novelraw Chapter 850: They Are Still Young, What More Could One Wish For?
Chapter 850: They Are Still Young, What More Could One Wish For?
"What?" Eileen turned her head, having not quite heard what Lu Li was saying.
"The 'person' we've been looking for this whole time did this," Katerina answered for him.
"Anna was here?"
Eileen stared at the desiccated mummy on the platform.
The sound of shuffling footsteps came from behind them. Finn had ordered his men to carry braziers to the corners of the ruins and light them.
The light filtering through Lu Li's fingers began to fade, but the newly lit braziers took its place, illuminating the ruins.
Faded, heavily oxidized drawings and runes still lingered on the smooth rock walls and the steps of the platform. They likely once held images and inscriptions, but most of that was probably destroyed when the shelter was excavated here several years ago.
Had the shelter not sealed off this passage, the markings might have suffered even greater damage.
The shelter residents, relaxing in the warmth of the braziers, looked to Finn. Finn then asked Eileen, and Lu Li turned to Ophelia:
"Is there a problem here?""It's very clean... except for... the statues." Ophelia turned toward the statues standing at the four corners of the platform.
"The statues... they have... an aura."
"I advise you deal with the statues before you touch anything else here," Eileen warned from the side.
"How do we do that?" Katerina asked Lu Li.
"Gouge out the faces."
Lu Li lowered his hand; the light from the ancient statue fragment was now barely stronger than a torch. He and the others moved toward the statues.
It was a ritual once performed by exorcists: carving out the faces would rob the statues of their power.
"Leave it to me."
Katerina stopped Lu Li, her distorted hand gripping her artifact daggers tightly. She drew a second dagger with her right hand and, holding both blades, walked toward the statue.
The records never specified what tool to use for carving the faces, so using both couldn't hurt.
"Ophelia, please protect her."
Ophelia's scorched head bobbed, radiating waves of heat.
Reaching the statue, Katerina looked up, pressed both daggers to its face, and then, without a moment's hesitation, dragged them hard across the stone—
A grating screech echoed. The ordinary dagger left only a white scratch on the statue's face, but the artifact blade sank deep into the stone. She'd used so much force that the entire blade plunged in as if slicing through frozen lard, leaving only the hilt visible.
Sheathing her ordinary dagger, Katerina gripped the embedded artifact with both hands and gouged out the statue's face.
Thud—
As Katerina stepped back, the carved-out face slid free, landing with a dull thud that left no doubt in anyone's mind: "It's just stone."
Katerina stared intently into the cavity her blade had carved into the statue, a result of using too much force.
Nothing happened. Even her Mind Level counter remained silent.
"The aura... is gone," Ophelia confirmed.
"Gouge out the faces of the remaining statues," Eileen commanded the shelter's residents.
And once Lu Li finished his investigation of the ruins, this place would be absorbed into the shelter.
"Wait." Katerina stopped them and gestured toward Lu Li:
"You try."
Understanding Katerina's intent, Lu Li nodded. He took a dagger and walked to another corner of the platform.
The blade sank into the statue's face like a dinner knife through butter, the stone yielding as if it were softer than flesh. As the dagger carved a rough circle and gouged out the face, a wave of Humanity washed over him.
And with it, the Memories of Death.
...
The sea wind swept through a marvelous terraced city.
Tall, long-limbed humanoid creatures in armor patrolled the area.
So the statues had once been "people".
The ravages of time had left the stone indistinct, rough, and weathered; the statues they saw resembled melting, standing lions. Lu Li found himself standing beside a viscous, lukewarm, blue-brown pool of lava. A dozen more such pools were arranged around it.
He watched as a naked humanoid creature approached the pool. They spoke in an incomprehensible tongue, their voices filled with religious fanaticism and a warrior's resolve, even as they stepped into the viscous lava and submerged themselves completely.
In time, the lava pool would cool and harden. Then, the stone encasing the sacrificed being would be extracted, and from it, a guardian statue would be carved.
Lu Li looked away, his gaze sweeping across the terraced city into the distance.
Along the coastline, he could faintly make out the contours of reality—or perhaps it was just an illusion.
The city's terraced architecture reminded Lu Li of the empty city of the underground giants, a place caught between fire and water. It also made him wonder about the similarities between those ruins and these.
This was tens of thousands of years ago.
They were the "people of the previous generation"—beings who had considered themselves the masters of the world before humans ever existed.
And now, in the void on the horizon, a dark halo was silently lowering black tendrils.
"The tide..."
Lu Li muttered something quietly, and his figure disappeared from the lava pool, or rather, he was never there to begin with.
THUD.
The carved face fell away. Lu Li pulled his consciousness back to the present and lowered his hand.
"How did it go?" Katerina asked from behind him.
"I got it," Lu Li replied.
"Much?"
Lu Li looked at the remaining two statues:
"A decent amount."
It would take nearly a hundred ghosts or similarly powerful anomalies to gather even a speck of Humanity, and finding such weak anomalies was difficult in this era.
Lu Li looked at Eileen and asked:
"Should I leave one?"
"Why do you ask?"
Eileen was still trying to process their earlier exchange.
"These are the ruins of a prior generation. The statues are its people, self-sealed in stone. It might still be possible to communicate with them."
"A prior generation..." Eileen murmured to herself.
The shelter, being a repository of all human knowledge, was naturally aware of the existence of a prior generation.
The Exorcist Association had also known about them, which was why they had developed the "Spark" plan.
Perhaps... perhaps the "Spark" plan was itself an effort conceived by that prior generation.
"Just don't leave it in the shelter."
Eileen was implying that Lu Li could do as he pleased with it.
Lu Li consulted the Trader. After confirming that the Trader could take the statues, he left the remaining two untouched, allowing the mysterious merchant to collect them.
Finally, having examined the badly damaged, weathered murals and the desiccated bodies without finding any further clues, the group left the ruins.
The cleansed ruins would soon be demolished, its space absorbed by the shelter.
Their next step was to leave the shelter and wait for night, when the statues would come to life. Before that, however, they had to journey to the Forest of Silence to find the "Trader's corpse."
As for the conflict between the two factions in the shelter, Lu Li's arrival had resolved that as well.
The supporters had insisted on retrieving seeds from the surface, while the opposition refused to leave the shelter. For years, the two factions had been locked in a bitter struggle. And although the supporters had been steadily losing ground, the conflict would have at least given Eileen a headache for another year or two.
But now, the shelter could obtain seeds without its residents ever having to leave—and they could re-establish contact with the outside world.
The credit for all this went to the Trader—and, by extension, to Lu Li.
The Trader was as tight-lipped as a corpse.
So, as they departed the shelter, the gazes that followed Lu Li and his companions no longer held the same hostility. Instead, they were filled with a mixture of gratitude and hope.
Lu Li had given them the illusion that "perhaps it's not so bad on the outside, after all."
As they passed through the old shelter and began their ascent, Eileen dismissed the other administrators. Only she and Lulu followed Lu Li's group through the passage to the surface—a passage the residents were already beginning to seal with stones.