Night had fallen completely.
The moment Lu Yuan stepped out of Kraus's office, the cold night wind of the outer city rushed to meet him. At the same time, an extremely faint ripple reached him from afar. Lu Yuan instinctively glanced toward the Polymath Tower.
Was that the aura of a new knowledge-derived insect?
At this moment, the main tower stood dark and silent in the night, seemingly devoid of any unusual movement.
Lu Yuan shook his head helplessly and didn't take it to heart. Even though he knew one was there, it wouldn't be easy to find. It would be much more convenient to search once his own knowledge-derived insect had mostly recovered.
Lu Yuan withdrew his gaze, clutched the Holy Light Stone in his coat, and turned back toward his residence.
Meanwhile, at the top of the Polymath Tower, the sound of the wind had long been blocked out by the thick stone walls.
In the center of the circular platform, the giant head resting within the dark red array hung quietly, its bony surface a ghastly, pale white.
Since the previous Seed of Wish had been forcibly extracted by Lu Yuan, this remain belonging to The Man on the Wall seemed to have recovered significantly. The dark flames deep within its eye sockets, which had previously been almost stagnant, were now slowly churning once more.
An old man stood at the edge of the array.
The Guardian's white hair fluttered slightly in the windless air. His cloudy pupils stared unblinkingly at the skull in the center of the array.
The black overcoat he wore was somewhat tattered, and threads of pitch-black aura, like ink, were currently seeping from its edges. They crawled slowly against his neck and arms, shrouding more than half of his body in shadow.
Beneath his feet, the dark tissue that had originally merged with the floor tiles of the Polymath Tower was rhythmically pulsing like a living thing.
As he stood there, a flash of killing intent crossed his eyes.
Clearly, the Guardian had not been idle during the day since binding himself to the Polymath Tower. Using the tower's inscriptions, he had secretly probed the true state of this head.
Standing before it now, he already knew exactly what he was dealing with.
At the same time, the air at the top of the tower was becoming thick, cold, and viscous at a visible rate.
Hum.
The head trembled slightly within the array.
Immediately after, wisps of silver-grey mist seeped from the cracks in the bone, swirling and intertwining above the skull to faintly form a massive, blurred phantom.
The phantom had no specific features, only two hollow eye sockets, looking down from above at the white-haired old man.
As the phantom flickered, overlapping, muffled echoes reverberated through the stone walls.
"State your wish."
The ancient and stiff syllables echoed through the tower top.
As each word fell, it carried a physical weight of oppression, attempting to burrow deep into the Guardian's consciousness.
The Guardian remained expressionless, not even lifting an eyelid.
On his withered, wrinkled face, the only change was the faint upward curve at the corner of his lips.
He didn't acknowledge the invitation to state a wish at all, or rather, he refused to enter into the contract with The Man on the Wall.
In the next moment, the pitch-black aura on his body exploded outward, transforming into countless fine black threads. Following the dark tissue beneath his feet, they spread across the floor and stone walls in all directions like a spiderweb.
On the walls of the Polymath Tower's main tower, the ghostly blue inscriptions that had been dormant suddenly flared to life.
Following the rhythm of the spreading black aura, they began to flicker erratically.
The bricks, the pipes, and even every ancient inscription of this tower had now become an extension of his perception.
He stared at the head, his fingertips slowly curling inward.
The Guardian had no intention of listening to Kraus's earlier persuasion.
This wasn't a sudden fit of pique; it was a decision made after repeated consideration.
In the old man's worldview, such a weak yet troublesome forbidden remain should never have been allowed to stay within the bounds of the Polymath Tower.
Since a rabid dog was lurking beside his bed, the only logical course of action was to crush it while it was weak.
Furthermore, what truly made it intolerable for him was his binding with the Polymath Tower's inscription network yesterday.
When those ghostly blue runes embedded themselves into his flesh and began to delay his body's mutation, he had sensed something wrong.
An extremely faint yet tangibly real invisible thread had bypassed several floors to connect his perception with this head at the top of the tower.
He was a fifth-rank transcendent expert.
He was the final and strongest combat force of the Nightwatchers in Bronze City. Even if he had become a half-human, half-monster madman, what he maintained in his core was still that meager bit of human identity.
But now, this head was silently reaching out its aura through the inscriptions.
This was equivalent to placing an invisible noose around his neck. No one knew when the other party might give it a gentle tug, causing him to plunge into the abyss.
This was absolutely unacceptable!
Not to mention the recent series of upheavals in Bronze City.
The hyphae in the pipe network, the underground sinkholes, the forced harvesting, and the spill from the Sea of Knowledge.
Each of these disasters, which had nearly overturned the entire city, was inextricably linked to the remains before him.
With old and new debts piled together, there was no reason for a peaceful talk.
The black pupils deep in the Guardian's eye sockets fixed on the head, his cloudy gaze gradually becoming sharp.
He raised his right hand, and the dark tissue clinging to his body suddenly tightened, making his fingers look like a withered eagle's claw cast from bronze.
With this one palm strike, he would ensure this remain was completely wiped from existence within the Polymath Tower.
