Lu Yuan glanced at the afterimage fading behind him and nodded.
He walked to the edge of the sinkhole and peered into its depths.
It was pitch-black below. Even the light from his march lamp couldn't reveal much, showing only the swirling inscriptions that began covering the edges of the walls, growing denser the deeper they went.
Lu Yuan hesitated no longer. Carrying the march lamp in one hand, he stepped inside.
Kraus stood in the pipe network layer, watching Lu Yuan's figure vanish into the darkness. He turned to look at Margaret.
“Go clear out the ghouls nearby,” Kraus said. “The fog has brought them surging up again. I'll watch over these people.”
Margaret nodded without a word, turning to walk back toward the entrance.
The pipe network layer quickly fell silent. Kraus stood alone before the sinkhole, staring down into the darkness, his thoughts unreadable.
The moment Lu Yuan stepped into the darkness, he felt the ground beneath his feet vibrating slightly, as if something below was slowly writhing.
He raised the march lamp to illuminate his surroundings.
The light only reached three to five paces ahead; any further, and it seemed to be swallowed up.
Those swirling eerie inscriptions covered every inch of the channel—above his head, beneath his feet, everywhere—spinning in loop after loop, devouring the light bit by bit.
Lu Yuan narrowed his eyes.
The moment his gaze landed on those inscriptions, an intense wave of dizziness washed over him, and the entire world seemed to twist along with the swirling arcs.
He immediately cast his gaze downward, doing his best not to focus on any single inscription, which caused most of the dizziness to recede.
Before entering these deeper depths, a single swirling inscription indeed couldn't affect him.
Now, though the number of these inscriptions had multiplied countless times, the outcome remained the same—it was just slightly more disorienting when he looked directly at them.
His Sanity didn't fluctuate in the slightest, and the grey-white text gave no warning either.
Lu Yuan composed himself and took a few steps forward, holding the march lamp.
Before he could go far, a line of text popped up at the edge of his vision.
【Inscription (Advanced · Eerie Inscription): +1...20.5/50】
Lu Yuan's footsteps paused.
Immediately after, another prompt popped up.
【Inscription (Advanced · Eerie Inscription): +1...21.5/50】
He knew that, currently, he had only one way to gain experience in eerie inscriptions: carving ghoul brain cores.
Yet carving several of those might not even yield 0.1 points.
But here, after taking just a few steps in this channel, his skill had actually increased by a full point, and it was still climbing.
This place was practically a holy land for farming experience.
However, Lu Yuan did not forget his purpose.
Suppressing the slight joy in his heart, he raised his march lamp and walked quickly toward the depths of the channel, guided by the pale white light of the sandworm oil.
This wasn't Lu Yuan's first time in this channel, and he was fairly familiar with the paths nearby.
Though the light was chewed away by the swirling inscriptions until it only reached two or three paces ahead, the path beneath his feet remained unchanged. Guided by memory, he didn't slow down.
The channel was incredibly quiet.
The swirling eerie inscriptions didn't make a sound. Only the flame of the march lamp occasionally flickered, pressed down by something unseen, casting fluctuating shadows inside the copper casing.
As he rounded the second bend, a faint blue light emerged from the darkness ahead.
The light was very dim and faint, yet it stood out starkly in the pitch-black darkness seven or eight paces away.
Lu Yuan slowed his pace and held the march lamp further forward. While the light couldn't reach that far, the blue glow was moving toward him.
It was the Blue Knight.
The Blue Knight emerged from the darkness, her state completely different from before.
The light blue threads on the outer layer of her armor were wound extremely tight, wrapping layer upon layer against the plates, sealing her from head to toe. Only her eyes shone with a deep blue light, exceptionally conspicuous in the pitch-black channel.
She seemed to sense someone behind her. Stunned for a moment, she took a few steps toward Lu Yuan's direction before confirming that there was indeed someone there, and that it was Lu Yuan.
She stared at Lu Yuan in the darkness, clearly not expecting to see him here.
A Rank 2, casually walking through these overwhelming, omnipresent eerie inscriptions while holding nothing but a single lamp.
After all, she had only managed to endure and reach this point after walking for so long by relying on the Knight Academy's special cultivation method and a full set of transcendent equipment.
Yet the young man before her, who had clearly entered after her, had already caught up. It defied all logic.
The Blue Knight opened her mouth but ultimately decided against asking.
Lu Yuan saw her confusion but didn't explain. He simply walked quickly to her side, nodded, and continued forward.
The Blue Knight remained silent for a breath, watching Lu Yuan walk ahead. Unsure of what to think, she followed him.
With Lu Yuan leading and the Blue Knight following less than a step behind, Lu Yuan quickly discovered something: these swirling eerie inscriptions seemed to possess a consciousness of their own.
Whenever something passed by, they would instinctively lock onto the moving object like countless staring eyes.
Thus, with Lu Yuan walking in front, the attention of those dense eerie inscriptions fell almost entirely upon him.
They surged from all directions, their rotations seemingly carrying a collective gaze that closely tracked Lu Yuan.
The sensation of spinning and twisting landed on him, only to slide off his body.
