Chapter 227 | Transmigrated with a Sanity Gauge

The three nuns didn't ask further questions. They nodded slightly and headed down the alley toward the church station.

Their greyish-white figures grew distant in the twilight, quickly vanishing around a street corner.

Only two people remained in the square.

Agnes glanced at Lu Yuan.

“Follow me.”

She turned and walked toward the southern side of the square.

Lu Yuan followed without asking where they were going.

The two of them passed through a narrow alley at the edge of the square and made a few turns.

The lights of the temporary church station were already faintly visible, and the silhouette of the largest cathedral under construction stood out prominently in the night.

But Agnes didn't head toward the cathedral.

She circled around to a two-story stone building behind it.

The building was small, its exterior walls coated in the same white plaster as the cathedral, but it had clearly been renovated recently. The windows had been replaced with pointed arches, and a small holy light emblem was nailed to the doorframe.

She pushed the door open and entered.

The first floor was a simple parlor.

A table, four chairs, and a print of an Angel hanging on the wall.

A tin stove sat in the corner, its chimney extending through the wall. The charcoal fire inside had already gone out.

Agnes sat at the table.

She pulled back her hood.

Her pale gold eyes looked exceptionally clear in the dim room.

Lu Yuan sat across from her.

They stared at each other across the table for a few seconds.

Agnes spoke first.

“I’ve done what I promised you.”

She paused for a moment.

“I won’t ask what you did at the top of the Third Tower.”

Lu Yuan didn't respond.

Agnes didn't look away.

“I only want to know one thing.”

Her voice dropped a few notches.

“Do you have a way to help me enter the Sea of Knowledge?”

Silence fell over the small building as the question hung in the air.

The distant sound of hammering occasionally drifted in from the church station; night construction likely hadn't fully finished yet.

Lu Yuan looked at Agnes.

Her expression hadn't changed.

But in those pale gold eyes was something Lu Yuan rarely saw in her.

It was a restrained longing.

Lu Yuan remained silent for a few seconds.

“I can't be certain. You should know that as a believer transcendent, the Sea of Knowledge is an absolute forbidden zone for you.”

“The moment you set foot there, the existence you believe in might unravel. You should understand what that means.”

Agnes didn't answer him directly, but followed up with another question.

“I know. So, do you have a way? You can simply say no.”

Lu Yuan looked into Agnes's eyes and eventually sighed.

“I can't give you an answer,” Lu Yuan said after thinking for a moment.

“But I might know someone who can help you.”

Agnes's breath hitched for an instant.

“But not now,” Lu Yuan continued. “I can only give you a definitive answer once the Bronze City has completely stabilized.”

Lu Yuan wasn't lying; he truly knew someone who might be able to help her.

A.M.

Andre Morris. An alias. His true identity still hadn't been uncovered.

And he had no idea where the man had run off to.

The next time he saw him, perhaps he would ask about Agnes's situation.

Agnes just stared at Lu Yuan.

Something churned in those pale gold eyes, but she eventually suppressed it.

“Fine.”

Just one word.

Crisp and decisive.

The room fell silent again for a while.

Agnes stood up.

“You should leave.”

Lu Yuan nodded. Just as he turned to walk toward the door, Agnes's voice came from behind him.

“By the way.”

Lu Yuan stopped.

“When you get back, you’d better prepare yourself. Get more Sanity potions and the like.”

Agnes's tone had returned to its usual businesslike manner.

“The ghouls at the collapse site have almost entirely disappeared over the past few days.”

Lu Yuan frowned slightly. “Disappeared?”

“Yes.” Agnes's voice held a rare gravity. “But they aren't dead.”

“You've been down there; you should know what kind of things are hidden below.”

“The collapse near the square will likely be reopened in the future.”

She walked to the window, looking out toward the distant square.

“An exploration team will be formed then, and all factions will send people down.”

She turned back and glanced at Lu Yuan.

“You might be chosen.”

Lu Yuan said nothing.

Agnes tilted her chin toward the door.

“That's all.”

Lu Yuan didn't linger.

He pushed open the door, and the night wind blew against his face.

He pulled the church hood low again and headed back along the narrow alley.

Streetlamps glowed in the distance.

Warm yellow light fell on the stone path, stretching his shadow long.

After leaving the inner city district, Lu Yuan ducked into an abandoned building.

He took off the white church robes, folded them, and tucked them into his bag.

He changed back into his deep grey Nightwatcher coat.

Then, he continued toward the North Ward.

The night was deep.

The streets were almost deserted.

Occasionally, patrolling Nightwatchers could be seen passing under the lamps, their silver badges reflecting a cold glint.

Lu Yuan walked in the darkness, his mind turning over several matters.

The ghouls had disappeared.

That was not good news.

No one knew what exactly was hidden in the endless abyss beneath the Bronze City.

However, the issue with the Bronze City's walls had been partially resolved.

Even if another ghoul tide broke out, it wouldn't be an unmanageable situation.

And then there was the Polymath Tower.

Sigh.

Hopefully, everything would go smoothly.

Outside the Alchemy Workshop.

