novelraw Chapter 139-1: Touching the Divine, Child of the Stars (1)
Chapter 139-1: Touching the Divine, Child of the Stars (1)
[A wandering soul awakens in an ancient prison cell…]
[You have entered the Celestial Prison of Captive Stars!]
[The holding cell is extremely large, a perfect square, with a length, width, and height of over a hundred meters. Aside from the floor beneath your feet, the surrounding walls and the ceiling above are all formed of shimmering white Knowledge Barriers.]
Celestial Prison of Captive Stars?
Lin Xun furrowed his brow. What kind of bizarre place was this?
In the inventory, there was an eyeball that had just dropped from Astrologer Grandmaster – Shamara.
[Giant Stargazing Eyeball (Rare+ Grade): A wondrous eye harvested from an unknown starborn creature. Grants the ability to gaze upon the stars without a telescope.]
Connecting the two, Lin Xun quickly filled in the gaps in the story on his own.
Could it be that Shamara, in order to gaze upon the stars and acquire knowledge, used the Astrologer Tower to capture star monsters, imprisoning them within this very cell as a reserve supply of eyeballs?
Having just teleported in, Lin Xun was still in wandering soul state, like being naked, lacking any sense of safety.He hurriedly opened the Shell Slots to possess a shell. Just as he was about to select the Earth Giant shell, he suddenly saw the astrologer shell acquired from the Astrologer Tower.
A thought stirred in his heart.
[You possess the shell of the Knowledge-Seeking Tower Astrologer.]
[The fragmented memories within the shell begin to awaken…]
[I am not Shamara’s first assistant; I am the thirty-ninth.]
[As for my predecessors, they all died under the master of the Astrologer Tower: Shamara…]
[I know why Shamara chose me. It was nothing more than because I was young, robust, and strong-bodied, just like those thirty-eight who came before me.]
[The neighbors all advised me not to go to the Astrologer Tower, because Shamara was a man-eating flower that sucked blood, though she was an exceedingly beautiful one…]
[I was confident in my body. Dealing with someone like Shamara? Nothing difficult about it. Let it be known I once dated eleven noble ladies at the same time and had them all eating from the palm of my hand.]
[But what truly drove me to enter the Astrologer Tower, was that Shamara offered too much…]
[Only after entering the Astrologer Tower did I realize why she had to be so generous.]
[In pursuit of knowledge, Shamara unrestrainedly gazed upon the starry sky. She even captured extraterrestrial creatures through the tower.]
[As the master of the tower, Shamara’s strength was far beyond someone like me, a commoner. But compared to the high-ranking chairpersons of the association, she still fell far short.]
[So she always captured star monsters with utmost caution, never daring to touch the traces of the stars themselves, and never daring to commit the forbidden act of contacting a true star.]
[But even so, she still teetered on the edge of madness, because the knowledge drawn from star monsters was mostly chaotic and disordered.]
[Shamara wanted to avoid madness. She sought to obtain more orderly knowledge, and there was only one method: giving birth to children, to expel part of the chaotic knowledge.]
[Yet none of my predecessors had succeeded in making Shamara pregnant. Hah… all useless men! In the end, it had to be me…]
[…]
[I was wrong. In just two months, I became white-haired, wrinkled, unable to stand straight, needing to lean on walls just to walk.]
[But I did receive much from Shamara: for example, star magic, the Stargazing Short Staff, and even the precious eyeballs of star monsters. These were things I, a mere commoner, could never have dreamed of.]
[Yet despite two months of effort, Shamara still showed no signs of pregnancy.]
[She never once considered that the reason for her infertility might not lie with her assistants… but with herself…]
[My complaints were overheard by Shamara. She did not fly into a rage as I had imagined…]
[She told me she was ready to abandon the idea of purging chaotic knowledge, and instead throw herself into the ocean of knowledge.]
[I knew Shamara had already reached the brink of madness. To satisfy her ever-growing thirst for knowledge, she had gone insane.]
[Shamara said that when she was capturing a star monster, she had discovered a real star, one that was incredibly close to our world, yet had never been discovered before.]
[As her final assistant, she sincerely invited me to witness that star together with her, so that we could dive into the ocean of knowledge hand in hand…]
[She’s completely mad!]
[I refused without hesitation. Observing a true star is the greatest taboo in this world.]
[If the School Association were to find out, both of us would die without a grave… I didn’t want to die. I would report her to the association!]
[Shamara seemed to have seen through my thoughts of betrayal and ordered a maid doll from the Doll Factory to monitor me.]
[She spent one last night of madness with me, then began preparing her body for stargazing.]
[She locked herself in the basement, surrounded by those star monsters…]
[The maid doll watched me relentlessly, making it impossible to leave the tower. Had it been two months earlier, I might’ve still been interested in sampling a maid doll… but now…]
[I didn’t see her, no, it, again until a month later.]
[Shamara had transplanted the eyeballs of star monsters into her own body, and to accommodate those massive eyeballs, she had transformed herself into a monster…]
[I saw her float to the top of the Astrologer Tower without any lift, gazing into the cosmos without even a telescope…]
[I felt only nausea. I didn’t want to look anymore… I couldn’t reconcile that the beautiful, painful nights had come from such a monster.]
[After completing her transformation, the maid doll no longer monitored me. I returned to the ground floor of the Astrologer Tower, determined to flee this filthy place and report her violation of the forbidden.]
[Faintly, I heard Shamara’s excited scream. Her voice was shrill with ecstasy, so loud I could hear it clearly even through several floors.]
[She screamed that she had seen a true star…]
[The broken memories came to an abrupt end.]