16: Chapter 16 Key and Anchor

The touch of the copper handle of Chanis Gate against my palm was colder than ice. It was not a low temperature in the physical sense, but a spiritual chill that penetrated directly through skin and muscle, seeping into the marrow of the bone.

The moment the door was pushed open, it let out a dull groan—not the sound of metal hinges rubbing against each other, but the spiritual lament of the sealing structure itself as it bore pressure exceeding its designed limits.

Behind the door was a flight of stone steps extending downwards. There were no wall lamps on either side of the steps, but the entire space was shrouded in a layer of dim, silver-gray glimmer.

The light source came from the half-open door of the main sealing node at the end of the steps; the light shining from within formed slowly flowing patterns in the air, like stirred mercury.

The air was filled with the smell of ozone produced by the ionization of high-concentration spiritual particles, mixed with the lime dust kicked up by aged stone being crushed under pressure.

As Lu Li walked down the stone steps, every breath felt like sandpaper gently scraping his throat.

The stone steps were not long, only fourteen of them. It took him less than twenty seconds to finish walking them, but during those twenty seconds, the fragment of the worm of time in his pocket went from scorching to burning hot, and from burning hot to a heat that was almost stinging.

The dark light inside the fragment no longer flickered but maintained a continuous, uniform rhythm, pulsating like a heartbeat.

Lu Li suddenly realized that this was not a warning—it was synchronization. The entity awakening deep within the sealing system of Chanis Gate was producing a resonance of the same source with the Lord of the Mysteries Pathway that transcended the sealing barrier.

Every pulsation was telling him the same thing: there were only a few steps left until that critical point.

The copper door of the main sealing node was blown half-open by a blast of air from within.

Nearly half of the rune arrays carved on the door panel had shattered, and the remaining half were dimming one by one at a speed visible to the naked eye, as if something was sucking the spirituality from the back, bit by bit.

Lu Li squeezed in through the gap in the door.

The space behind the door was a circular hall, about twenty meters in diameter, with the dome hanging seven or eight meters above his head.

The sealing rune array, flickering due to the turbulent spiritual pressure, shrouded the entire hall in a constantly shifting, gray-purple eerie light, somewhere between dusk and extreme night.

Embedded in the floor directly beneath the dome was a piece of Moonstone polished into the shape of a concave mirror, nearly three meters in diameter.

The naturally formed silver-white veins inside the stone slab were slowly and rhythmically flickering under the spiritual resonance—that was the heart of the sealing system of Chanis Gate, the main anchor point.

The spiritual supply for all secondary seals, outer barriers, storage boxes, and binding arrays ultimately converged on this stone slab, to be distributed and regulated by it.

At this moment, a crack had appeared on the edge of the stone slab, extending from the top left corner to a position slightly to the right of the center.

Dark red mist was constantly pouring out from inside the crack. After emerging from the fissure, the mist did not dissipate but slowly sank along the concave surface of the stone slab, like an extremely thin snake testing the temperature of the ground.

Old Neil was standing less than two meters in front of the stone slab.

His staff was stuck obliquely into a gap in the stone bricks on the right; the crystal at the head of the staff had completely shattered, leaving only the bare silver staff mount still emitting intermittent pale blue electric arcs.

His work robe had several tears from the spiritual pressure, and the left sleeve was ripped from shoulder to wrist, revealing an entire arm covered in dark red vascular patterns.

Those patterns were not external injuries—they were the traces left by the backlash of the seal eroding backward along the spiritual circuit, spreading from the fingertips all the way to above the collarbone; each line looked like a mark branded under the skin by a red-hot iron wire.

But his posture remained straight. His right hand held high that silver key—the "key of life".

The snake-shaped relief coiled around the handle of the key seemed to be slowly wriggling under the illumination of the sealing light. The two garnets embedded in the snake's eyes emitted a dim red light, echoing the dark red mist pouring from the crack in the stone slab, flickering in and out, like two hearts beating in different chests at exactly the same frequency.

The tip of the key was inserted into a keyhole directly above the main anchor point that had originally been sealed, and it was rotating slowly. With every tiny arc of rotation, the crack on the stone slab would stop spreading for a moment, and the already emerged dark red mist would be sucked back into the fissure by a few inches.

