Hilde shook her head. “It’s impossible to judge precisely from the outside. However, based on the load fluctuations in the energy conduits, at least sixty percent is complete. If Kame is using his modified scheme, the remaining part might be even faster.”
Faster meant the load the old Dean had to bear was also accelerating.
Kraus looked at the old man inside the protective door, who was constantly convulsing within the sarcophagus, and fell silent for a few seconds.
“Where is Calvin?”
“He’s upstairs organizing the evacuation,” Hilde replied. “He gathered all the mentors who can still move and divided them into three groups to take turns stabilizing the peripheral inscription protection. But that’s about all they can do.”
Kraus rubbed the corners of his eyes with some frustration. The only sounds in the corridor were the low hum of the energy conduits and the dull, rhythmic pulse of the inscription resonance from within the Main Control Room. The mixture of the two sounds was stifling.
Arthur folded the sketches and tucked them back into his pocket, then stood up with his hands on his knees.
“What if he completes the harvesting?” Arthur’s voice was very soft. “According to him, everything will come to a close once the harvesting ends. How do you think he’ll end it?”
“He won’t be able to,” Kraus’s answer was short.
“The old Dean was forcibly connected as a medium, and his body has already held out for several hours. Kame’s modified scheme reduces the instability of the channel, but it transfers all the pressure onto the medium. If he wants to complete the harvesting, the old Dean has to endure until the very end.” His gaze fell on the sarcophagus.
“But the old Dean won’t last much longer. Are you still going to lie to yourself?”
Arthur’s expression shifted, but he couldn’t find the words to respond.
The corridor fell silent again. There was nothing they could do but watch the situation slide step by step toward the worst-case scenario.
Above them, the stone walls of the Polymath Tower were vibrating slightly.
The Sea of Knowledge was still overflowing.
The air in the corridor suddenly grew heavy.
Kraus’s body reacted before his mind did. The hand he had resting on the stone wall suddenly clenched, and his other hand instinctively rubbed the bone ring on his ring finger.
Arthur felt it too. His body, which had just stood up, froze, and he turned his head toward the spiral staircase at the end of the corridor.
A sense of oppression seeped through the stone walls and copper pipes from outside the Polymath Tower, compressing the air in the corridor until it became viscous.
The flagstones beneath their feet began to tremble slightly. The ghostly blue inscriptions embedded in the walls extinguished the moment that aura passed over them, darkening one by one as the effect spread from the staircase toward them. The corridor plunged into darkness, and then footsteps approached.
They were light, almost inaudible, but with every step, the inscription patterns in the flagstones beneath would shudder. One ghostly blue light would be stepped out, only for another to relight, though its brightness was much weaker than before.
A figure emerged from the shadows of the spiral staircase.
His full head of white hair had greyish-white edges in the residual shimmer of the inscriptions. A pitch-black aura enveloped his entire body; thick black mist flowed slowly against his aged, hunched frame from shoulder to ankle.
Over a dozen black eyes drifted within the aura, their pupils pointing in different directions—some staring at the ceiling, others at the depths of the corridor—rotating slowly.
The Guardian stood in the center of the corridor. The pitch-black aura in his deep-set eye sockets obscured most of his pupils, while the remaining parts looked toward the crystal protective door.
His gaze pierced through the semi-transparent crystal barrier, sweeping over the old Dean in the sarcophagus, the dark black fragment in Kame’s hands, and K, who was leaning against the copper pipe supports in the corner.
The moment Kraus turned around, he understood what the Guardian intended to do.
Every eye on this old man, who was shrouded in pitch-black aura, turned toward the Main Control Room simultaneously. The speed at which the black mist diffused from around him accelerated, and the inscriptions on the flagstones beneath his feet shattered instantly.
“Sir, don’t!”
Kraus’s voice echoed through the corridor, its tail end grinding away against the shattered inscriptions.
The Guardian glanced at him, his aged face calm. He merely gave a small shake of his head, his white hair swaying slightly on his shoulders.
Then, he took the next step toward the crystal protective door.
The pitch-black aura around the Guardian suddenly surged.
The dozen or so eyes that had been slowly drifting in the black mist all snapped open to their widest extent at the same moment.
The pupils constricted rapidly, spinning frantically in different directions, as some eerie aura surged within the black irises.
Immediately after, even more eyes surfaced from the depths of the aura—twenty, thirty—the number continued to increase, densely crowding the surface of the black mist around the Guardian. Each one rotated independently, turning the entire surface of the aura into a writhing curtain of eyes.
The Guardian raised his right hand, palm upward.
An eye squeezed out from the center of his palm, larger than all the others. Its black pupil was twisted, its edges irregularly twitching and expanding.
The moment the eye left his palm, it shot upward, piercing through the stone ceiling of the corridor, through the layers of floors and copper pipes of the Polymath Tower, rising in a straight line toward the tower top.
In the sky above the Polymath Tower, the golden river of light, which had expanded to the point of being nearly out of control, was overflowing frantically. Variegated knowledge fragments, accompanied by whispers and eyes, poured out in all directions.
The moment that massive pitch-black eye broke through the top of the tower, it suddenly expanded to dozens of meters in diameter. Its pupil aligned perfectly with the rift where the Sea of Knowledge was leaking, and the entire eye pressed against it, sealing it tight.
The overflow was cut off.
The variegated fragments vanished the moment they hit the surface of the black eye. The end of the river of light was blocked, and no more new knowledge fragments drifted out from the rift.
