Chapter 107: The Cruel Analysis of the palace

Chapter 107: The Cruel Analysis of the Palace

The screams from the circular altar did not last long.

As the ancient crimson runes drained the final drop of vitality and poisoned Qi from Yue Fen and Mo Ruyuan, their bodies withered at a visible pace.

Their skin turned the color of dry parchment, collapsing inward against bone. When the blood-red light finally receded with a satisfied, low hum, only two piles of gray ash and shattered jade pendants remained on the stone platform.

HUMMMMM.

At the far end of the chamber, the massive stone archway shuddered. The heavy barrier of red light that had blocked the exit dissolved, revealing a dark, swirling spatial vortex that led directly into Sector 2.

The chamber fell into total, suffocating silence.

Nyren remained slumped against the fractured pillar, clutching her left shoulder. The three Purification Talismans Lothe had slapped onto her back had done their job—the creeping purple veins on her neck had stopped their lethal march toward her heart. Still, the residual poison made her skin look as pale as winter frost, and every breath rattled in her lungs.

She raised her crystalline blue eyes, staring at the figure standing amidst the drifting dust.

He wore the plain, unremarkable black robes of a traveling scholar. His face, masked by the talisman, was completely ordinary. Yet the terrifying efficiency he had displayed—manipulating two high-tier foreign cultivators to their deaths without ever unsheathing a blade—sent a shiver down her spine that had nothing to do with her Ice Qi.

"Why did you help me?" Nyren asked, her voice raspy, breaking the heavy quiet.

Lothe didn’t answer immediately.

He slowly turned his head, his dark, bottomless eyes meeting hers.

In truth, he hadn’t cared whether the daughter of General Ashford lived or died in this palace. In this new, broken world, lives were cheaper than dried grass, and compassion without purpose was a death sentence.

Yet, as he looked at Nyren’s determined, wounded posture, an image flashed unbidden across his mind.

Seana.

He remembered the stubborn, dangerous girl who would throw herself into danger just to save some few poeple, the girl whose fierce pride masked a deep, quiet empathy for those she deemed her people.

If Seana were standing here right now, she wouldn’t have stood by and watched an acquaintance—someone who had fought alongside them outside—get slaughtered by foreign invaders.

For a single microsecond, the cold, unyielding indifference in Lothe’s eyes melted into a faint, bittersweet softness.

The apocalypse had stripped away the world, turning him into a calculating, frozen instrument of survival. Only Seana’s memory remained as an ember of warmth in his chest.

The softness vanished as quickly as it had appeared, replaced once more by the unreadable gaze of the Cold Scholar.

"Someone I know would have scolded me if I let you die," Lothe said flatly, his voice devoid of emotion. "Consider it a debt paid to a memory."

Nyren’s brow furrowed slightly. She couldn’t understand his words, but the profound, solitary weight behind his voice struck her deeply. She didn’t press further; martial etiquette demanded respect for another cultivator’s secrets.

She closed her eyes, focusing inward.

With a faint shimmer of spatial energy, a small wooden medicine box appeared from her Soul Manor into her palm. She flipped the lid open and swallowed two snow-white medicinal pills.

CRACKLE.

A layer of pure, medicinal frost instantly coated her lips. The high-grade detoxification pill circulated through her meridians, violently freezing and purging the lingering neurotoxin from her shoulder wound. The bleeding stopped, and color slowly returned to her cheeks.

While Nyren meditated to stabilize her condition, Lothe stood quietly near the altar, his fingers buried inside his flowing sleeves.

Beneath the calm facade, a dull, throbbing ache pulsed behind his temples.

My Soul Energy is draining too fast, Lothe noted grimly.

Executing the [Four-Pillar Sealing Cage], sustaining multiple kinetic redirection mirrors, and forcibly rewriting the altar’s gravitational vectors had cost him a severe amount of mental focus.

Without Seana’s high-grade Soul-Vitality Restoration Pills to constantly replenish his reserves, he couldn’t afford to spam master-tier arrays indefinitely. In the battles ahead, every talisman had to be calculated down to the last scrap of ink.

Then, his gaze drifted back toward the blood-stained altar.

A chilling thought struck him like an icy dagger.

The altar required two living sacrifices to activate the gate.

His eyes narrowed into thin, lethal slits as his mind pieced together the architectural logic of the room.

What if Yue Fen and Mo Ruyuan had never appeared?

