Extreme cold and extreme heat tore at each other in the deepest depths of Ryan's bone marrow.
The rules of the Lantern were like a defense line woven from countless minute, cold white ice needles, pinned firmly into his nerve endings and deep within his brainstem, defending the absolute sovereignty of his self-awareness as “Ryan.”
Meanwhile, the Grail origin seeping in from the black stone floor beneath his feet, the surrounding flesh walls, and every corner of the flesh sanctuary was like a thick, boiling primordial soup, striving to wash over his bones, blood vessels, and every single cell, restoring them to their initial form.
Thump!
The massive heart suspended deep in the dome of the sanctuary throbbed violently once more!
This time, what accompanied the resonance was no longer merely a rewrite command on the spiritual level, but a complete rampage in the material world. On the surrounding flesh walls that had collapsed into smooth geometric shapes, countless closed slits tore open in an instant, spraying translucent mucus like a torrential downpour. Those half-grown deformed arms, underdeveloped bones, and lumps of flesh bearing blurred human faces actually pulled themselves free from the walls, rapidly adhering and stacking together like molten grease!
Within just a few breaths, a colossal flesh entity several dozen meters tall, pieced together from tens of thousands of individual organs, rose up with a boom in the center of the sanctuary!
It was no longer an inanimate object, but a gigantic creature possessing ten thousand eyes and over a hundred twitching arms.
“Found... you...”
The grand, overlapping voice spilled from the gaping giant mouth on the creature's chest.
Lucia, hovering before the door, had eyes as black as pitch. The black feather patterns on her cheeks had completely seeped into her flesh, turning her into an extended nerve ending of the giant flesh entity. Like a precise navigational device, her rigid finger locked firmly onto Ryan's location.
The Grail origin spiraled completely out of control.
Beneath the skin of Ryan's right arm, crimson blood vessels bulged violently, even forcing out several pulsating embryo-like tumors along his forearm. Pain made his rationality razor-sharp. Clenching his teeth tightly, he compressed the light of the Echoing Lantern to its absolute limit with his left hand, frantically carrying out self-analysis and localized blockades.
He knew all too well that if his Lantern was submerged by this massive surge of the Grail, he would cease to be Ryan and instead become part of that giant entity—a perfect component thoroughly “corrected” and restored to its place.
Yet right at this critical juncture—
Screech!
A violent, sharp sound—like heavy cloth being forcefully shredded by a sharp blade—exploded without warning from the void above the subterranean space!
This was no resonance of extraordinary spirituality, but a physical tearing of the spatial structure itself.
A pitch-black rift reeking of pungent sulfur and high-pressure steam appeared out of thin air. In the next second, two blurred figures slammed down from the void rift with near-brutal force, crashing heavily onto the subterranean ruins!
Dust and gravel showered in all directions.
Ryan's pupils contracted slightly. He instantly adjusted the angle of the lantern in his hand, causing the cold white daylight to cut through the haze like a spotlight, illuminating the faces of the newcomers.
They were two figures he was by no means unfamiliar with—figures that should not have appeared here at this moment by any stretch of the imagination.
The one on the left wore an exquisitely tailored three-piece grey suit with slightly scorched edges, a bowler hat on his head, and rested one hand on a blackwood cane. Though his face bore a sickly paleness brought on by spatial transit, he still maintained a near-rigid London gentlemanly demeanor—the master of the Knock pathway, the Gentleman of Knock.
Crouched on the ground to his right was a tall figure wrapped entirely in pitch-black leather and metallic armor. The figure slowly rose to his feet and drew a double-edged longsword from his back, the blade whistling through the air with a grating, razor-sharp sound. This was a high-rank Edge pathway powerhouse, a hound-like killing machine.
The Gentleman of Knock lightly adjusted his collar and looked up at the sanctuary blanketed in massive flesh. There was no shock in his eyes, only a complex coldness forged across long ages.
Then, his gaze crossed the roiling tide of flesh and fell upon Ryan, who was kneeling on one knee with veins bulging across his body.
An indescribable gleam flashed across the Gentleman of Knock's eyes, which were deep as the night sky.
“Look who it is...” the Gentleman of Knock spoke.
Ryan's eyes were shrouded in cold white flame. Though racked with excruciating pain, the analytical engine in his mind spun at high speed.
The Gentleman of Knock and the Edge warrior.
They harbored no killing intent toward him; all their spiritual pressure naturally radiated outward, warding off the gravitational field of the flesh sanctuary.
They had tracked traces of some aberration all the way from London, forcibly tearing through vast distances of space to descend upon this place.
Boom!
