The team came to a halt.
The two Descendants at the very front suddenly stopped in their tracks.
The first reaction of those behind them was to look forward. Lake’s hand already gripped his short-blade, the Blue Knight’s fingertips tightened slightly, and Adrian’s prayer faltered for a beat.
Everyone’s gaze swept over the shoulders of the Descendants, piercing into the depths of the channel ahead.
The light from the march lamps swept across, illuminating the rubble floor, the cracks in the rock walls, and the remains of greyish-white hyphae.
There was nothing.
The channel ahead was empty.
Lu Yuan retracted his gaze from the front and fixed it upon the Descendants.
They were frozen in place, motionless. Their mechanical joints were locked in the posture of their last movement; their arms, hanging beneath their black robes, leaned slightly forward, and their feet were still planted on the gravel as if they had just taken half a step.
The cold white glimmer in their eye sockets had completely gone out.
The problem lay with the Descendants themselves.
The Great Ascendant stepped forward from the middle of the team, his silver-grey pupils scanning the stalled Descendants twice. His pace slowed by half a beat.
He did not act immediately.
The consciousness of the Descendants was still there; the Great Ascendant could feel that the faint layer of autonomous consciousness had not disappeared. They were still “alive,” but they no longer responded to any commands, nor did they act on their own.
Though conscious, they were locked within their own bodies.
“The consciousness is still present,” the Great Ascendant’s voice came from his metal chest, a few degrees slower than usual. “It doesn’t seem like anything is restricting it.”
He walked to the nearest Descendant, crouched down, and flipped it over.
With the Descendant’s back facing upward, the Great Ascendant’s metal fingers found an inconspicuous seam in the middle of its back and pried it open with force. The casing component emitted a dull metal clicking sound as he detached the entire plate.
The mechanical structure inside was exposed to the light of the march lamps.
A vast array of metal parts and gears were densely arranged inside the Descendant’s torso, their precisely interlocking structures reflecting a dull metallic luster under the light.
But between those gears, something that shouldn’t be there was entwined: greenish wooden roots.
Fine roots threaded through the gaps between the gears, spreading along the metal surfaces. Some were wound around several times, while others had bored directly into the joints between components.
The edges of some gears had been gnawed away into jagged remains, leaving rough gaps on the metal surfaces.
Lu Yuan crouched beside him, his gaze falling on a deeper spot.
【Detection Target: Descendant (Parasitized)】
【A mechanical breeding ground parasitized by an unknown living thing. Perhaps a unique eerie can be born?】
Seeing this, Lu Yuan understood. This thing actually counted as a living thing?
There were several copper parts inside the Descendant. They were few in number and scattered at key nodes of the mechanical structure, but these copper components had completely changed. Their copper color and luster had vanished, and in their original positions, a layer of wooden fibers had grown.
The fibers had grown into the original shapes of the copper parts, fitting perfectly into their original slots.
The copper had been eaten. After consuming it, the wooden fibers transformed themselves into the shape of the copper parts, replacing the original host.
The other metal components nearby were merely entwined and jammed by the roots; their surfaces showed no signs of corrosion.
Adrian walked over.
The old Archbishop looked down at the exposed internal structure of the Descendant, his gaze lingering on those wooden imitations for a few seconds. His brow furrowed as he looked up at the Great Ascendant.
“Are your Descendants really this easy to infiltrate?” Adrian’s tone was none too polite. “Doesn’t the Ascension Society claim that its mechanical modification technology has extremely high resistance to pollution?”
The Great Ascendant straightened up.
His silver-grey pupils turned toward Adrian without any sign of being provoked. His tone was flat as he answered the question.
“Descendants utilize a gold-silver-copper alloy formula. Their resistance to pollution and the eerie is extremely high; even rank 3 pollution erosion might not necessarily penetrate this system.”
He paused for a moment, his gaze falling back onto the replaced copper parts inside the Descendant. His silver-grey pupils suddenly constricted.
“Pollution? No, it is devouring copper.”
The Great Ascendant did not continue. He lowered his head to inspect his own right wrist joint.
Several extremely fine, greenish-grey roots were attempting to bore into the gaps of his joint.
He had just personally disassembled the infected Descendant and directly touched the internal wooden roots. The roots reacted quickly, already beginning to extend toward the alloy structure of his arm.
Without changing his expression, the Great Ascendant used his left hand to pinch those few roots, precisely pulling them out and crushing them between his fingers. At his rank 4 strength, this small amount of growth posed no substantial threat.
But after crushing them, he stared at his wrist for a few seconds longer.
Several visible microscopic corrosion pits had appeared on the alloy surface. At the spots where the roots had just touched, a thin layer of metal had been gnawed away.
Lu Yuan saw those corrosion pits.
He didn’t make a sound. The string in his mind was already pulled taut.
‘Even gold-silver-copper alloy can’t withstand it. What about pure copper?’