What if it had just been him and Nyren in this room, clearing the twenty stone constructs together as a pair of surviving allies?

The realization was horrific.

If two people entered this trial together, conquered the guardians through sheer teamwork, and stood victorious before the sealed gateway, the palace would still demand its toll.

The door would never open for two survivors. It was deliberately engineered to force allies, companions, or even lovers to turn their weapons on one another—murdering each other on the stone platform just to open the path forward.

It isn’t an obstacle course, Lothe realized, a wave of revulsion passing through his analytical mind. It’s an execution chamber dressed as an inheritance trial.

Furthermore, where was that harvested Qi going?

The altar hadn’t simply burned the energy to unlock the door. The grooves in the floor had carried the refined essence deep into the subterranean veins of the palace.

Something was receiving it. Something beneath them.

Lothe’s eyes narrowed.

He didn’t know what.

He needed more evidence, more data from the subsequent sectors, to determine exactly what kind of monster this ancient place was trying to awaken.

"I’m ready," Nyren’s cold voice interrupted his thoughts.

She had risen to her feet, her ice sword re-manifested in her right hand. Although her shoulder was still stiff, her crystalline eyes were sharp once more.

Lothe didn’t say a word. He simply turned and walked toward the swirling spatial gateway.

Nyren followed half a step behind him, her gaze lingering on his back with unspoken curiosity.

Together, they stepped through the vortex.

——————————

WHIRRRRR.

The familiar sensation of weightlessness lasted only a second before gravity slammed back into place.

When Lothe’s boots touched the ground, there was no sound of polished marble or echoing basalt tiles.

Instead, his soles sank half an inch into soft, wet soil.

Drip... drip... drip...

The sound of mineral water echoing through a colossal hollow greeted them.

Sector 2 was entirely different from the structural halls of Sector 1. There were no jade columns, no stone temples, and no carved murals.

They were standing inside a colossal, subterranean Cave.

The ceiling was lost in a vast expanse of pitch-black gloom, punctuated only by clusters of phosphorescent, dark-blue fungi that grew in erratic patches along jagged stalactites. Colossal, petrified tree roots—some as thick as ancient city walls—twisted down from the rocky heights, piercing the cavern floor like the ribs of an ancient leviathan.

The air was dense, humid, and heavy with the smell of damp earth, rotting wood, and a strange, metallic sweetness that made the skin itch.

Ping!

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[ENVIRONMENTAL UPDATE]

• Region: Sector 2 — The Subterranean Grotto of Roots.

• Air Quality: Trace airborne fungal spores detected (Mild Narcotic Effect).

• Spatial Resonance: Highly Unstable.

• Ambient Energy: Wood and Water Qi dominant.

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"A cave system..." Nyren murmured, glancing around with heightened vigilance. Her Ice Qi subtly lowered the temperature around her body, creating a thin barrier of cold air that froze the floating spores before they could reach her nostrils.

Lothe didn’t need an ice barrier. His body’s innate Void affinity naturally dissolved foreign impurities before they could penetrate his skin.

He crouched down, touching the moist soil.

The earth here was pulsing.

Beneath the mud and moss, thousands of hair-thin root filaments were slowly undulating, drinking in the ambient Qi that leaked from the higher levels.

Sector 2 is biological, Lothe analyzed. Sector 1 was the processing station. This place is the digestive tract.

Suddenly, the moist soil beneath their feet convulsed.

RUMBLE!

"Move!" Lothe barked, his voice cutting like a razor.

Both of them reacted instantly. Nyren leapt backward, landing atop a protruding boulder, while Lothe slid five paces to the side with an effortless, gliding stride.

KRAAA-BOOM!

The ground where they had been standing ruptured violently!

A colossal, segmented monstrosity burst forth from the mud, showering them with wet earth and rotting wood.

It was nearly fifteen meters long, its body resembling an armored centipede, but instead of a chitinous shell, its back was fused with thick, jagged tree bark and hardened black stone. Its dozens of scythe-like legs were made of petrified ironwood, and where its head should have been, a grotesque cluster of glowing yellow eyes encircled a gaping, circular maw lined with concentric rows of rotating stone teeth!

Ping!

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[INSPECT]

• Target: Root-Carapace Devourer

• Rank: Peak Level 5 Mutated Construct

• Traits: Subterranean Camouflage, High Physical Resilience, Spore Breath.

• Danger Level: High.

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