Elias and Bloodsong exchanged a glance, tacitly choosing to remain noncommittal.
After his initial exclamation of surprise, Malcolm swept his gaze around the room, finally locking onto Bloodsong's exquisite, cold, and distinctly exotic, wild face.
He seemed a bit unsure, hesitating for a long moment.
“Is she...”
Malcolm swallowed hard, looking at Bloodsong with curiosity.
“Is she Bloodsong?”
“You didn't know?”
Elias glanced sideways at Malcolm, raising an eyebrow as he countered.
Malcolm shook his head honestly.
In his past understanding, the bartender at Siren's Song was a slender fellow with dark red skin and two goat horns.
Who would have thought that beneath that guise was actually a pure-blooded demon girl whose beauty transcended species boundaries?
Bloodsong watched the two men discuss her gender right in front of her with a look of helplessness, letting out an impatient click of her tongue.
“Enough, let's get to business.”
Bloodsong coldly broke the awkward atmosphere.
“Listen, Malcolm.”
Elias put away his playful expression and pointed at the bizarre, frost-radiating ice sculpture on the steps.
“Even though she is temporarily sealed by my ice, she is a bona fide Scale Four.”
“Behind that layer of translucent ice, her eyeballs are still moving.”
“So, here are some hardcore precautions for guarding this piece of ‘fresh meat’.”
Elias began to explain the rules for watching over Sarah.
“First, avoid eye contact with her. In fact, try to avoid staring at or observing her for prolonged periods of time.”
Malcolm's expression tightened.
“Second, if any of you hear inexplicable whispers, voices, or auditory hallucinations in your head, do not waste a single second—report it to each other immediately.”
“Third, if you notice any other sailors behaving abnormally, like suddenly snickering or drooling...”
Elias paused, his eyes turning cold.
“Do not hesitate, and don't even try to wake him up. Just take whatever you're holding and knock him out cold.”
Malcolm wiped the cold sweat from his forehead and nodded.
Having finished laying out the security measures for the ground floor, Elias tightened his grip on his Thorn Cutlass and prepared to head up the metal stairs to the top of the tower with Bloodsong.
“Wait, you two.”
Just before they went upstairs, Malcolm suddenly thought of something and stepped forward quickly to stop them.
“The captain gave specific instructions outside earlier.”
Malcolm lowered his voice, his expression solemn.
“The interior of the top of this resonance tower is almost identical to a regular lighthouse in terms of space and layout.”
“But from the outside, the resonance tower's flame was actually extinguished a long time ago.”
“In other words, the rules up there are completely different from ordinary visual logic.”
As he spoke, Malcolm carefully pulled something out from the inner pocket of his filthy sailor suit and handed it to Elias.
“Take this.”
Elias reached out and took it, weighing it in his hand.
It was a slender brass lamp-aligning pin.
It was shaped very oddly, looking like a cross between an old-fashioned mechanical pocket watch hand and a long wick-adjusting needle, about a palm's length.
Embedded finely at the end of the lamp-aligning pin was a small flake of grayish-white sea salt crystal.
On the brass body of the pin, an extremely fine Dawn Emblem and rings of complex navigation scale marks were micro-carved.
This kind of tool was quite common in the mundane world, basically a small implement used by ordinary lighthouse keepers to align wicks and clear grease-clogged nozzles.
“What is this supposed to be?”
Elias held up the brass pin, examining it under the dim light as his mouth twitched.
“Aren't these things already provided up there?”
“What, is this some kind of souvenir from the Nightgull?”
“This is no time for jokes, Elias.”
Malcolm's face darkened completely.
“Once you reach the top of the tower, if you see more than one wick at the main lamp, insert this immediately into the very bottom of the lamp base.”
“Remember, you only have one chance.”
“If you light the wrong one even once, or insert it into the wrong spot, more wicks and oil valves will instantly pop up around you.”
“Until your sanity is completely driven to madness.”
Elias put away his playful expression.
This sounded like a defense mechanism filled with sheer malice. Once triggered, it would escalate exponentially.
“And you can't rely on any visual or delusion-dispelling spells to break through the illusions up there.”
“Because any delusion-dispelling spells cast at the top of the tower will trigger a hidden ‘Dream-Summoning Circuit’.”
“A Dream-Summoning Circuit?”
Elias frowned, repeating the ominous-sounding term.
“It's a trigger-based spell.”
“Once any delusion-dispelling spell is cast up there, this circuit will be activated instantly.”
“It will trace along your Rational Circuit, exposing your spirituality to the material world, and then forcibly tear open a spirit world rift, drawing a massive swarm of dream demons into reality.”
Malcolm stared into Elias's eyes.
“Dream demons?! A swarm?!”
Elias couldn't help but think of Old Ed, who had been drained to death by a swarm of dream demons.
If it was an entire swarm of dream demons like Malcolm said, the scene would practically be like a spirit world demolition crew showing up at your doorstep.