Lu Li could see that he was repairing the seal. Using the key, and also using his own life force.

Old Neil clearly perceived Lu Li's footsteps. He did not turn his head, but his voice came over, hoarse and restrained, with a very short gasp between every word.

"Who let you in?"

"No one let me in. I opened the door myself." Lu Li walked to the edge of the stone slab and stood still, the silver-threaded runes on the fingertips of his gloves tracing a thin silver trail in the air, "How much efficacy does the potion still have?"

"About a third left. You modified the formula for this potion; the price of that extra extraction step you added to the auxiliary materials was shortening the half-life. The peak is very high, but the potency fades much faster than normal. I took the medicine ten minutes before coming in, and it will completely wear off in another two and a half minutes."

He finally turned half his face.

Lu Li was able to see his full appearance—the whites of his left eye had completely turned dark red; that was not bleeding from ruptured blood vessels, but a sign that spiritual erosion had crossed the retinal barrier and entered the visual neural center.

But his right eye was still gray, clear and focused, the deep wrinkles at the corners of his eyes looking like knife-carved gullies in the flickering light and shadow of the sealing rune array.

"Two and a half minutes is enough for you to go back the way you came."

"Not enough." Lu Li pressed his fingers against the fragment of the worm of time in his pocket, feeling the subtle difference between its pulsation and the resonance frequency of the main anchor point, then looked up and stared straight into his eyes.

"The current backlash stage of the key is at the end of the second stage; it is repairing you. The vascular patterns on your right hand are moving towards your collarbone and haven't passed the carotid artery yet, which is why you can still stand and talk to me. Once it reaches the third stage—the key will stop repairing the seal and instead absorb your humanity as its own energy source. You know what will happen then."

"I know." Old Neil turned his face back and focused all his attention on the key again.

There was a thin, hard layer of irritation in his tone, the kind Lu Li often heard when he helped him watch the furnace in the Potion Room, only deeper.

"I've been in the Potion Room for twenty years, and I've read at least a hundred more reports on Sealed Artifact backlash than you. Of course I know what will happen in the third stage. Within two minutes after the third stage starts, the seal will lose the repair support of the key, and the main anchor point will continue to disintegrate along the existing cracks, eventually causing at least three layers of barriers in Chanis Gate to lose pressure simultaneously. By then, everything sealed behind the door—not just the Snake of Fate—will attempt to break through at the same time."

He paused, turned his wrist slightly, and pushed the key clockwise by about half a degree.

The crack on the main anchor point stone slab stopped extending, and the dark red mist pouring out from the fissure was forcibly pushed back by two inches by an invisible force.

"So I don't intend to enter the third stage. I will pull the key out before the second stage ends, and then use the remaining half bottle of potion to suppress the backlash within my spiritual circuit. This is the only plan that can save both the seal and myself."

"Using your own spiritual circuit to forcibly resist the third-stage backlash of the key, the success rate—"

"About ten percent or so. I haven't calculated it yet, but it doesn't matter anymore." The corners of his mouth twitched very slightly, as if he were trying to smile at himself, but halfway through the smile, he was interrupted by another burst of backlash pulse coming from the handle of the key, and his entire right arm trembled violently.

"I have been at this post for fifteen years. If the seal breaks tonight, these fifteen years will have no meaning. If the seal doesn't break tonight, whether I can come back myself is a weight that can be measured compared to the oath of employment I took fifteen years ago. You are different; you have only been in Tingen for a few months. You have time."

After saying this, he stopped talking and focused all his attention back on controlling the key.

Lu Li did not try to persuade him further. It was not because he was convinced, but because there really wasn't much time left. He walked to the sealing structure diagram behind Old Neil and looked up at the rune array still flickering on the dome.

Three concentric circles. The innermost circle was the main anchor point, the middle circle was the secondary sealing nodes, and the outermost circle was the twelve seal anchor points connected to the outer corridor of Chanis Gate.

At this moment, eleven of the twelve seal anchor points were lit, and the twelfth was flickering with an unstable eerie green light at the bottom right corner of the structural diagram.

