96: Chapter 96: The Inspiration of Our Ancestors is Everywhere

When Xie Feng came out of the warm pavilion, it was already getting dark.

The Centurion had somehow appeared again in the shadows at the end of the corridor, following him back with a blank expression.

Xie Feng couldn't be bothered to argue with him; anyway, the intervals between his bathroom breaks had long since been put on record, and it was too late to say anything now.

After returning to the post house, he washed his face and checked the linen thread in the palm of his left hand. That mouth had only bulged once today, probably quite angered by the failure of the Spacetime Gate.

He took the revelations of glaaki out of his bundle, flipped through a few pages, and stuffed it back in. Now was not the time to learn new Spells; there was serious business tomorrow.

Early the next morning, the Centurion appeared promptly at the entrance of the post house.

Xie Feng wrapped his black cloak tightly around himself, pulled his hood down low, and tapped his cold crystal blind staff against the bluestone pavement as he followed the Centurion through the corridors on the outer perimeter of the imperial city, turning into an alley even more secluded than the archives' passageways.

At the end of the alley was a heavy black iron door. There was no plaque on the lintel, only a simple rune engraved on it—the Hall of Archives mark belonging to the imperial family's retainer sequence.

The Centurion stopped at the doorway and made a gesture of invitation: "Your Majesty has decreed that the Young Master may enter on your own. Dr. Wenren is waiting inside." Xie Feng pushed the door open.

"'Wenren'? This name sounds a bit scholarly, doesn't it?"

Behind the door was a circular hall. A circle of spiritual power lamps was embedded in the ceiling, casting light down from above and illuminating the entire hall as bright as day.

The four walls of the hall were lined entirely with bookshelves, but unlike the archives, the bookshelves here did not display silk manuscripts or bamboo slips; instead, they were filled with cyan-leather silk-faced scrolls of uniform size and form.

A small bronze plate was hung on the roller end of each scroll, engraved with a serial number and a code name.

In the exact center of the hall was a rosewood long table. An unfolded silk scroll was spread across it, trailing from the edge of the table all the way to the ground. It was densely covered with neat cinnabar handwriting, which from afar looked like a congealed red spiderweb.

Standing behind the long table was a person, adding new annotations to the silk cloth.

This person was tall and thin, looking to be well over seven feet (two meters one), wearing a washed-out, faded dark gray Confucian robe with the cuffs rolled up to his elbows, revealing dense blotches of ink on both forearms.

Those were overlapping ink stains left from years of bending over a desk to write, accidentally getting stained, washed off, and stained again. His grayish-white hair was casually tied behind his head with a very thin hemp rope, and a few stray locks hung before his forehead.

His fingers were bizarrely slender, his knuckles protruding to the point of being abrupt, and his fingerpads were covered with a layer of calluses worn down from years of holding a brush.

Hearing the sound of the door opening, he raised his head. On his gaunt face rested a pair of extremely rare crystal-lens glasses. The eyes behind the lenses were intensely focused, bright with the unique intensity of someone who dedicated their entire life to doing just one thing.

"Young Master Xie." He put down his brush and cupped his hands in a salute toward Xie Feng, his movements standard, but his tone devoid of any polite pleasantries. "This humble official is Wenren Jingming, a doctor of the Hall of Archives. Your Majesty issued an order to this humble official last night, instructing me to open all case files of the Shituolin Swamp to the Young Master. If the Young Master has any questions, you may interrupt this humble official at any time."

Xie Feng leaned his cold crystal blind staff against the side of the long table and sat down in the chair opposite it.

"Dr. Wenren, what is the Shituolin Swamp?"

This was Xie Feng's first question.

Wenren Jingming was visibly stunned for a moment.

He probably thought Xie Feng would first ask how large the anomaly was, how many rules there were, or how much longer the Seal could hold—questions that ordinary Cultivators would normally ask first. He didn't expect Xie Feng to ask about its name.

"Reporting to the Young Master, it was named by a former chief doctor of the Hall of Archives. At that time, this anomaly had just been sealed, and the veterans of three reigns held a closed-door consultation to discuss what code name should be assigned to it. In the end, that chief said that this anomaly was essentially a swamp that would never completely congeal, and the swamp itself constantly emanated an aura extremely similar to that of remains. 'Shituo' is a Buddhist term referring to a corpse's tomb; taking its meaning, it was named the Shituolin Swamp."