Sensing the intrusion of outsiders, the giant flesh entity standing dozens of meters tall brought down hundreds of deformed arms like a collapsing wall of flesh, hurtling tens of thousands of tons of immense force toward the three of them!
“Reunions end here,” the Edge warrior beside him said coldly, his voice sounding like two iron plates grating against each other. “Deal with the big guy first.”
Before his words died away, the Edge warrior's figure vanished from where he stood!
A streak of dark red blade light, so intense it was nearly blinding, erupted out of thin air like lightning cutting through the night sky. There were no flashy extraordinary techniques, only the principle of the Edge pushed to its absolute limit—slaughter, slicing, and armor-cleaving!
Slash—!
Several massive falling arms of flesh were precisely severed into dozens of segments midair. A torrential rain of thick blood poured down, only to be repelled by an invisible barrier emanating from the cane in the Gentleman of Knock's hand as soon as it came within three chi of the trio.
“Door of Knock, Lock!”
The Gentleman of Knock slammed his blackwood cane onto the ground.
Decades of illusionary iron doors shimmering with ancient runes materialized out of thin air, embedding themselves layer upon layer into the surrounding void and the fissures of the earth. The gravitational pull of the Grail surging from the depths of the sanctuary, which attempted to forcibly correct Ryan's physical form, was severed by fully thirty percent the moment those spectral iron doors descended!
Ryan seized this immensely precious breathing room.
The Lantern spirituality within his body acted like a precise carving knife. Capitalizing on the weakened external force, he instantly sealed off several completely uncontrollable Grail nodes inside his right arm.
As the excruciating pain subsided slightly, Ryan stood up, the cold white daylight of the Echoing Lantern blazing bright.
For the first time, the three stood in the exact same trench.
The Edge warrior confronted the flesh entity head-on, his dark red blade light cutting the giant creature into ragged pieces; the Gentleman of Knock locked down space with the laws of Knock, severing the sanctuary's rule-based suppression; and Ryan used the light of the Lantern to illuminate the entire sanctuary, exposing the internal spiritual flow trajectories of the giant creature without reservation before the two of them!
“It's useless!” Ryan's voice was cold and precise. “Its flesh is supplied with boundless vitality by the Heart. As long as the sanctuary remains intact, it can regenerate over a hundred times a second! Ordinary slicing cannot kill it!”
Amidst flashing blade light, the Edge warrior cleaved the giant creature's massive face in two with a single strike. Yet in a mere fraction of a breath, countless crimson sprouts of flesh intertwined, sealing it back together.
“The core isn't here.” The Gentleman of Knock raised his head, looking toward the colossal heart in the deepest depths of that viscous flesh. “The core is inside that heart. This sanctuary possesses an extraordinarily high degree of self-awareness... It isn't attacking you, Ryan. It's trying to reclaim you.”
As if to confirm the Gentleman of Knock's words, the giant flesh entity that had been repeatedly battered by the Edge warrior suddenly ceased its meaningless thrashing.
A massive wound tore open on its chest. From within, countless blood vessels equipped with suckers and flesh-hooks swarmed toward Ryan like a torrential downpour! Those blood vessels completely ignored the nearby Edge warrior and Gentleman of Knock, locking all their greed and fanaticism onto Ryan's physical form, which emanated the Grail origin!
It wanted to drag Ryan into that mass of flesh and merge with him completely!
A cold light flashed in the Gentleman of Knock's eyes. He swept his cane in a strange arc through the air, forcibly twisting a row of blood vessels aimed at Ryan off course.
He turned his head, staring dead at Ryan, and growled in an extremely stern, somber tone:
“Back off! Don't let its flesh touch you!”
“The current you hasn't fully awakened... Once it touches you, it will completely recognize who you are! When that happens, the entire sanctuary will devour you at all costs!”
Flesh wailed; space trembled.
Facing the overwhelming tide of flesh, the blackwood cane in the Gentleman of Knock's hand erupted with ten thousand rays of golden-bronze brilliance. This was a high-tier application belonging to the Knock pathway—the Key to the Void.
A spectral door ten meters high swung open before the three of them, completely isolating the oncoming swarm of suckered vessels and bloody rain inside another dimensional fold.
“Go!”
The Gentleman of Knock barked out, stepping through the door first. The Edge warrior moved like lightning, right behind him.
Ryan did not hesitate. Gripping the Echoing Lantern tightly with his left hand, his body firmly shielded by cold white daylight, he stepped across the spectral door.
The tearing sensation of traversing space vanished in an instant.
When his vision cleared, the three were already behind the giant flesh entity—right within the inner heartland of the flesh sanctuary.
This place was a literal maze of flesh.