That was the circle that was only half-drawn on the secret room diagram of the Hoi Family—the twelfth seal.

[part:gemini-3.5-flash]

Roy King hadn't finished it, but he left a backup plan. His experiments at the Textile Factory had already calculated the spirituality tolerance margin when the sigils were incomplete. As long as enough pressure was applied to the periphery of Chanis Gate, eleven sigils plus a silver ritual vessel would be barely enough to reach the activation threshold for the Spirit Descent Ritual.

Lu Li knew very well that once the Spirit Descent Ritual was officially activated, even if the seal's structure itself was not completely destroyed, the remnant soul of the Snake of Fate would still seep into the physical world through the ritual's channel.

At that time, the key in the keyhole would no longer be a tool to repair the seal—the key's snake-shaped relief would resonate with the will of the Snake of Fate, and the repair would instantly transform into a channel. Even if Old Neil pulled the key out, it would be too late.

But he couldn't directly tell Old Neil this conclusion. He wouldn't believe it. Or rather, he couldn't believe it.

A man who had stood before Chanis Gate for fifteen years could not, at the very last moment, doubt whether the gate he was guarding was actually helping the enemy by leaving a back door.

Lu Li didn't continue standing behind him. He walked to the edge of the cracks on the main anchor stone slab, stretched out his right hand clad in a deerskin glove, and gently pressed his fingertips against the crevice at the end of the crack, from which dark red mist was still pouring out.

The glove's silver-thread runes let out a sharp hiss upon contact with the residual will in the crevice, and a burning pain from his palm instantly surged up his wrist.

But he didn't draw his hand back. He merely pushed his perception of the Marauder Pathway to its limit, trying to capture the slowly awakening will deep within the crevice.

A massive, cold, ancient will. Coiled in the deepest part of the seal, bound by layers of chains, every single chain groaning under an unbearable burden.

That will was waiting for something—not for the seal to break, but for the channel to open.

The key to activating the Spirit Descent Ritual lay not in the twelve sigils, but in the key itself. Once the key completed the repair of the seal, that existence would directly rewrite the repaired seal into its own exit.

A script already known, with the final variable held in Lu Li's hand.

The fragment of the worm of time in his pocket grew hot at a frequency perfectly synchronized with the pulsation of the ancient heart deep within the stone slab. It was no longer a detector, but a key—a key that only someone of the same origin could turn.

Lu Li removed his hand from the crevice, took a step back, and turned toward Old Neil's back.

"How much longer until the key finishes the repair?"

"Less than a minute."

"Pull it out. Pull it out now."

"I told you, I will—"

"The key is lying to you." Lu Li gripped the still-pulsating fragment of the worm of time from his pocket into his palm.

Its temperature was no longer burning hot, but had cooled down in synchronization with the sweat seeping from his palm.

"You think it's repairing the seal, but what it's repairing is not the seal itself—it's the channel for the will inside the seal. The twelfth sigil of the Spirit Descent Ritual doesn't need to be carved anywhere; the key itself is the twelfth sigil."

Old Neil turned his head. His right eye was still gray and lucid, but the dark red in his left eye was spreading. He stared at Lu Li, as if re-examining a collectible he thought he had already known inside out.

Then he reached into his breast pocket, pulled out the potion bottle containing the remaining one-third of dark blue liquid, and tossed it to Lu Li.

"When did you find out?"

"The Hoi Family's secret chamber. The half-drawn circle on the array diagram was located in the center of the twelve-pointed star's eye—not at any of the points. The sigil at the center of the array's eye didn't need blood or carvings; it only needed a key that could touch both the inside and outside of the seal at the same time. The key of life was kept inside Chanis Gate, not because it needed to be sealed, but because it was itself the most dangerous part of this seal."

Old Neil fell silent for the duration of a breath.

Then he released his grip on the key handle, his fingertips leaving the ancient key coiled with a silver snake.

As the end of the key handle separated from his skin, it made a tiny sucking sound, like a baby releasing a pacifier, and the snake-shaped relief on the handle stopped squirming.

Immediately afterward, the dark red mist pouring out of the cracks in the main anchor stone slab froze in mid-air.