Many Nightwatchers were still diligently ensuring the safety of the perimeter.

Glock hadn't returned yet.

The Nightwatchers holding short-shotguns perked up when they saw Lu Yuan.

Lu Yuan didn't pay them much mind, simply nodding in greeting.

He returned to his room.

He prepared to carefully explore the Knowledge Worm Pathway Laurina had left behind.

The power of the Knowledge Worm was still fresh in Lu Yuan's memory.

Furthermore, the fragments of vision from Laurina's laboratory had deepened his understanding of the Knowledge Worm.

As long as there was any systematic unit within a brain...

A Knowledge Worm could invade it, consume its knowledge, and provide purified feedback, continuing until the knowledge in the brain was picked clean—until the host could no longer comprehend the knowledge being fed back.

At that moment, the host's life would come to an end.

The damage caused would be nearly irreversible.

But that wasn't even the most terrifying part.

Lu Yuan sat at his desk, took his notebook from his pocket, and flipped to a blank page.

Sporadic hammering drifted in from outside; workers were still working through the night to repair the lamp posts along the North Ward streets.

Some were replacing gas lamp covers, while others were connecting electrical circuits, trying to relight the lamps the ghouls had twisted and broken.

Lu Yuan ignored the sounds.

He wrote the first line in his notebook.

“Knowledge Worms are not picky about their hosts.”

This was the piece of information that had made Lu Yuan most wary in the visions from Laurina's lab.

A Knowledge Worm's parasitic targets were not limited to humans.

It didn't care what species the host was, or even if the host had language capabilities.

It only recognized one thing: whether a systematic knowledge structure existed within the brain.

A blacksmith who had learned a complete forging process, a warhorse trained with complex commands, a hound domesticated to master foraging routes.

As long as those experiences formed a framework and logic in the mind...

The Knowledge Worm could find an entry point.

This meant its ecological niche in the Sea of Knowledge was far higher than Lu Yuan had previously thought.

Moreover, the Knowledge Worm was not an accidental failure of an experiment.

It was one of the native species of the Sea of Knowledge.

It fed on knowledge and nested in knowledge.

Lu Yuan set his pen down and looked at the words on the paper.

According to the logic of the residual laboratory visions, if a new swarm didn't come into contact with a knowledge source after its reproductive cycle ended, it would die along with its host.

In other words, this thing was naturally restricted outside the Sea of Knowledge.

It couldn't survive long away from an environment with a sufficiently high knowledge concentration.

That was why Laurina's mentor had conducted those experiments in the Polymath Tower; the tower itself was the place with the highest knowledge concentration in all of Bronze City.

The parasitized students were the perfect breeding ground.

“Laurina's method: Knowledge Anchoring.”

In the laboratory's residual visions, he had captured Laurina's core strategy for dealing with Knowledge Worms.

Domestication and contract.

Laurina had taken the largest block of knowledge in her own mind, separated it, and tied it to the Knowledge Worm.

Coupled with external knowledge feeding, the host could continuously receive purified knowledge without worrying about being hollowed out.

Lu Yuan's pen paused as he wrote this.

Genius.

The idea was absolute genius.

Turning a lethal parasite into a tool for the continuous purification of knowledge.

No wonder Laurina was the top of the Polymath Tower's Alchemy Department.

This kind of thinking wasn't something one could come up with just by being smart; it required a near-obsessive understanding of knowledge itself.

Of course, the problem was also obvious.

Lu Yuan hadn't seen how to actually contract and domesticate a Knowledge Worm.

Lu Yuan leaned back in his chair, feeling a bit helpless.

However, there was good news. Because Laurina had used her own alchemy as an anchor, the number of contracted Knowledge Worms was very small.

She only had twelve.

Lu Yuan, on the other hand, didn't have to worry about that at all.

The reason was simple.

His anchor wasn't any specific discipline.

It was Forbidden Lore.

Medicinal Herbology has boundaries, alchemy has boundaries, inscriptions have boundaries.

But Forbidden Lore has none.

Its essence is to understand everything that should not be understood.

Therefore, theoretically, the number of Knowledge Worms Lu Yuan could contract was infinite.

Furthermore, he only needed to recite his systematic Forbidden Lore knowledge to the Knowledge Worms, and what they fed back would also be purified forbidden knowledge.

This would be a massive boost to his experience bar.

And Lu Yuan had something no one else had.

The Sea of Knowledge.

One had to remember that there was a natural connection between Knowledge Worms and the Sea of Knowledge.

Lu Yuan just hadn't quite figured out why Knowledge Worms couldn't simply gorge themselves directly within the Sea of Knowledge.

If he could figure that out, he might be able to perfect the restrictions on them.

Moreover, if he could bring back a bit of the aura from the Sea of Knowledge, or something more specific...

The Knowledge Worms might achieve a qualitative breakthrough.

Thinking of this, Lu Yuan's pen hovered over the paper for two seconds.

Then he suppressed the thought.

He had only just unlocked the basics of the Knowledge Worm Pathway and hadn't even domesticated his first worm yet.

And here he was, already thinking about evolution.