Chapter 113: The Sacrificial Inheritance I

Chapter 113: The Sacrificial Inheritance I

Lothe pressed the fresh talisman against his chest.

WHOOSH!

The illusion snapped into place.

The dark purple robes faded back into plain, dust-stained travel clothes. His hair shortened, his jawline softened, and his sharp, lethal presence receded into the quiet, unassuming aura of an ordinary wandering scholar.

Lothe looked down at his sleeves. "That should suffice."

He turned toward the newly opened stone passage at the back of the chamber.

Before taking a step, however, his eyes drifted back to the ash-covered crater where the Warden had fallen.

His eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

The sequence of the battle replayed through his analytical mind.

The Warden had absorbed the energy from his talismans. Then it had drunk the ambient energy circulating through the room. When the input exceeded its conversion threshold, it hadn’t shut down—it had entered an unstable, devouring frenzy.

It wasn’t merely a guardian designed to defend a gate.

It was an energy converter.

The flowers. The roots. The subterranean ley lines.

The creature had been plugged into a much larger circuit.

Why would the architects of this palace design a guardian that actively harvested energy, only to funnel the excess deeper into the earth?

His thoughts snapped back to Sector One.

The sacrificial altar. The two Emerald Venom Corps cultivators who had been sucked dry. The refined river of Qi that had disappeared into the subterranean conduits.

Lothe’s gaze hardened.

The Warden wasn’t an obstacle.

It was a harvesting organ.

He lacked the remaining pieces of the puzzle to verify the theory, but the suspicion took root in his mind like poisonous ivy.

Lothe stepped across the threshold into the dark corridor.

Ancient runes covered every inch of the basalt walls. Some resembled the protective seals he had deciphered in the tomb; others were completely alien, jagged and sharp like hooked chains.

Lothe slowed his pace, quietly activating [Qi Sight].

The dark tunnel transformed into a vibrant tapestry of energetic currents.

Vibrant ribbons of light wound through the stone beneath his boots, all flowing in a single, unified direction—deeper into the heart of Sector Two.

Lothe followed the current.

Suddenly, a thread of energy made him pause.

Cold. Pure. Crystalline.

Nyren.

He would recognize that frozen cadence anywhere.

Yet woven tightly around her Ice Qi was another signature—dense, metallic, and rigid.

Another cultivator?

Lothe didn’t waste mental energy guessing. He hastened his silent steps, tracking the intertwined currents around several winding turns.

The passage abruptly opened.

Lothe halted at the entrance of a colossal, domed amphitheater.

In the center of the chamber hovered a massive spear.

It measured nearly three meters long, forged from a dark, silver-black metal that drank the dim light of the cavern. Its head was slender, triangular, and unadorned.

There were no chains binding it. No stone pedestal beneath it.

It simply floated in mid-air, suspended in perfect, eerie equilibrium.

Yet the space around the weapon was wrong.

The ambient Qi in the chamber didn’t merely flow past it; it actively bent away from the spear, forming a dead zone of unnatural silence.

Lothe’s guard surged to its absolute peak.

He swept his gaze across the room.

No visible formations. No sleeping beasts. No obvious tripwires.

Just the silent, floating spear.

WHOOSH!

Without warning, an invisible, gravitational vortex pulled violently at Lothe’s center of gravity!

Lothe reacted by reflex. A sliver of Void Qi condensed before his chest.

BOOM!

A spatial wedge manifested, cleaving the suction force in two. The invisible current slid harmlessly around his flanks and dispersed.

Lothe’s eyes narrowed into slits.

The sudden lurch had dragged him ten meters closer to the center.

From this distance, faint, weathered characters carved into the basalt floor directly beneath the weapon became legible:

[Supreme Armaments Technique]

Lothe’s pupils contracted.

The words contained an undeniable weight, a resonance that promised the secrets of weapon mastery and boundless martial authority. To any cultivator striving to survive this brutal apocalypse, it was the definition of an irresistible treasure.

Lothe raised his hand toward the shaft.

His fingers hovered an inch away.

Then, they stopped.

Suspended in the cold air.

His hand lowered back into his sleeve.

His expression turned to ice.

Bait.

The palace did not give away supreme inheritances at the foot of an empty staircase.

Lothe turned his head, inspecting the gloomy perimeter of the amphitheater with cold, methodical scrutiny.

This time, his gaze penetrated the shadows.

Bodies.

Rotting military fatigues. Fractured armor plates.

Dried, shriveled corpses.

They were wedged against the outer pillars, dead for what appeared to be weeks—likely the vanguard from the first ill-fated expedition.

His eyes continued their circuit.

In the southern alcove lay another figure.

Then a third.

A fourth.

Lothe’s gaze locked onto the fourth body.

Black and silver combat robes. A harness lined with specialized, magnetized throwing blades.

"Adrian Blackwood..." Lothe murmured.

The young metal cultivator was splayed out against the cold stone, seemingly lifeless.

Yet, as Lothe focused his perception, he caught it.

A microscopic lift of the ribs.

A faint, thread-thin pulse in the carotid artery.

He was alive, but barely clinging to consciousness.

Adrian’s metal aura and Nyren’s ice... they were brought here together.

Lothe shifted his perspective to the floor, driving his [Qi Sight] to its absolute limit.

The stone peeled away.

The horrifying truth beneath the chamber was laid bare.

Arranged in a massive, symmetrical pentagram around the hovering spear was a vast Crimson-Black Array.

Its blood-red runic lines linked the bodies of the fallen cultivators like beads on a necklace. Thin, crimson siphon-threads were drilled directly into Adrian’s dantian, continuously pumping his vital essence and refined Metal Qi toward the center.

And beneath the array?

A stone altar, buried deep under the flagstones, was drinking the mixture of refined energies.

Nyren’s frost. Adrian’s steel. The water-essence of the previous victims.

And even a residual trace of Lothe’s own Void Qi, dragged in from his battle with the Warden.

The Wood trial. The Ice trial. The Water trial.

They weren’t isolated corridors.

They were three pipes leading into the same slaughterhouse.

CLAP. CLAP. CLAP.