Chapter 877: Chapter 406: Lin Yi… “Ashen Apostle”?_2
Lin Yi leaned close to Zhao Lingxiao and whispered: “Hey…”
“What?” Zhao Lingxiao replied impatiently.
Lin Yi asked humbly for guidance: “What is ‘Ashen Apostle’?”
“I have no idea either…”
“Then what were you so shocked about?”
“Whatever the security guard said you were at that mont, I would have been shocked. That’s all.”
“Damn…” Lin Yi curled his lips, “You’re putting up quite an act, huh?”
“If it were you, and you said ‘Look, there’s a dog over there,’ I’d still widen my eyes and look over.”
“Thanks, I feel mildly offended.”
As Lin Yi spoke, he refocused his attention because the security guard had already brought them into a certain section of the library.
He widened his eyes, attempting to peer beyond the edges of the orange-yellow light, but all he saw were rows upon rows of bookshelves, giving him the feeling of weaving through endless stacks in the shelving area.
Yet this shelving area subtly gave him a sense of being distinctly different from the “normal” library.
“Could it be ‘Layer Transition’?” The thought popped into Lin Yi’s mind.
Soon, they disappeared into this corner, and then the encroaching darkness began to recede until everything returned to normal.
On May 10, X023, at 5:01 AM, the first floor of the library fell silent once again, leaving only the faint shadows of zealots wandering among the shelves, trembling as they gazed from afar at the corner that had long since returned to its usual state.
At 5:01:34, the elevator on the first floor of the library opened, and a disheveled figure rushed out, shouting into the void where the security team had long since vanished…
On May 10, X023, within the depths of an unknown expansive room in the library’s “?” layer.
The walls of the room were covered with rows upon rows of LED light tubes, their blue-white radiance saturating the entire space.
Inside the room were nurous mobile bookshelves, though the books they held were all chaotically arranged.
The shelves were a cluttered ss, so of the books left deliberately open as if soone had purposefully positioned them there.
Despite the chaos, a large, empty area stretched across the center of the room.
In that space stood a group of people along with an enormous experint table.
The group numbered about seven, most of them stooped elderly figures, their sparse, gray hair clinging to their scalps like withered winter grass amid barren fields, their faces deeply etched with wrinkles.
Their leader, a man with a high-bridged nose, wore thick black-frad glasses that housed sharp, fervent eyes at odds with his outward appearance.
Clutching a book, he chanted obscure, lengthy phrases, his voice teeming with intent as he glanced occasionally at a vessel on one corner of the experint table.
Several others near him echoed his chanting, their tones resembling a peculiar choir.
Within the vessel lay a sculpted fragnt of a dismbered limb.
From its twisted contours, it was impossible to determine what exactly the object was. It resembled an unsettling vine-like sculpture or perhaps a piece of dark, retro-styled cultish artwork.
As the man chanted, faint lights continuously flickered across the surface of the limb, as if responding to the magical power invoked, akin to a raw stone brimming with mysterious energy.
The elder’s chanting grew increasingly hoarse, beads of sweat forming on his deeply furrowed brow, as though simply uttering the words was exhausting an imnse amount of spiritual power, leaving him teetering like a dying fla in a gust of wind.
Those around him swayed as well, their bodies precariously upright, resembling seaweed tethered amidst turbulent waves.
Finally, the radiance on the dismbered limb began to gather inward, culminating in a faint golden glow within.
The ergence of this golden glow filled their eyes with fervent anticipation, akin to sparrows born in the night witnessing the first crescent moon.
Their chants beca increasingly synchronized and resonant, while the light within the limb grew denser and more dazzling.
With a sudden “crack,” fissures spread across the surface of the limb!
The fragnt appeared to be a mysterious egg, their chants seemingly accelerating the incubation of so unknown entity within!
At the sight of these cracks, they grew more excited, their eyes so feverish and expectant that words could no longer convey the intensity.
But just as the brilliance within the limb reached its peak, the cracks swiftly extended across its entirety. Monts later, with a resounding “boom,” the limb shattered into dust, leaving only an incredibly concentrated golden aura that lingered briefly in the vessel before dissipating like a wisp of exhaled warm air.
The chanting abruptly ceased, and the sudden silence chilled the air surrounding the experint table.
The elderly leader’s arms weakly supported him against the table, quivering hands removing his heavy black-frad glasses before quietly pulling out a handkerchief to clean the lenses.
The fervor in his eyes had crumbled entirely, replaced by a hollow daze.
His fingers idly pinched at his glasses, as though trying to crush the weight of disappointnt.
After a while, he silently retrieved a recording pen and pressed the record button:
“Log entry…”
“May 10, X023, 4:53 AM, the 1,012th ‘Supre Breath Incubation’ experint…”
“The experint made so progress, but overall results remain insignificant…”
“Including myself, six administrators conducted ‘intensified testing’ on ‘Specin #1504’… As anticipated, the Supre Breath did manifest, but it persisted for only 13 seconds before abruptly decaying…”
“That’s 3 seconds longer than the last attempt…”
The elder recorded gradually, as though reliving the defeat of a protracted battle.
What was strange, however, was that despite his aged appearance, his voice sounded youthful, like a man barely in his twenties.
This incongruity between voice and visage made it hard not to suspect that he might have lost portions of his ti due to so malevolent curse.
“…Experint conclusion…”
“Failure.”
“Cough, cough…”
“Cough, cough, cough…”
The elder clutched his chest and coughed violently, as though he intended to expel his lungs entirely.
He steadied himself, picked up the book at hand, and approached a disorderly bookshelf, muttering under his breath: “Where could the oversight be… Where could it be…”
He incessantly flipped through the books, as if trying to burrow into them.
Suddenly, he sensed sothing and looked sharply toward a certain direction…
Not just him, everyone in the room felt this wave of disturbance and turned their gazes to the sa spot.
“It’s…?! It’s!!!” The elder’s voice quivered with excitent.
“It’s the ‘Pathway’! The pathway to the Mysterious Codex has truly appeared!!”
At the direction the elder stared, space distorted, layers rippled, and a deep passage gradually materialized amid the library’s chanisms—exactly the pathway Lin Yi had glimpsed before, and at its end lay “Lawmaker’s Words,” which seed to be the ‘Mysterious Codex’ the elder referred to.
The elder dashed out of the room in an uncontrolled frenzy, like a soldier fleeing in panic, crazedly rushing toward where the pathway had been unveiled.
Oddly enough, as he exited the room, he imdiately found himself among a cluster of Greek temple-inspired structures. This was indeed a layer within the library, yet the architectural style differed drastically from the traditional design of the first floor…
The construction here resembled an entire slice of a temple uprooted and transplanted into the library. Massive Doric pillars dotted the space, covered with the scars of ti.
Under the glow of the lights, these columns seed to emit faint luminescence, tracing strange patterns as if imbued with an enigmatic magical energy.
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