“Did Ilos really say that?” Eko stared hard at Salian, his voice trembling with disbelief.
After reuniting, Salian held nothing back from the Guard Captain. Everything he had seen and heard—the horrifying information blocks, the conversation with his teacher—he laid it all bare.
“So the madness spreading everywhere… was his doing?” Eko’s voice shook with fury.
“I’m afraid… yes.” Salian nodded with difficulty. How he wished it weren’t true.
“He’s lost his mind?!” Eko’s roar echoed through the empty darkness. “Walk out now? Right into the continent’s wars, fighting those powers to the death, only to end up like last time—letting some uncontrollable human Hero become the final victor?!”
“For that reason, he’s willing to destroy the entire dungeon and sacrifice more than forty of my elite rangers?! And now he plans to sacrifice even more elves?!”
“I’ll kill him myself!” The more Eko spoke, the angrier he grew. Murderous intent boiled inside him. He wanted nothing more than to drive his twin blades into Ilos’s chest and demand answers.
Yet trapped in this strange, invisible cage, all his strength was useless. He could only clench his fists until they cracked.
“Salian,” Eko forced down his rage and pinned his hope on the young mage, eyes burning with urgency. “The black wall suddenly vanished—did you figure something out? Do you know how to get us out of here for good?”
Salian could only shake his head helplessly. “It wasn’t me. I have no idea what happened.”
“Then someone else must have done it. Our priority is to gather everyone!” Eko quickly calmed himself and made the call.
Salian expanded his Illumination spell to its limit. Gentle light pushed back the darkness as they began searching the void for their companions.
In the end, they found Ilos’s other student.
Unfortunately, the disappearance of the walls had nothing to do with him. Ilos hadn’t even tried to recruit him.
But Seldan—they couldn’t find him anywhere.
The last section of the black wall around the Sacred Tree area still stood.
Now it seemed to them that either Seldan had removed most of the walls and remained trapped in the final zone,
or Seldan had chosen Ilos’s side, left early, and the walls had vanished for some other reason.
Whatever the truth, they were completely stuck.
Left with no choice, the group turned their attention to the motionless black information blocks floating in the space, hoping to find clues.
But that was an excruciating method. Not all blocks were as short as the three diary entries.
They varied wildly in size; the one that had nearly broken Salian earlier was actually among the smaller ones.
Every touch and reception of information was torture for the mind.
Even picking the smallest blocks and taking turns, the flood of data still left them in agony.
Before long, they were forced to stop what was essentially suicide.
Salian’s head throbbed. Fragmented images and sounds flashed endlessly in his mind. He couldn’t focus; even a Clarity spell barely helped.
The other mage was in worse shape—he had passed out cold.
Even Eko, who hadn’t uttered a sound the whole time, was pale as paper, hands trembling. He too had reached his limit.
And after all that pain, their harvest was zero!
They saw more horrific scenes of a world shrouded in mist, but not a single scrap of information about how to escape.
Despair washed over Salian.
His teacher clearly didn’t intend to let him starve here. In other words, the plan would likely be complete before he died of hunger.
If he then factored in the time needed to get out and stop the Chief…
The window for action was terrifyingly small.
And now it seemed they had almost no chance of finding a way out in time.
Salian could only collapse powerlessly onto the cold ground, silently praying in his heart.
He hoped his little sister would, just this once, be clever enough to notice something wrong and hide far, far away…
…
In the only corner still sealed by a black wall, countless massive information blocks floated in the void.
The Puchi was in this corner too.
The walls isolating the elves were themselves information; the Puchi could pass straight through.
In this final corner were many blocks dozens—even hundreds—of times larger than the mist-scene one Salian had first seen.
Even if the elves saw them, they could only steer clear. Trying to read one would be suicide.
The crooked-capped scout Puchi flapped its wings, darting from block to block without pause.
Lin Jun didn’t analyze each one in detail. He absorbed first, glanced over, and if it wasn’t what he needed, tossed it into a mental corner to sort later.
Only blocks that might relate to dungeon control got a second look.
Massive amounts of data piled up, but it still hadn’t reached a level that pressured Lin Jun.
Compared to the Hollow last time, this was completely risk-free information gathering.
And although most blocks were skimmed and discarded like trash,
the useful-information ratio here was vastly higher than in the Hollow.
Even meaningless images or half-sentences were infinitely more valuable than the usual abyssal gibberish that looked like face-rolling on a keyboard.
Under Lin Jun’s rapid sorting, he actually figured out how Ilos controlled teleportation.
Because the Sacred Tree’s roots were anchored in this static abyssal space, any abyssal ritual performed within the tree’s domain would inevitably be disrupted, losing its original function and instead linking the tree to this space.
And the partial dungeon-control permissions had clearly been found inside the Sacred Tree.
In other words, Lin Jun just needed to perform any random abyssal ritual and he could similarly intrude into the tree.
Of course, success wouldn’t be that simple, but he had to take this step to see the next.
…
Elven forward camp.
Seldan handed Pelagel a pile of materials.
“Is this for some kind of magic array? But what can you even set up? The Chief actually left something like this to you…”
Seldan was speechless—not that he looked down on his best friend, but as a ranger, Pelagel’s spellcasting was barely tier 2-3.
Adding a bit of magic to arrowheads was fine, but setting up an array—even the simplest one—would be a stretch.
Pelagel just smiled. “Watch and be amazed!”
And when, in front of the Sacred Tree sapling, Pelagel’s “quiver-pack” hopped down and began drawing the array with the materials, it truly exceeded Seldan’s wildest expectations!
He watched in horror as he realized—this wasn’t a pack at all. It was a disguised Puchi!
Before he could recover from the shock, Pelagel gripped an arrow and drove it straight through Seldan’s abdomen…
(End of Chapter)
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