The fourth silver needle shattered.
The sound was faint, like ice being crushed between fingers. The resulting powder slid down the inner wall of the sarcophagus and vanished into the gaps of the piping.
Calvin felt it.
He didn't even need to look through the observation window; the glow of the inscriptions on the pipes already told the story—they had dimmed by another level.
The fifth one.
The interval was even shorter this time. The sound of it shattering followed almost immediately after the previous one. Before the powder from the fourth could even settle, the fifth had already turned to dust.
The light in the runic channels plummeted.
The aura emanating from the girl in the sarcophagus was weakening at a rate visible to the naked eye.
The degrading circuit composed of those silver needles and pipes was originally responsible for filtering the original knowledge aura into a bearable concentration. Now, that circuit was collapsing.
Unfiltered knowledge aura surged back like a flood, pouring out in reverse along the pipes.
Calvin's face turned pale. As the final readers, they were now bearing almost the entire weight of the pressure.
Selena wasn't faring any better; her body was trembling slightly.
But neither of them had any way out. If they let go now, everything they had worked for would be lost. They had no choice but to actively shoulder the impact, sharing the mental burden that was flooding into the girl in the sarcophagus.
If she were left to bear it all alone, the channel would snap completely within seconds.
In the Sea of Knowledge, at the center of the vortex.
The storm of fragments continued to howl, yet everything remained eerily quiet around the small girl. The knowledge fragments flying in all directions seemed to automatically divert around her.
Behind her, the channel bought with eighteen lives was vanishing.
Blackish-red blood surged back from both sides of the channel, reclaiming the gaps that had been propped open by the insect bodies. It closed rapidly from the outside in, like a wound on this massive entity beginning to heal.
In the girl's eyes, the path that had been cleared was already being refilled with knowledge.
It was clear she could not go back.
As if she hadn't noticed a thing, the girl didn't look back.
She simply fixed her gaze on the massive light orb before her.
The light orb's flickering frequency accelerated, its pulsing growing more urgent. A vast number of knowledge fragments emerged from within, churning across its surface.
The shadow formed inside seemed to be waiting for her.
Back in the room with the sarcophagus.
Calvin and Selena gritted their teeth and held on.
The siphoning force of the Sea of Knowledge far exceeded their expectations.
The moment they shared a sliver of the original knowledge aura for the girl, their consciousnesses were violently yanked into the Sea of Knowledge.
Though it lasted only an instant.
The towering, vast, and dreamlike colors instantly filled their vision.
An endless sea, flowing light, and blurred structures in the distance that rose high enough to touch the vault of the sky.
But in the next moment, the inscriptions beneath Calvin and Selena's feet erupted in a blinding flash of light.
That was the Polymath Tower's fail-safe—a rune placed by someone unknown that had finally activated.
Their consciousnesses were fished back to reality by a powerful suction.
The entire ordeal lasted no more than two seconds.
Calvin was the first to snap back to his senses. His hand was still pressed into the groove on the sarcophagus's shoulder, and the stinging pain of the silver needles piercing his palm confirmed that he was back.
He instinctively looked at the tome.
The bronze tome floating above the sarcophagus had flipped to the end of the seventh page. The text was packed tightly, filling the entire page.
“Seven pages,” Calvin whispered, unable to hide the joy in his eyes. “Two more than expected.”
He shifted his gaze from the tome to the observation window on the front of the sarcophagus.
The feedback from the runic channel was still there, but it was now extremely weak.
“And there's actually one still alive.”
“Continue?”
Selena didn't answer.
She stared at the pale face inside the observation window, hesitation appearing on her face for the first time.
Calvin glanced at her.
“If we cut it off now, we only get seven pages. If we hold on—”
The sixth needle shattered.
A very soft groan echoed from inside the sarcophagus.
It didn't come from the girl.
It was the resonance produced by the runic channel as it collapsed—like a lute string stretched to its limit, letting out one final, trembling cry.
Selena finally spoke.
“Hold on.”
Just two words.
The two no longer hesitated. Almost simultaneously, they increased their Sanity output, taking over the majority of the pressure from the girl in the sarcophagus.
The leaking knowledge aura poured from the pipes, slamming into their mental barriers only to be forcibly pushed back.
The tome flipped to a new page. Runes began to fall, line by line, steadily filling the eighth page.
In the Sea of Knowledge, at the center of the vortex.
The small girl walked toward the heart.
She knew her task was finished. She had captured three fragments, which, according to the plan, should have been enough to fill five pages of the tome.
Now, she wanted to do what she wanted to do.
The path behind her was sealed, the channel completely closed, and blackish-red blood had covered everything once more.
She did not hesitate.
She walked forward.
As the girl drew closer to the light orb, the mark on the back of her hand began to change.
Blood-red patterns seeped into the pale gold luster like tiny roots, spreading outward from the center of the mark, crawling across the back of her hand and onto her wrist.
The Knowledge Worm hovered above her head.
Sensing something was wrong, its shifting colors suddenly became chaotic—dark purple, silver-white, and blood-red flashed in turn.
Then, it was pinned in place.