By walking in front, Lu Yuan shouldered a massive portion of the burden for the Blue Knight. Almost all the gazes that had previously targeted her were drawn to him instead.
Sensing the sudden relief of pressure, the Blue Knight watched the young man ahead. The threads wrapping her body loosened slightly, and her somewhat ragged breathing grew steady.
Her bewilderment reached its peak at this moment.
This made absolutely no sense. How on earth was Lu Yuan resisting these things? Was it because of his transcendent pathway? But she didn't ask.
Kraus had mentioned Lu Yuan to her a long time ago—about a month back.
At that time, she had just returned to the Bronze City from the Knight Academy when Kraus approached her, saying he had a young man under him whom he wanted to send to the Knight Academy to train.
Every Nightwatchers branch had slots for training at the Knight Academy, but they remained vacant year-round.
Having a slot didn't mean one could get in.
Most of the time, these slots were used to accommodate noble scions, either to give them prestige or to help them avoid trouble; very few actually went to train at the Knight Academy.
The Knight Academy's recruitment relied mostly on knights discovering and recommending candidates themselves.
Once a person trained to the level of “Knight” and obtained their qualification, they would leave the academy to pursue their own path to becoming a Grand Knight Commander.
Yet most graduated knights would never reach the rank of Grand Knight Commander in their lifetimes. Consequently, they scattered across the empire, searching for their own paths while assisting the empire and keeping an eye out for truly promising talents for the academy.
This method did bring some highly talented youths to the academy, but the efficiency was incredibly slow.
Those who could become knights possessed extremely critical standards. A graduated knight might not recruit a single student for the academy in several years. Thus, the academy's student pool was exceptionally scarce.
So when she heard Kraus say he had a young man under him, the Blue Knight's first thought was: Which family's young master wants to go to the Knight Academy to gain some prestige and experience? She hadn't paid it much mind.
However, Kraus carried some weight within the Nightwatchers, and his strength was undeniable. She didn't want to slight him, so she said she would look into it later.
It wasn't until she met Lu Yuan in person that her perspective shifted, and she truly began to take him seriously.
The first time she examined Lu Yuan's pathway, she knew it was absolutely not what was written in his file—a mere Eerie Knowledge transcendent.
Although an Eerie Knowledge transcendent was dangerous and powerful, they were far from being this defying of nature, unless the eerie entity he chose was incredibly powerful—yet Lu Yuan didn't show the slightest hint of pollution.
Moreover, through their interactions, she could feel that Lu Yuan's Sanity was ridiculously high, almost on par with her peers back at the Knight Academy.
For a Rank 2 Knowledge transcendent to have such a foundation of Sanity—in all her years at the northern branch, she had only ever seen one other.
Lu Yuan's background was also clean. An Easterner with no family background, no backer, and a Nightwatchers status that seemed to have come out of nowhere.
Such a background amounted to nothing in the empire's aristocratic circles, but the Knight Academy didn't care about that.
The academy only looked at two things: whether one's talent was sufficient, and whether one's mind was resilient enough. No matter how she looked at it, Lu Yuan's talent was certainly more than enough.
The scene before her further validated her judgment. A Rank 2 youth, casually paving the way for her in a place where even a Rank 4 struggled to hold on.
This could no longer be described simply by the word “genius.”
The Blue Knight suppressed these thoughts. The channel rounded its final bend ahead, and the space suddenly opened up.
The two of them rounded the bend one after the other. The ground suddenly expanded beneath their feet, their footsteps echoing through the vast space.
The light of the march lamp could illuminate nothing in this vast emptiness; its pale white flame flickered and instantly dimmed by more than half.
The suppression of this place was far heavier than in the channel.
Lu Yuan swept the march lamp around, barely managing to discern the outline of the space.
The copper wall should have been directly ahead. The last time he came, the copper wall stood at the very end of this space like a massive mountain, its surface smooth as a mirror.
But now, there was nothing.
Swirling eerie inscriptions covered every single wall around them, spinning frantically in the empty darkness at a speed and density countless times higher than in the channel.
Thousands of swirling arcs fell upon Lu Yuan from every direction, only to slide off him. The dizziness was several times more intense than before, yet Lu Yuan remained completely unfazed.
As long as his Sanity didn't drop, he was invincible.
Just then, Lu Yuan's left eye grew slightly warm. The Knowledge Worm had awakened.
At some point, it had poked its head out from beneath the key, looking around. The colorful light covering its body suddenly flared up, blinking rapidly—far more active than during its quiet recovery period.
Lu Yuan could feel the emotions it was transmitting: excitement, laced with joy.
Clearly, the swirling eerie inscriptions in this vast space were exactly what it loved.
Currently, its entire body was flashing with faint light as it buried its head, devouring something.
Lu Yuan didn't interfere.
Once the Knowledge Worm was full, it would always feed some of that energy back to him. The more it ate, the more he benefited.
Back when he was heavily injured, no matter whether he fed it crystals or anything else, the little thing had shown no interest. Now that it was willing to eat, Lu Yuan was more than happy to let it.
Rate on N.U.