He thought of the bronze pillars. The core structure of the entire sealing network was made of copper. Although inscriptions were engraved upon them, the inscriptions relied on the copper surface. If the copper was continuously eroded, a single flaw in the inscriptions could easily lead to a large-scale chain failure.
Then he thought of something else.
When the previous battle ended, a Descendant had carried the captured wood-armored ghoul back to the surface.
That Descendant had walked all the way up from the bottom of the abyss, remaining in close contact with the wood-armored ghoul the entire time.
‘That Descendant above... what is its situation now?’
He was deep underground and had no way to notify the surface.
At this moment, the Great Ascendant added another comment.
“However,” his tone remained one of calm analysis, “if this thing truly could devour copper without limit, the two copper plate protection layers we passed through when we came down should have been eroded beyond recognition long ago.”
He paused.
“But they were perfectly intact. Therefore, there must be some kind of restriction.”
Lu Yuan made a mental note of this doubt. Currently, he didn’t have enough information to determine what that restriction was.
The Great Ascendant did not discuss it further with anyone.
He directly gave an order to those behind him, moving all remaining Descendants to the rear.
But he did not have them return to the surface.
Lu Yuan noticed this. It was unknown which Descendants had already been tainted by the Forest Seed; sending them up rashly might instead bring the problem to the surface.
However, if they remained in the rear, avoided contact with any infected ghouls, and were still infected, it would mean that the underground environment itself contained a source of Forest Seed pollution. The Great Ascendant was likely thinking the same thing.
The Descendant phalanx silently retreated to the very back of the team, forming two rows and coming to a standstill.
Without the Descendants acting as the front line, the team’s formation needed adjustment.
Adrian pressed the holy emblem on his chest and scanned the people present.
“Send one person up,” the Archbishop said decisively. “Notify the surface of the situation here.”
He looked at Hilde behind him.
Hilde nodded slightly and turned to point at a nun. The nun received the order and, without a word, turned to climb back up the way they came. Her footsteps echoed further and further away in the channel until they soon vanished.
Lake remained silent throughout, but when the Great Ascendant was inspecting the roots on his wrist, his gaze lingered on those corrosion pits for an instant.
The Blue Knight leaned against the rock wall, seemingly deep in thought.
...
Old Council Square. The sinkhole exit.
Glock leaned against the low wall at the edge of the copper plates, arms crossed over his chest, facing the dark opening of the sinkhole.
The cordons of the Holy Armored Army and the Iron Guard glowed with a dull golden light in the surroundings. The night wind blew from the direction of the inner city, carrying the characteristic chill of the copper walls.
The square was very quiet.
Occasionally, faint sounds could be heard coming up from deep within the sinkhole—the muffled thud of footsteps on the metal ladder, the echoes bouncing a few times in the vertical shaft before dissipating.
Then, the sound changed.
The rhythmic tapping on the metal ladder vanished, replaced by a splat-splat dragging sound. It was heavy and irregular, as if something wet and weighty was being hauled upward.
Glock’s arms dropped from his chest.
He walked to the edge of the sinkhole and leaned over to look down.
A figure dressed in grey robes was climbing up. The style of the robes belonged to a Descendant; he recognized the cut and fabric.
But the way it climbed was wrong.
The Descendant’s movements were stiff and sluggish. When its arms reached for the rungs, it looked as if it were completing a mechanical action repeated countless times—every movement was of the same amplitude and speed, devoid of any life.
The cold white light that should have been in its eyes was completely extinguished. Its entire body relied on residual instinct to drag itself up, section by section.
Glock took two steps back.
The upper body of the Descendant pulled itself over the edge of the sinkhole.
Its back was exposed to the light of the march lamps.
Glock’s expression darkened.
The wood-armored ghoul that had been bound with blue threads and carried on the Descendant’s shoulder was no longer there.
It had fused with the Descendant from the back.
The greenish-grey flesh of the ghoul had seeped into the gaps between the Descendant’s back plates, spreading along the grooves of the mechanical structure and intertwining with the components inside.
Wooden fibers filled the junction where the two bodies met. Densely packed roots sprouted from the boundary between flesh and metal, stitching the two together into a single entity.
The back of the Descendant’s grey robes had been burst open. The things revealed in the tear were neither entirely flesh nor entirely metal, but something utterly repulsive.
The Amalgamation stopped moving once it reached the surface.
Its entire body froze at the edge of the sinkhole, showing no signs of aggression. However, the wooden roots and scattered spores on its body were attempting to spread outward. Fine greenish-grey threads extended from its joints, reaching toward the copper plates on the ground.
Then, those roots recoiled.
The copper plates around the sinkhole were engraved with sealing inscriptions, which were connected to the underground sealing system of the Bronze City.
The moment the Amalgamation landed, the dark golden patterns at the edges of the inscriptions briefly flared. Upon contact with the surface of the copper plates, the roots immediately began to curl and blacken as if being scorched by something, and the speed of their spread was suppressed.
Glock retreated to a safe distance.
“Everyone, fall back! Do not approach!”
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