This was the origin of this body. The vessel created by Chris and the others.
From the very first moment this physical body was born and manufactured, it was a product shaped entirely according to the rules of the 【Grail】.
Ryan's heart sank to the bottom.
He did not fall into a state of madness or let out terrified roars. Instead, he rapidly deduced all the clues in his mind.
Why did this ruin respond to Lucia? Because the mark on Lucia was a remote-control switch.
Why did the entity behind the door sigh just now?
Because the massive will hidden in the depths of the flesh sanctuary was never waiting for Lucia, nor was it waiting for some ordinary extraordinary test subject.
It was “recalling” this body.
It recognized Ryan's physical body as the supreme template it had waited for over countless years, one that could perfectly bear the rewrite.
Right at that moment...
Lucia, hovering in front of the door, twisted her neck around at an extremely rigid angle.
There was still no luster in the girl's eyes, and the black feather patterns on her cheeks wriggled like living things.
“Found you...”
The hoarse, overlapping voice spilled from the girl's lips once more.
Ryan gripped the 【Echoing Lantern】 tightly, his surrounding spirituality as cold as frost and snow. “You are looking for this body?”
Lucia did not answer directly.
She merely raised her hand, which was covered in black patterns, and pointed her finger across the cold air toward Ryan's chest.
“Return to your place.”
The grand voice echoed above the flesh sanctuary.
The instant the words fell—
Thump!
The entire massive flesh sanctuary erupted with its most violent pulsation since falling into its ancient slumber!
Tens of thousands of blood vessels on the walls swelled simultaneously. A massive 【Grail】 spirituality interwove into an invisible gravity field, crashing down upon Ryan.
Ryan let out a muffled groan, the black stone floor beneath his feet instantly shattering into a spiderweb of cracks.
In the next second, an aberration erupted inside his physical body.
This was not brute-force destruction on a physical level, nor was it the pollution and erosion of a foreign spirituality, and it was certainly not a soul possession.
This was a “correction.”
It was like a creation that had left the factory for too long being sent back to the production line; the sanctuary was using the underlying rules of the 【Grail】 to forcibly drag Ryan's physical body back to its original ancient design template.
A stabbing pain exploded from the deepest depths of his bone marrow.
Ryan could clearly feel the blood vessels beneath his skin beginning to rearrange themselves according to some ancient geometric trajectory. His bones let out fine clicking sounds, and his muscle fibers tore and rewove themselves in an unimaginable manner.
The power of the 【Grail】 fully revived deep within his flesh, attempting to erase all the minute differences his body had developed after its creation, restoring it to its initial form.
“Teacher...”
Lucia's soul seemed to pause briefly amidst that terrifying fluctuation. A line of bloody tears trickled from the corner of her eye as she let out a faint cry filled with immense pain and fear.
But in the next moment, her consciousness was crushed once again by the massive black glow, falling back into silence.
The excruciating pain of skeletal reconstruction caused thick veins to bulge on Ryan's forehead. His leg joints let out heavy groans under the massive pressure of the correction.
Yet within those pitch-black eyes, there was not the slightest trace of collapse. Instead, a nearly cold rationality burned within them.
There was no fear in his mind, only an extremely clear analysis:
What is the opponent changing? The structure of the bones and blood vessels.
What is the opponent relying on? The Grail rules inherent to the origin of this physical body.
How can I stop it?
Denying the Grail is impossible, because the base of this body is the Grail.
The only thing that can protect me is the Lantern.
The 【Grail】 had shaped his physical origin, but the 【Lantern】 was the power he had mastered later. It was the cornerstone of his thinking, observing, and perceiving the world. It was his absolute line of defense as “Ryan”—his self-awareness and sanity!
The 【Grail】 wanted to redefine his body.
The 【Lantern】 had to protect his current self and personality.
“You want to rewrite me?”
Ryan clenched his teeth tightly, blood seeping through the gaps.
The absolute rationality and rules of truth belonging to the 【Lantern】 within him were ignited without reservation at this moment!
Cold white flames surged violently from the depths of his eyes.
He did not try to destroy the 【Grail】 inside his body. Instead, using the “revealing” and “illuminating” properties of the 【Lantern】, he completely analyzed and exposed all the skeletal reconstruction and blood vessel shifting occurring within himself!
Wherever the light of the 【Lantern】 shone, all physical “corrections” were forcibly jammed in place.
He could not eradicate the 【Grail's】 influence on his body, but using the rationality of the 【Lantern】, he constructed an insurmountable cold white wall between his physical form and his consciousness!
Boom!
Ryan slammed the 【Echoing Lantern】 heavily onto the ground!
The brilliant cold white daylight diffused outward, instantly illuminating the dim, viscous flesh sanctuary.
The light illuminated the massive heart in the depths, as well as the thousands of strange tissues on the flesh walls that closed and twitched under the daylight.
The colossal flesh sanctuary continued to beat slowly.
The power of the 【Grail】 still seeped into Ryan's body from all directions, trying to pull him back to the template. Meanwhile, the 【Lantern】 inside him acted like a cold scalpel, firmly resisting every attempt at rewriting, preserving his sanity and self as “Ryan.”
The two sides fell into a rigid, cold standoff before the door.
Ryan knelt slightly on one knee, supporting himself with one hand on the lantern, his breathing heavy but even. Blood dripped from his chin onto the stone pavement, yet his gaze was clearer than ever before.
He had not won; he could not destroy this massive flesh sanctuary.
The sanctuary had not won either; it could not forcibly erase Ryan's consciousness under the illumination of the 【Lantern】.
The cold white daylight and the viscous flesh locked in a stalemate in the void.
Ryan looked down at his hands, which shimmered with a faint, strange color under the daylight, feeling the 【Grail】 origin beneath his skin that resonated with the entire sanctuary.
A cold, absurd thought rose uncontrollably from the depths of his mind.
His coming here was perhaps never a coincidence.
Between this body and this sanctuary lay a certain causality that spanned across ages. The entity behind the door recognized this body, and the sanctuary itself had been built to manufacture it.
Even before he possessed consciousness, this physical form had already been shaped by some ancient power.
Ryan pressed down hard on the lantern, the cold light in his eyes like eternal snow.
For the first time, he clearly realized—
The physical body he had been using and relying on all this time had perhaps never truly belonged to him from the very beginning.
Rate on N.U.
