The cultist's ruined half-face was slowly regenerating. His low voice, wheezing from his mangled vocal cords, carried a bone-chilling, airy hiss.
“Heh.”
“As long as it works.”
“Old geezer.”
The cultist's sole remaining eye stared intently at Crowley in mid-air.
“Let's see how many more spirit restoration potions you have left to keep you going.”
In mid-air, the old-timer Crowley trod upon the wind.
He instinctively rubbed the cold, heavy, and bizarre object in his coat pocket.
It was the shipwreck anchor.
It wasn't that he didn't want to use this thing to directly pass judgment on the heap of seafood below, but the price of this containment object was simply too heavy.
Simply put, the thing was a death sentence.
For the current Edward Crowley, his mission was still far from complete.
And each time this containment object was used, his spiritual body's aura would drift closer to that of a sinking ship.
Use it too much, and he would be the first to “sink.”
He was deeply conflicted about this.
What made it even more troublesome was that the near-shameless regeneration ability the other party displayed was clearly not something an ordinary Mist Veil Society Missionary could perform.
During the battle just now, Crowley keenly realized that the other party must have a flesh-and-blood core hidden somewhere inside this resonance tower.
Otherwise, how could this guy regenerate infinitely in this place?
At the very beginning, his lightning javelin crashed down, squarely blasting half of the opponent's body into charcoal.
He thought this battle could be declared over ahead of schedule.
To his surprise, the opponent rolled on the ground, casually grabbed a nearby fish-man corpse, and pressed it against his own wound.
The dead fish-man's thigh instantly fused with his torso. Amidst squirming flesh, he grafted the fish-man's body directly onto himself.
The result was as grotesque as could be.
His appearance was rapidly heading toward abstract art.
Then, Crowley steeled himself. Risking the consumption of his spirituality, he used wind-pressure bullets paired with 【Call Lightning】 to blast the opponent into a heap of black ash.
Yet, before three seconds had passed, the black ash on the ground began to gather back together, and the opponent actually reconstructed himself once again.
During this time, he also tried repeatedly using 【Call Lightning】 and 【Ice Storm】, attempting to continuously destroy or freeze the opponent.
But the rules within this cultist priest were bizarre.
The frantically squirming flesh buds on his body could actually produce a strange reaction with all the scattered chunks of flesh on the nearby beach.
Even if his entire body was frozen into a block of ice, his mutated spirituality could still summon external severed limbs and corpses to carry out a new round of physical reconstruction.
After fighting for so long, the opponent gained more and more parts the more he was hit, and his shape became increasingly anti-human.
Crowley could only curse furiously in his heart while praying that Elias and Bloodsong would hurry up and light the lamp at the top of the tower.
As long as the tower lamp was lit and the wide-range glow of the primal fire spread, the home-field advantage these cultists had gained in Moon Bay would be significantly weakened.
The current environment was actually extremely disadvantageous for him.
Crowley frantically calculated the time in his mind.
He had already burned through three bottles of spirit restoration potion, and his inventory was bleeding dry.
If Elias and the other couldn't light the tower lamp within five minutes, he would have to accept his bad luck and use the heavy power of the shipwreck anchor once more.
With this thought, the old man's gaze sharpened. Clutching his flintlock pistol and the pirate cutlass in his hand, he enveloped himself in wild winds once more and charged fiercely toward the abstract cultist, who had already grown two pairs of legs and three arms.
Meanwhile, the puzzle-solving phase inside the tower had only just begun.
When Elias and Bloodsong pushed open the wooden door at the peak of the resonance tower, even though they were mentally prepared, they were still shocked by the sight before them.
This place was an entirely different world from the inside of an ordinary lighthouse.
At this moment, the small space at the top of the tower was densely packed with whale oil storage tanks.
Along with crisscrossing delivery pipelines extending from the tops of the storage tanks.
These pipes covered the floor and climbed the walls, densely filling the entire space.
What drove them even crazier was that the Mist Veil Society had clearly spared no expense on anti-tampering measures.
These storage tanks and pipelines were almost completely identical in terms of their polished appearance, the stale odor they emitted, and even the subtle spiritual fluctuations on a mystical level.
Even the supernatural grease smell wafting from inside was made to seem exactly the same.
It was impossible to tell which one led to the real wick and which was a fake designed to trigger the defense mechanism.