"Do all anomalies surpassing prefecture-Rank have a dedicated moniker?"

"Indeed." Wenren Jingming turned around, walked over to the bookshelf, pulled out several scrolls from it, and spread them out one by one on the long table.

On the silk surface of each scroll was painted the morphological diagram of an anomaly. Some looked like a mass of mist stuffed into a bottle and kneaded repeatedly, some looked like a human figure constantly folding inward into its own body, and some looked like a gigantic withered tree with roots plunging into the Void Realm.

Next to each diagram, the code name and Rank were marked in tiny cinnabar characters.

"Residence-Rank anomalies only have serial numbers, not names. City-Rank anomalies are named at discretion depending on the degree of threat. Prefecture-Rank anomalies all have independent code names and dedicated case files. As for the Shituolin Swamp, it belongs to an existence surpassing prefecture-Rank. Back then, to deal with it, the imperial court mobilized three ninth-realm retainers, one of whom paid the price of his lifelong Foundation to barely suppress its core, but it was only a Seal; it could not be completely destroyed.

An anomaly of this level couldn't simply be dismissed with a serial number. Its name itself was a warning, so that any official or Cultivator taking over its case file would know at the very first glance what level of thing they were facing."

Xie Feng thought of the subterranean fire beneath Ranhuo City. According to the imperial court's standards, it should also be above prefecture-Rank, but back then the Tianque Sect couldn't even report it in time, and the chain of information was broken. If not for the Third Princess stubbornly holding on and dragging the imperial court into it, Ranhuo City would probably have turned into a lake of lava a few months ago.

"Besides its name, what other abnormalities does this anomaly have?" Xie Feng asked again.

Wenren Jingming turned around and retrieved another scroll from the deepest part of the long table.

The material of this scroll was completely different from the rest; it wasn't cyan-leather silk, but a material that made Xie Feng's spiritual power perception suddenly tighten by half an inch.

It was a thin board pressed from bone powder, its smooth surface carrying a subtle grainy texture.

"This damned material is definitely the handiwork of that Old Ancestor of mine. Why does it feel like it's getting mixed up with Cthulhu-mythos stuff again? Don't you guys have purely native anomalies?"

"This page wasn't recorded by us." Wenren Jingming gently unfolded the scroll on the long table, pointing to the end strokes of those few rows of runes on it. "About several hundred years ago, this was still an uncertain moniker. Later on, that retainer officially wrote it into the statutes, and it became the current title."

Wenren Jingming pointed to the end strokes of those few rows of runes on the bone board. "To this day, these strokes can still only be copied—except for you, Young Master Xie. Your Majesty gave instructions in the decree for you to take a look at these pages."

Xie Feng lowered his head, activated the Night Demon's Three Eyes, glanced at those rows of runes, and felt somewhat surprised.

They were Dreamlands scripts.

They were of the same lineage as the cultes des goules and the Voormis surveillance runes. The structure of these few runes was extremely simple; they were the opening sentence of a prayer, roughly meaning "May the deity upon the Ivory Throne help us destroy the Shituolin Swamp".

Centuries ago, someone had tried to use the language of the Dreamlands to pray to the ancient Old Gods for the complete eradication of this anomaly. This prayer was an original artifact brought back from an even earlier labyrinth on the Hyperborean Continent.

Hiss, my mouth really is quite accurate; could this actually be a purely native anomaly without any Cthulhu elements? But is it really okay for you guys to pray to such things?

"I cannot give you a complete explanation of this for now, but you will know in the future." Xie Feng raised his head, his tone somewhat relaxed. "Now let's continue, starting with the rules."

As long as it had nothing to do with the Old Gods, everything was easy to talk about, because there was an eighty percent chance he wouldn't recognize it anyway, and he could just take a stroll down there and come back.

Wenren Jingming looked at him for a moment, then acknowledged.

He unfolded the huge silk cloth that trailed to the ground once again. The dense handwriting was like dark red ants crawling all over the fabric.

This scroll unrolled inch by inch on the long table. The edges of the scroll were already frayed with age, and the ink stains in some places on the silk surface had been patched with extremely fine silk thread, the stitches meticulous—obviously mended stitch by stitch by Dr. Wenren himself.

Upon it was precisely the information regarding the anomaly.