A beam of light shot out from the living inscriptions on the surface of the heart, locking onto the worm with precision.
The Knowledge Worm's colors instantly froze, and its body went rigid, losing all control.
It began to drift downward slowly.
But its perception was not cut off. Its body couldn't move, but its consciousness remained.
It could see the girl, it could see the heart, and it could feel that approaching power—a power that far exceeded its understanding.
The small girl saw the little colored light orb that had been following her fall from the air.
She tilted her head.
She reached out to catch it, cradling it in her arms.
The Knowledge Worm huddled in her embrace, motionless and more obedient than ever before.
“You can understand me, can't you?”
The girl murmured softly.
The Knowledge Worm couldn't move, but a final remnant of the symbiotic link remained. It transmitted her words.
At the barrier, Lu Yuan heard her.
The girl didn't pay any mind to the motionless Knowledge Worm in her arms. She lifted her head to look at the light orb before her. The rune on the back of her hand flickered constantly, the blood-red hue growing deeper and deeper.
She continued walking toward the heart.
“So it was you who kept calling me.”
She reached out her hand and touched the heart.
The moment the blood-red mark on her hand made contact with the living inscriptions on the heart's surface, they resonated.
The heart split open from the middle.
Pure, colorless light poured from the rift, swallowing her whole.
She walked into it of her own accord.
The Knowledge Worm was still in her arms.
The symbiotic link snapped completely the moment the girl was swallowed by the light.
At the barrier, Lu Yuan felt a sudden emptiness deep within his left eye, as if something had been ripped out by the roots.
He tried desperately to summon the symbiotic link.
But there was no response.
The vision went pitch black; he could see nothing.
【Sanity: -3... 18/140】
His Sanity continued to drain. The pressure at the barrier did not lessen just because the girl had entered the heart.
Lu Yuan couldn't worry about the Knowledge Worm now, because his Sanity was about to hit rock bottom.
His consciousness, which was being dragged toward the Sea of Knowledge, began to distort.
The dreamlike colors before him turned into a chaotic mix of black and red. That flowing sea was now constantly bleeding.
Everything was warping. Through his own eyes alone, Lu Yuan glimpsed a fraction of the truth of this branch.
“Captain Lu! How are you holding up?!”
A worried inquiry came from a Nightwatcher beside him.
Lu Yuan waved a hand to indicate he was fine. Controlling his body with effort, he pulled out a bottle of Sanity potion he had brought before leaving and downed it.
【Sanity: +10... 28/140】
The brief wave of coolness didn't dispel the distortion before his eyes. Lu Yuan gritted his teeth, forcing himself to stay upright. Nothing could happen to the Knowledge Worm.
“Keep holding on!”
Lu Yuan shouted to the other Nightwatchers, continuing to stabilize the barrier with himself as the center.
Inside the Sea of Knowledge.
After the endless light dissipated, the girl stood in a space she had never imagined.
A palace.
It was a palace.
Suspended in an endless void.
The vault of the sky was so high the end was invisible.
Thousands of meters, perhaps even higher.
Massive stone pillars rose from the stone-slab ground, dozens of meters in diameter.
The stone slabs extended in all directions, stretching as far as the eye could see.
Everything was soaked in black and red.
Blackish-red congealed matter had accumulated in every crack between the stone slabs.
Un-dried liquid remained in the runic grooves on the vault. Every few seconds, a drop would fall from a height of a thousand meters, slamming onto the stone slabs with a dull echo.
It sounded like the final heartbeat of the palace.
The vault was covered in spiral inscriptions.
Hundreds of millions of runic lines were woven into a massive pattern, but not a single one was still glowing.
Those inscriptions were all dim; they had clearly all 'died.'
The pillars were not solid. Through the cracks on their surfaces, one could see networks of withered, grey-purple veins collapsed inside, like dead vines.
It seemed as though the pillars had 'grown' from within the body of this entity.
Corpses littered both sides of the stone path.
They were everywhere, covering the entire palace.
They weren't human corpses.
There were some with six limbs, some headless, their severed necks sprouting dark red crystals. Their armor was fused with their bodies, the line between steel and bone indistinguishable. Their weapons, now solidified like fossils, were still held high in the air.
Some had fallen facing the end of the palace, killed in mid-charge.
Some had fallen with their backs to the end, killed while fleeing.
Some had chests that had burst open, their ribs splayed outward, as petrified runic lines poured from their bodies to connect with the bloodstains on the ground—it was as if something had detonated them from the inside.
“Where is this? Is the truth I wanted to know really like this?”
The girl murmured to herself. She didn't realize at all that she seemed unaffected by this environment.
Given the scale of what she was seeing, the lingering resentment of the dead should have been enough to turn her into a vegetable in an instant.
But she wasn't. She stared blankly, her gaze shifting further ahead.
At the end of the palace.
A massive depression hundreds of meters in diameter.
The walls of the crater were covered in cracks, and the cracks were filled with blackish-red congealed matter.
In the very center of the depression sat a black altar.
Five heads hovered around a headless torso, rotating slowly in a circle.
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