Chapter 513 (2/2)

Then he led them across the hall and went on to another, more inclined, downward corridor. Soon everyone walked through a stone wall that looked like it had just been broken, and the road ahead suddenly broadened.

“We have just passed the outer wall of the underground palace, which we just broke it last month,” another bishop looked back at the black stone wall engraved with Letta runes and said, “starting from here we entered the First Born’s sphere of influence.”

Several ministers in the team immediately clenched the magic amulet in their hands. They were just ordinary men. They did not have the strong mind like ascetics or the strong will of those knights. Because of the mission, they entered the territory of the First Born and relied on the blessed amulet to move freely in this underground world.

“It’s getting hot now,” said Nangong Wuyue. She was the first one to sense the subtle change of the surrounding. “And the air smell like… sulfur?”

“We are now under the Volcano of Dusk,” Ophra explained with a smile, “The werewolf mage-emperor, Sanur, created the world’s largest and most complex underground lava river under the volcano, so there’re some heat and gas seeping through the cracks in the rocks. But don’t worry, we have confirmed that there is no leakage.”

Nangong Wuyue protected herself with a layer of mist and grumbled, “Tsk… Why I always encounter this kind of thing. I’m starting to lose my scales.”

Hao Ren was speechless.

They walked all the way down the underpass, the farther they went the broader it became. They passed a few forks and some spacious stone chambers. Just as Hao Ren expected, there were three to five high-ranking knights or ascetics stationed at each fork and stone chamber. They built simple and crude camps and defense lines in the underworld, monitoring any movements that could be heard in the maze-like of corridors.

At the same time, Hao Ren finally saw what he wanted to see: The First Born’s tentacles began to appear on the surrounding wall.

When Auburn looked at the winding and huge tentacles, his face finally lost the kind of stone-like calm and his poker face even slightly twitched a little bit. As a cardinal who had a strong and firm mind and was very sensitive to the ‘Lifeblood’ and ‘The Power of Origins’, he could feel the powerful force and crazy thoughts in these tentacles more clearly than others. He explained to them, “These are the outer tentacles, and only a few of them have the ability to interfere with the mind. You won’t be affected if you avoid them. So it’s safe here, but as we go further we will enter…”

“We’ll enter the key ‘organ’ of the First Born, I know, we went in there before,” Hao Ren said and nodded, “these tunnels should still be in the outer layer of the cavern, and you had opened the outer crust of the inner zone?”

“Right in front, but it’s not opened by us,” Orben nodded and led them to a fork in the road, “It took us 10 days to find the weak spot of the barrier left by the ancient mage-emperor in the tunnel, and it made us uneasy as we found a hole in it. Some of the tentacles of the First Born were spread out of that hole.”

10 minutes later, the team came to the ‘barrier entrance’. This was a huge round cavern. The walls around the cavern were covered with ancient and sacred writings. These were the seals and messages left by the first pope. Hundreds of ascetics and knights built forts and defense lines in the cave, closely monitoring the tentacles that spread from the west side of the cavern. Hao Ren saw the tentacles coming out of a huge rift, rather than ‘penetrating’ from the cracks as elsewhere, which indicated that the tentacles were using a more violent approach to break through the barrier, consciously expanding their access.

But it looked like this was just a short period of ‘false awakening’. Now those tentacles had fallen asleep again. Judging from the traces around the tentacles, their last ‘convulsions’ should be many years ago.

“It’s disturbing. How many things have happened underneath when we’re not aware of it?” said Ophra.

Hao Ren approached the tentacles gingerly. After confirming the tentacles were unresponsive, he stepped on them and climbed along the tentacles to the hole on the wall to see the situation on the other side.

The other side was the chamber where the First Born was sleeping. He saw a huge stone chamber filled with ominous red light. Countless tentacles converged from all directions to form an organ that looked like a twisted tumor. The organ was dormant and its faint red light was flickering at a very slow rate.

“The good news is that it’s sleeping very well, and the bad news is that this ‘tumor’ looks bigger than the one in the Dragonspine Ridge.” Hao Ren jumped back to the ground and asked, “Where is the Divine Sarcophagus? I want to analyze how it works.”

Orben pointed to a small stone house in the center of the garrison, said, “Right there.”