The dark purple halo permeating the sky began to slowly dissipate, and the space above the Polymath Tower returned to a silent night sky occupied by the massive black eye.
In the corridor, the Guardian withdrew his right hand, and the aura around him began to erupt.
He took the final step toward the crystal protective door.
The semi-transparent crystal barrier, the bronze railings, the node inscriptions of the energy circuits, and the defense arrays on both sides of the Main Control Room entrance—everything shattered simultaneously the moment the Guardian’s aura crushed over them.
The crystal exploded into powder-like fine chips that suspended in the air. The welding points of the bronze railings burst, and the inscription patterns peeled off the stone surfaces, crumbling into a floor of dim copper dust.
“How is this possible!” Kame let out a cry of shock.
The barrier that had trapped Kraus and Arthur hadn’t even lasted a single step against the Guardian.
Kraus stood where he was, unmoving. Hilde retreated to the side wall of the corridor, her hand pressed against the copper box, her breath hitched.
Arthur staggered half a step back, his back hitting the wall, as crystal dust drifted onto the shoulders of his mage robes.
The space of the Main Control Room was now completely open.
The Guardian was already standing in front of K.
The Guardian raised his left hand with a gentle movement. His fingers weren’t even fully extended; he simply gave a faint push forward.
The air in the Main Control Room solidified in that instant. The energy light-beams flowing through the copper pipes all came to a standstill, and even the spasms of the old Dean’s facial muscles in the sarcophagus slowed down by several degrees.
The space around K was the first to change.
The pitch-black aura spread out from the Guardian’s body, condensing into an opaque black shroud around K.
Dozens of black eyes emerged on the inner side of the shroud, every single one staring intently at K. Their pupils bore down on him from above, from the sides, and from beneath his feet, crowded so densely that not a single gap remained.
The lower half of K’s face beneath his hood tightened instantly. He instinctively took a step back, his back hitting the copper pipe supports with a dull metallic clang.
His hands clenched inside his sleeves, and black liquid began to seep from his fingertips; he was clearly severely shaken.
Before Kame could even react, his body did it for him.
A thumb-sized bulge rose on his right arm. The skin was pushed up from beneath, expanding visibly before it tore open. A black eye squeezed out from the rift, its pupil slowly rotating once before stopping to stare back at Kame’s own face.
A second bulge appeared below his collarbone, a third on the left side of his neck, and a fourth and fifth emerged almost simultaneously from his chest and forearm.
The bulges swelled and burst one after another. Black eyes grew from every rift, accompanied by viscous bodily fluids and torn edges of flesh, their pupils rotating in all directions.
When Kame looked down and saw those eyes sprouting from his own arm, he let out a distorted scream, and his legs began to go weak.
He tried desperately to retreat, but his body was no longer listening to his commands. His knees bent further and further, and three more bulges appeared on his left leg, squeezing out a string of eyes from his thigh to his knee.
“Lord Guardian! Listen to me! They—”
His mouth was still moving, but his voice had already become a blur.
Something inside his throat expanded, blocking his trachea. Kame’s eyes bulged wide, his lips twitching, but he couldn't squeeze out another word.
His body began to collapse from the inside. His flesh liquefied and subsided, spreading from the ends of his limbs toward his torso. His bones lost their support within the liquefied muscle and slumped over. Within seconds, the man collapsed from a standing humanoid form into a pool of greyish-black sludge on the floor.
The surface of the sludge was covered with dozens of black eyes, large and small, still rotating slowly. Faint outlines of a human shape remained at the edges; the curve of the shoulders and the direction of the arms were still recognizable, but his facial features were indistinguishable.
The dark black fragment Kame had been holding lost its support and tumbled onto the stone floor, bouncing twice before coming to a stop. The fragment’s light-devouring property cast an unnatural shadow on the ground.
K watched the entirety of Kame’s death.
From the first eye sprouting on the arm to the entire person turning into sludge, it had taken less than ten seconds.
K’s hood was soaked with sweat and clung to his forehead. The pupils in the depths of his eyes constricted to their limit, and his jaw muscles creaked as he ground his teeth.
A Rank 3 Knowledge transcendent hadn’t even managed to withstand a single move before the Guardian; he had been dismantled from the inside into a pile of waste.
K’s mind raced at high speed, scanning for escape routes and positions in an instant. His entire body erupted with a massive amount of black liquid as he began to liquefy. His liquid body flattened and elongated, trying to slip through the gaps between the copper pipes and the flagstones.
The Guardian’s raspy, low voice rang out in the Main Control Room.
“I gave you a chance.”
K’s liquid surface began to bulge, exactly like what had happened to Kame. They rose from the liquid surface and then burst, black eyes squeezing out from within.
K’s liquid form suddenly contracted as he tried to shed the parts where the eyes had grown, his liquid body splitting into several streams to flee in different directions simultaneously.
But wherever the liquid flowed, eyes grew. Even the liquid that had crawled into the gaps of the copper pipes grew eyes, which stared out from the inner walls of the pipes.
Every escape route was watched and blocked.
The Guardian stood in place without giving chase. The number of black eyes on his body continued to explode; hundreds surfaced from beneath his clothes, and over a dozen small ones squeezed out from between the strands of his white hair, densely covering most of his body's surface.
With him as the center, a pitch-black domain expanded outward. The walls of the Main Control Room were the first to be swallowed; the inscriptions on the stone surfaces extinguished in the darkness, and the metallic luster of the copper pipes vanished.
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