“Wayland Shipping has operated in Moon Bay for so many years, and there are plenty of keepers on the various reefs and islands who have had their spirituality quietly drained dry by dream demons every year.”
“So, if possible, you two had better get it right on the first try. Don't give that rogue spell array any chance to activate.”
Malcolm turn around and organized the sailors to surround Sarah's ice sculpture.
Elias stood in place, staring at the cold brass lamp-aligning pin in his hand, sinking into a long silence.
The hidden rules of this resonance tower seemed designed to target transcendents at every turn.
“Alright.”
Seeing Elias standing motionless for a long moment, Bloodsong stepped forward and nodded to Malcolm on his behalf.
“Shall we go, then?”
The Dvorin girl reached out with her pale pink hand, gently tugging the sleeve of Elias's slightly tattered trench coat.
At this moment, while Elias appeared to be staring blankly at the brass pin, he had actually already opened a long-overdue party committee meeting in his mind.
“Old Ed, get online and let's compare notes.”
Elias called out with his consciousness through their mental channel.
“So, when it comes to this so-called resonance tower and the detailed lighthouse lighting rules, the shadow of those Wayland Shipping capitalists has been looming over it from start to finish.”
Elias analyzed calmly in his mind.
“It certainly looks that way, kid.”
Old Ed's voice sounded incredibly grim as well.
“If it were just those cultists from the Mist Veil Society, and they had the ability to set up trigger-based ‘anti-theft circuits’ at the base level of the Origin Web, they wouldn't have needed to go to all the trouble of targeting low-level keepers.”
“They could have just sent dream demons to search for the descendants of those hidden ancient Moon Bay families.”
“Capturing them through spiritual pollution and dragging them back for sacrifices would be far simpler than forging identities to get these jobs, wouldn't it?”
Old Ed paused, his teeth grinding slightly.
“From the looks of it, in the fifty years since my death, the underlying structure of all the lighthouses in the Moon Bay region has been thoroughly and secretly remodeled on both a physical and mystical level.”
“And not just those moonlight stone alchemy buoys in the sea.”
“This damn Wayland Shipping is truly a bastard of a company with an extreme desire for control and dirty methods.”
“By the Moon Lord, almost the entire supernatural ecosystem and defensive line of Moon Bay are being manipulated right in the palm of their hands.”
Elias agreed deeply in his heart.
But the old man was clearly not done speaking.
“I used to think that after my death, the Mist Veil Society was the number one evil organization in Moon Bay.”
“Now it seems capitalists are clearly far more evil than those cultists!”
“Elias?”
In reality, seeing that he was still spacing out, Bloodsong tugged on his sleeve again, her slitted pupils filled with confusion.
Elias snapped out of his daze.
“Let's go.”
He slipped the brass lamp-aligning pin into his belt buckle, and alongside Bloodsong, stepped around the ice sculpture of Sarah—whose eyes were still filled with resentment on the stairs—and headed toward the top of the tower.
The spiral staircase stretched upward into the darkness, while outside, separated by thick stone walls, a higher level of devastation was tearing the world apart.
At this moment, outside the resonance tower.
A tempest was raging wildly high in the sky.
Old man Crowley's current state could hardly be described as elegant.
Utilizing the invisible currents of wind, he hovered in the air dozens of meters above the ground in a gravity-defying posture.
The old man reached to his waist, pulled out a bottle of spirit restoration potion that glowed with a pure white light, bit off the cork, and gulped it down.
Pure, massive supernatural spirituality instantly exploded throughout his limbs and bones.
Under the potion's catalyst effect, Crowley's sea of consciousness—which had been on the verge of running dry due to the high-intensity battle—was refilled to the brim at a visible rate like a massive reservoir.
The old man let out a breath, but his face was as black as a skillet.
This was already the third bottle of high-purity spirit restoration potion he had drunk tonight.
Every bottle he drank meant the gold crowns in his wallet were evaporating at a painful rate.
Looking down from above, his triangular eyes, filled with killing intent, glared deathly at the gravel beach below.
Standing there was the priest of the Mist Veil Society, who had been blasted repeatedly by his storms and lightning to the point of barely looking human.
Mutilated limbs squirmed, and negative spirituality interwove across his mangled, open wounds.
The cultist priest was currently grafting the leg of a dead fish-man onto his own shoulder.
“Are you sure you want to keep fighting like this?”
Crowley asked with a frown, his aged voice swept up by the wild winds, rumbles down like thunder in the night sky.
“You don't even look human anymore.”
Utilizing his high-altitude view, Crowley looked at the other man's torso, more than half of which had already turned into a fish-man's body, and sighed from the bottom of his heart.
The old man's tone was filled with unconcealed disgust and annoyance.
“This 【Flesh Grafting】 of your Mist Veil Society is truly disgusting.”
Rate on N.U.
