Chapter 117: The Digestive Palace

Chapter 117: The Digestive Palace

Lothe’s hand tightened around his spear as spiderweb cracks spread rapidly across the stone floor.

But then, the movement stopped.

The terrifying tremor that had vibrated through the bedrock slowly subsided, leaving behind a silence so dense it felt physical.

Lothe stood amidst the settling dust. With a simple, fluid flick of his fingers, his Void Spear vanished, returning silently into the depths of his Soul Manor. He took a slow, measured breath, allowing the newly expanded pathways of his Foundation Establishment—Tier 3 cultivation to stabilize.

He didn’t waste time checking his physical wounds. Instead, his dark eyes locked onto the cracked altar floor, his mind synthesizing every clue he had gathered since entering the ruins.

The entire picture was finally coming together.

Sector One, Lothe analyzed, his thoughts cold and precise. The primary altar did not simply want to kill the intruders. It demanded raw, living Qi to open the gates—acting as a selective extraction valve.

Sector Two.

His gaze drifted toward the memory of the Bloomroot Warden.

The guardian was not just a defensive unit. It was an environmental sponge. It absorbed the elemental Qi of the intruders, converted it into high-density Wood Qi, and stored it within its core. When overcharged or destroyed, that stored energy didn’t dissipate. The Palace’s underlying conduits immediately drank it.

And here... the Crimson Soul Convergence Array.

Lothe looked at the dead bodies of Mie’r and Fan’er.

The array had taken the raw, diverse elemental attributes of the five trapped cultivators—Nyren’s, Adrain’s, the dead scout, and Lothe’s own Wood-Void residue—and refined them into a standardized, hyper-dense energy source.

"At least I’ve confirmed some of my suspicions," Lothe whispered, the realization sending a cold thrill through his chest. "It is a colossal, automated digestive system. Every sector is a processing chamber. Every trial is a grinding stone. It lures cultivators in with the promise of inheritances, separates them to weaken their resistance, and then slowly refines their energy to feed whatever is buried at the bottom."

The ancient, heavy breath he had felt beneath the cracked floor was proof enough.

The Palace was trying to awaken something.

And the arrival of the apocalypse, along with humanity’s sudden awakening, may have provided it with the largest feast it had received in countless years.

But one question still remained.

Why humans? What is so special about this world?

As though awakened by the thought, Lothe’s eyes flashed purple. He activated [Qi Sight] and directed his perception toward the altar.

No.

Not the altar.

Beyond it.

And then he saw it.

Below the altar was not a basement or an ordinary underground chamber.

It was a womb.

A cathedral-sized hollow stretched beneath the chamber, its enormous walls disappearing into darkness. At its center, suspended by a network of thick, undulating root-veins, was a silver-black cradle.

Then it pulsed.

Thump.

Thump.

Slow.

Greedy.

Alive.

Streams of energy flowed toward it.

Adrian’s Metal Qi.

Nyren’s Ice Qi.

The remaining energy of the other cultivators.

All of it was being drawn toward the silver-black cradle.

A cold chill ran down Lothe’s spine. He felt that the palace was now targeting him for taking away two of it’s food.

"Ugh..."

A low, pained groan broke the silence.

Lothe’s gaze shifted.

Adrian Blackwood was slowly pushing himself up from the stone floor, one hand clutching his chest where the crimson siphon threads had recently been severed. His silver-and-black robes were torn, and his pale face was slick with sweat. Despite his exhaustion, his sharp metallic eyes were wide with survival instinct.

A second later, Nyren also stirred.

She leaned heavily against a frost-rimed pillar, her silver hair tangled and her breathing ragged. Her hand remained pressed against her side, where a thin layer of frost had begun forming over her injury.

The moment they sat up, their eyes fell upon the center of the chamber.

Then they froze.

The two powerful Core Formation cultivators of the Emerald Venom Corps—Mie’r and Fan’er—lay motionless on the flagstones.

Mie’r’s chest had been pierced through, one hand still reaching desperately toward the empty altar. Fan’er’s body was pinned to the floor beside her shattered jade spear.

They were dead.

Completely dead.

"What..." Adrian coughed, a trace of dark, stagnant blood escaping his lips. "What happened here?"

He looked toward the altar, then at Nyren, and finally at Lothe.

To Adrian, Lothe looked exactly like the weak, ordinary scholar who had been dragged into the trial. His robes were tattered, his posture slightly bent, and his spiritual pressure so faint it was almost nonexistent.

There was no way a scholar with such low cultivation could have killed two elite foreign cultivators.

"The... Ice Lizard," Nyren said, her voice raspy and cold as she struggled to stand.

The last battle she remembered before losing consciousness had been against a Level 5 mutated lizard capable of controlling Ice Qi.

She looked at the shattered remains of Fan’er’s jade spear, then at the empty space above the altar.

"Did my final strike... trigger a spatial backlash?"

Lothe did not correct her.