The surroundings were no longer hard stone walls, but passages constructed of translucent membranes, crisscrossing thick blood vessels, and writhing muscle tissue. The air was so thick it felt almost liquid; with every breath, one could feel intense extraordinary vitality burning inside the lungs.
What was most hair-raising was the inside of the flesh walls on both sides of the passage.
Enclosed within those translucent membranes were countless suspended “human bodies.”
As Ryan sprinted forward, he pushed his Glimpse eye technique to its absolute limit. The cold white daylight illuminated the scenes deep within the flesh membranes—
They were neither monsters nor corpses of cultists.
They were deformed human bodies of varied shapes, yet highly similar in some underlying structure. Some possessed double skeletons, some had completely inverted internal organs, and some had skin covered in cup-like sucker organs...
They were all failures.
They were the discarded, rejected products left behind by this sanctuary over long ages as it attempted to shape a “vessel of the Grail” according to some ancient template.
They had no souls, no consciousness, and not even fully developed brains—leaving behind nothing but physical shells lingering on through the vitality of the Heart alone, containing the pure origin of the Grail.
The Gentleman of Knock stopped in his tracks, turning back to look at the grim-faced Ryan. His voice was calm to the point of cruelty: “Back in the underground laboratory in London, we made seventy-three attempts in total. The first seventy-two times, all we created was rotten flesh like those over there. Only on the seventy-third try... did we succeed in using the supreme laws of the Grail to reconstruct a perfect physical body capable of bearing divine descent.”
“That was you.”
“Or rather, the body you currently occupy.”
Ahead, the viscous flesh maze suddenly twisted violently!
Enraged roars vibrated from all directions. The giant flesh entity outside seemed to have sensed the intrusion within; the walls of the entire maze began to contract sharply, and countless flesh spikes dripping with venomous acid stabbed out from every angle!
“Edge, hold it off!” the Gentleman of Knock growled.
The Edge warrior did not speak. His figure transformed into a dark red storm, twin blades dancing wildly, forcibly slicing through the compressing flesh walls ahead to open a bloody passage.
“Ryan, listen!” The Gentleman of Knock slapped a hand onto Ryan's shoulder. The power of Knock surged into Ryan's body, helping him share the pressure of the sanctuary's will. “Don't use the Lantern to hard-block the Grail!”
“This body is inherently the Grail! The more you use the Lantern to suppress it, the more severely your flesh and self-awareness will be torn apart!”
“Use your Lantern to analyze it! To illuminate it! To... master it!”
Ryan's body shuddered violently.
Use the Lantern to master the Grail?
This near-mad thought flashed through his mind like lightning.
The essence of the Lantern was revelation, intellect, truth, and definition.
The essence of the Grail was desire, containment, and the reconstruction and reception of flesh.
Why should he use the Lantern as a shield to passively take blows? Why couldn't he use the absolute rationality of the Lantern as a scalpel to command this vessel of the Grail?
Extreme composure instantly replaced shock and wavering.
Ryan closed his eyes.
In the extraordinary vision deep within his mind, the cold white light and pitch-black origin—which had been mutually repulsive and violently colliding—produced a bizarre fusion the moment his mindset shifted.
The light of the Lantern no longer acted as a wall. Instead, it transformed into countless infinitesimally fine threads of light, piercing with precision deep into those violent, uncontrollable Grail nodes within his body!
Analyze! Define! Reconstruct!
“In the name of the Lantern... define the vessel of the Grail!”
Ryan opened his eyes, the cold white flame and crimson glow shining in harmony within them!
Crack!
With a crisp click of bones, the tumor on Ryan's left arm that had deformed from loss of control instantly shrank and smoothed out. Immediately after, an extremely subtle, jade-like luster of healthy flesh surfaced beneath his skin.
Under the precise mastery of the Lantern, the Grail origin within him was no longer a poison destroying his self-identity. Instead, it became an absolute wellspring that instantly enhanced muscle density, boosted bone toughness, and granted his physical body incredible vitality and explosive power!
Ryan slammed his left fist shut, the air in his palm erupting with a dull blast like a steam whistle.
His physical strength surged several-fold in an instant!
“Very good... You truly are a monster.” Seeing this, a flicker of marvel flashed across the Gentleman of Knock's eyes.
However, the sanctuary's counterattack came faster and fiercer than imagined!
Boom—!
In the deepest depths of the maze, the heart as colossal as a mountain completely tore apart all the membranes wrapping it. Countless flesh tentacles bearing thousands of eyes smashed through the passage with a thunderous roar!
The full will of the sanctuary descended completely at this moment.
Rate on N.U.