The phantom suspended in mid-air suddenly shrank, and a strange ripple flashed through its hollow eye sockets.
The Man on the Wall had clearly not expected this human to act with such violence.
In His original estimation, since both parties had established an inseparable bond with this Polymath Tower, a mutual retreat out of fear for the vessel's safety should have been the logical outcome.
During the six months He had been enshrined at the top of the tower by the Empire, His own aura had long since permeated every brick and every handful of soil in the Polymath Tower.
That was an ability unique to forbidden existences, turning this stone tower into His physical extension in Bronze City.
And the fifth-rank on the verge of losing control before Him had barged in yesterday and, in order to survive, locked himself into the tower's inscription network.
This had turned the situation into an extremely awkward deadlock.
The two of them were now like two souls in one body, sharing the massive stone vessel of the Polymath Tower.
If the Guardian forcibly crushed the skull, the Polymath Tower's inscription network would instantly collapse, and the human fifth-rank bound to the tower would be consumed on the spot by rampaging eerie power.
And if The Man on the Wall were to kill the Guardian now and damage this vessel, His own remaining power wouldn't last long either.
Fragility against fragility; it should have been a stalemate of mutual restraint.
But the aura erupting from the Guardian showed no hint of a desire for compromise.
He was prepared for mutual destruction.
With The Man on the Wall's current shattered and tattered foundation, He indeed lacked the strength to forcibly pull a fifth-rank human into His domain from a distance.
The reason Lu Yuan had been able to enter and leave His platform was that the man carried a forbidden causality that even He couldn't see through. But facing this old fellow who was covered in pitch-black aura and had progressed hundreds of years along a transcendent pathway, His rules were equally unable to move him.
"I share this tower with you."
The overlapping echoes ground through the air with a hint of cold questioning.
"To do this is to destroy yourself."
The Guardian didn't respond, nor did he even look up at the phantom.
He simply stepped forward. On his withered, fleshy arm, the skin suddenly began to writhe violently. Then, bloodshot, fleshy eyes began to bulge out from beneath the skin one after another, turning restlessly.
His already stiff and deathly old face began to distort slightly under this surge of power.
The pitch-black aura on his body could no longer be suppressed, pushing outward frantically along the stone surface.
In the middle levels of the main tower, Arthur was hunched over, using his fingertip to trace a newly engraved locking rune on a broken stone slab. This was a lock that Valo had bypassed, and he had to complete it before the handover.
A flurry of footsteps came from the stairs, and Hilde rushed down, still clutching the notebook that recorded the changes in the Guardian's body.
"The Guardian isn't downstairs anymore," she said, her voice strained. "I wanted to get you to do a status assessment with me, but he's gone."
Arthur frowned and was about to respond, but his movements stopped first.
The inscriptions on the stone walls that had just lit up were suddenly subjected to a powerful pull, their ghostly blue light flickering wildly and erratically.
What followed was an icy pressure cascading down from the top of the tower, causing the air on this floor to drop over ten degrees in an instant. White frost even began to form in the cracks between the stones.
The corner of Arthur's eye twitched violently.
"He's at the top! Something's gone wrong!"
He immediately realized what was happening. Ignoring everything else, he dropped the bone needle he was using as a stylus, straightened up without a word, and began sprinting up the spiral staircase.
Hilde was stunned for a moment before she too realized what was happening. Gritting her teeth, she followed close behind.
The old man had made his decision after all.
Arthur chased upward through the dim staircase, the sound of their heavy, muffled footsteps echoing in his ears.
He knew all too well what was about to happen. With the Guardian's overwhelming and unreasonable strength, if he truly fought to the death with The Man on the Wall, mutual destruction was the best possible outcome.
But that was something he absolutely could not afford.
He had spent nearly ten years of his life's work on that head for the sake of this harvesting plan.
Now, he had finally obtained the follow-up scheme from the deceased Valo that could optimize harvesting efficiency, and he had gathered the physical materials needed to persuade the imperial center.
As long as these things could be presented on the tables in the royal capital, the infamy he had endured for half his life and the students who had died in Bronze City would finally have a justification.
If The Man on the Wall fell into a deep sleep again, the anchor for the Sea of Knowledge would close.
All the materials and all the optimized schemes would turn into scrap paper overnight.
He couldn't let his life's work be buried for nothing.
But Arthur also understood that against a fifth-rank Nightwatcher veteran, he had no possibility of intercepting him by force.
His only hope was to reach the top before the stone tower collapsed and persuade the old man to stand down.
"His body hasn't fully recovered yet," Hilde said as she caught up half a step behind him, her eyes fixed on the flickering inscriptions above. Her voice was full of anxiety. "Resting for a day brought back some strength, but he's far from being able to fight an all-out battle. If they really fight, he'll likely be the one to suffer."
Arthur believed this. When it came to judging the depth of a transcendent's status, few in Bronze City were more accurate than this Appraiser from the headquarters.
It was precisely because of this that Hilde was more anxious than anyone. She was under orders to keep a close eye on the Guardian's body, which was now symbiotic with the tower. If the confrontation at the top went south, it wouldn't just be the old man who suffered—she, who was following behind, would be caught in it as well.
Rate on N.U.