He kept his head slightly lowered, his face displaying the perfect mixture of exhaustion and lingering fear.

"The moment you both lost consciousness," Lothe said, his voice flat, sounding like a frightened academic trying to explain a natural disaster, "the two women tried to seize the hovering spear. But the inheritance array rejected them and reversed its energy flow. The phantom guardian executed a horizontal sweep, and the resulting spatial collapse crushed their weapons and pierced their chests."

He pointed a trembling finger toward the shattered jade fragments on the floor.

"I only survived because I was standing at the outermost edge of the circle, shielded by that stone pillar."

Adrian stared at the dead bodies. Then he released a harsh, bitter laugh that ended in a fit of coughing.

"Greedy fools," Adrian spat, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "They thought a Saint-Grade inheritance could be plundered without completing the trial. The Palace’s defenses chewed them up and spat them out."

He slowly dragged himself toward a pillar and leaned his back against it. Then he looked at Lothe, his metallic eyes narrowing slightly.

"You’re lucky, scholar.

If you had been one foot closer to that altar, your weak body would have been turned into meat paste alongside them."

"I know," Lothe replied quietly, adjusting his tattered sleeves. "My luck has always been... acceptable."

Nyren remained silent.

Her eyes stayed fixed on Lothe’s face.

She remembered the way the scholar had thrown those precise Talismans to protect her earlier. She also remembered how he had manipulated the gravity nodes during their previous battles.

He was clearly hiding profound knowledge of Arrays.

Yet his hands were trembling, and his spiritual pressure remained incredibly weak. She couldn’t determine whether he was truly frightened or merely pretending.

She narrowed her eyes slightly.

Seeing that neither of them appeared suspicious, Lothe secretly sighed in relief.

The enhanced Veiled Identity Talisman was doing its job perfectly.

To them, he was nothing more than a highly intelligent and unusually lucky scholar.

Even Nyren had failed to recognize him.

"This place is a trap," Adrian said suddenly, his voice dropping into a solemn register as he studied the room. "I was examining the Runes in the previous chamber—the metal one—before I was dragged here."

Lothe looked at him. "What did you find?"

"The Palace didn’t want to kill us," Adrian explained, his fingers tracing a faint, dormant line of crimson ink on the floor beside him. "It wanted us ripe."

His expression darkened.

"The metal corridor I was in kept forcing me to use my Metal Qi to block shifting blades. Every time I blocked one, the blade absorbed the Qi I released."

Adrian clenched his fist.

"It was like the corridor was training me—preparing my Qi until it reached a specific density before pulling me into this chamber."

Lothe’s eyes flashed with faint interest.

Adrian was exceptionally sharp. Even without being told, his survival instincts as a noble heir and a powerful awakened had allowed him to decode the basic structure of his trial.

"And my brother..." Adrian’s grip tightened around his knee. "Asher."

His expression became more troubled.

"We were separated the moment we stepped through the main gates. A localized displacement split our coordinates. He was pulled toward another sector the moment we landed. while I was routed into the metal-refinement room."

Adrian looked toward the crimson-black array.

"The Palace catalogued our elemental attributes the moment we entered."

"It’s a refinery," Nyren said quietly but firmly as she finally steadied herself. The frost on her shoulder dissipated into thin air. "We are the ingredients."

As she spoke, the deep, rhythmic breathing beneath the cracked floor vibrated through the chamber once more.

RUMBLE...

The stone wall at the far end of the circular chamber suddenly began to shift.

All three of them turned toward it.

A massive, seamless slab of white jade—which had appeared to be part of the wall—slowly began sliding upward with a heavy, grinding groan.

Ancient, pale-blue light spilled into the chamber from the newly opened passage.

Unlike the humid, organic Wood Qi of Sector Two or the cold, crystalline Ice Qi of the previous trials, the energy radiating from the corridor felt entirely different.

It was heavy and solemn, carrying the unmistakable scent of old parchment, dry ink, and ancestral laws.

The corridor to Sector Three had opened.

Lothe stood slowly, brushing the stone dust from his tattered travel robes. He didn’t look back at the dead invaders, nor did he offer to help the two injured heirs.

"The passage is open," Lothe said flatly, his scholarly persona fully re-established. "If we stay here, the residual Qi from the destroyed array will contaminate the air."

Adrian gritted his teeth and used the pillar to pull himself upright. His legs shook, but his eyes were filled with unyielding determination.

"He’s right. We can’t stay in this slaughterhouse."

Nyren supported herself with her sword and looked deep into the blue-lit corridor.

"Sector Three," she murmured. "Whatever is at the end... we are closer to the core now."

Lothe stepped toward the open archway first, his movements light, silent, and entirely unremarkable.

Behind him, the cracked altar of the Crimson Soul Convergence Array remained silent.

But deep within the subterranean womb, the silver-black cradle pulsed once more.

Thump.

And the energy gathered from the cultivators flowed toward it.

The Palace was feeding something.

And whatever lay within that cradle was slowly beginning to awaken.​