Elias stepped over a pile of intertwined pipes, his brow furrowing into a tight knot.
“This is literally the pipe-laying game for that bath-loving alligator.”
Elias grumbled in a low voice.
Of course, no one understood what he was muttering about.
Beside him, Bloodsong merely tilted her head, her eyes clear and bewildered.
The two carefully navigated the maze of pipelines and arrived in front of the tower lamp's massive Fresnel lens, looking at the main lamp base within.
Inside the lamp base was not a normal wick, but rather a dense, crowded row of black leads, looking like a power strip packed with plugs.
At a glance, there were at least dozens of slots where a pin could be inserted.
“What kind of fucking anti-tampering measure is this?”
“Is this Whac-A-Mole?!”
Elias couldn't help but curse.
“So, what do we do?”
Bloodsong looked around with a frown, her dagger still clutched in her hand, clearly finding this place even more of a headache than the humanoid jellyfish from earlier.
Elias stood in front of the lamp base, staring at the sets of nearly identical black wicks for a few seconds.
He didn't rush to insert the lamp-aligning pin Malcolm had given him.
Instead, he turned his head and suddenly asked Bloodsong a completely unrelated question:
“If you were the Mist Veil Society, or the mastermind behind this defense mechanism, what would you want me to do most right now?”
Without a second thought, Bloodsong replied as if it were obvious:
“To light the wrong lamp, of course, and trigger the punishment mechanism to be sucked dry by a swarm of dream demons.”
Elias shook his head, however.
“No.”
A trace of playfulness flashed in his eyes.
“You underestimate their malice.”
“What they want me to do most is to make me believe I am actually solving a puzzle.”
Hearing this, even Old Ed, who was waiting to watch the show in his mind, was stunned for a moment.
“What do you mean?”
Bloodsong was puzzled.
Elias began to lay out his logic.
“Malcolm said that using any delusion-dispelling spell up here will instantly trigger the ‘Dream-Summoning Circuit’ and draw in a spirit world demolition crew.”
“This proves that these dense tanks, pipelines, and wicks aren't a true-or-false puzzle meant to test our IQ at all.”
“It's a trap.”
“A cognitive trap designed to actively induce transcendents to use their spirituality to judge, perceive, and analyze.”
“The more you try to rely on supernatural abilities to confirm which pipe is real, the easier it is to follow the interfaces they left behind and completely expose your Rational Circuit to the dream-summoning ritual left by Wayland.”
Bloodsong listened, completely dumbfounded.
Elias didn't look at the highly deceptive wicks and complex pipelines.
Instead, he squatted down, reaching out with both hands to examine the details on the floor bit by bit.
Sure enough.
When he slipped his hands beneath the bases of those brass oil valves and pipes, his sense of touch returned the true answer.
He discovered that beneath several seemingly seamless oil valves, in the gaps connecting the floor and the bases, there were faint, extremely fine, greasy-textured roots of flesh.
These roots had dug deep into the stone crevices of the resonance tower.
They looked as if they had “grown” out of the stone crevices on their own, not at all part of the original metallic mechanical structure.
These arrays and pipelines were simulated with blood.
“Bloodsong.”
Elias patted the dust off his hands, stood up, and pointed to the oil valve of one of the pipes.
“Use the back of your dagger to gently tap this oil valve.”
“Do not channel even a single shred of spirituality into it.”
“Alright.”
Though Bloodsong had no idea what he was up to, she complied immediately.
She stepped forward, reversing her grip on her short blade, and tapped it gently with the thick brass guard.
Clink, clink, clink.
The first few oil valves and pipes she tapped, though outwardly gleaming with metallic light, returned an extremely bizarre sound.
Instead of the crisp ring of metal, they produced a dull, fleshy echo.
Bloodsong's eyes grew brighter and brighter.
She tapped her way along the pipelines.
Until she hit this particular one.
When the hilt struck the brass valve, a crisp metallic clank finally rang out through the top of the tower.
Bloodsong understood instantly, a look of sudden realization washing over her valiant, cold, and beautiful face.
The fakes had tried too hard, too deliberately mimicking the supernatural fluctuations and texture of real oil valves.
They had disguised themselves to the absolute limit on a spiritual level.
Yet they had forgotten that when subjected to a physical impact, real metal would never produce such a sluggish “response.”
“It's you.”
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