It remained still for a moment, then silently dispersed into countless tiny grayish-white particles, like crushed ashes, scattering across the concave surface of the stone slab.

The potion bottle in Lu Li's hand still carried his body heat. He handed the bottle back. Old Neil took it, tilted his head back, and downed the remaining dark blue liquid in one gulp. Then, he placed the empty bottle next to the shattered staff, bent down, and picked up the broken handle of the staff stuck in the gap between the stone bricks.

"Fifteen years," he said, looking at the slowly dissipating dark red mist on the surface of the stone slab, as if speaking to them, or to himself. "This key passed through my hands every afternoon during routine seal inspections. Before today, I never once asked who it was actually opening the door for."

"Now you know."

"Now I know." He leaned on the broken staff handle like a cane, resting his entire weight on the wooden pole that no longer had any spirituality amplification. His voice was tired to the point of being almost transparent, yet the rhythm between his words remained intact. "You just mentioned the array diagram in the Hoi Family's secret chamber—did you see it with your own eyes?"

"With my own eyes."

"Then write the report yourself. I won't do it for you."

He took a step up, his knees trembling slightly, before he stood firm.

The sound of footsteps ascended the stone steps step by step toward the dim light of the corridor. The pace was not fast, but every step was upward, and he did not look back.

Lu Li remained in the main seal node hall, leaving only after confirming that all the cracks in the stone slab had closed.

Behind him, the main anchor plunged the entire hall back into silence as the last sealing rune went out, but the ancient will coiled in the depths did not make any further attempts to breach the barrier. After the key to the channel was pulled out, it chose to return to dormancy.

Lu Li thought to himself, the next time it attempted to knock on the door, that door would no longer be guarded by the same key.

In the corridor, Daly was still standing in place, holding the lead box.

Seeing Old Neil walk out of the door, she took a step to the side and didn't step forward to support him. She only held the lead box tighter, her knuckles turning white from the pressure. Her lips moved, but no sound came out.

Old Neil stopped for a moment in front of her. Using the intact index finger of his right hand, he gently tapped the lid of the lead box. His voice was hoarse but steady: "You haven't finished the cataloging numbers for these letter fragments yesterday. Give them to me when you come to work tomorrow."

Daly's lips moved again, and then, with a tense face, she nodded and carried the lead box back to the archives room, her footsteps twice as heavy as usual.

Lu Li noticed that before she had walked very far, at the corner of the corridor, she raised her hand and quickly wiped the corner of her eye, her movement as swift and precise as her spirit mediumship.

Klein was standing at the end of the corridor, waiting for him.

He had already recovered from the initial resonance of the gray fog, but a trace of extremely faint residual gray fog remained at the corners of his eyes, detectable only by someone who had also had contact with Sefirah Castle.

Lu Li could tell that when the main anchor of Chanis Gate was touched just now, the gray fog of Sefirah Castle had automatically manifested for a moment without any summoning. Standing in the corridor, Klein had felt the entire process of that resonance from its emergence to its dissipation.

"When you entered Chanis Gate," Klein spoke, his tone not sounding like an interrogation, but more like calmly presenting an observation that could be left unanswered.

"There was a fluctuation. It came from you. It was very brief, but I wouldn't mistake it."

There were a few paces of corridor between Lu Li and him. The gas lamp flame was still slowly recovering its brightness, casting shadows on the stone wall that overlapped, stretching and shrinking. For a brief instant, the two shadows merged, making it impossible to tell which was which.

"As for that fluctuation, there will be plenty of time to explain in the future." Lu Li turned his lime-dust-covered gloves inside out, folded them, and put them in his pocket. "As for you—when you felt that resonance in the corridor just now, did anything that shouldn't have appeared show up on the gray fog?"

Klein looked at him, falling silent for a moment.

There was neither fear nor hostility in those dark brown eyes, only a cautious and prudent understanding, the kind that would only occur when seeing another ship in unfamiliar waters.

"A crack opened for a very short time. I couldn't control it, but the direction it appeared in—it led to the underground drainage Dark Channel beneath Iron Cross Street. There was a sigil in there that hadn't been fully activated yet. The final vibration of the Chanis Gate seal was caused by that sigil."

This perfectly matched the analysis Lu Li had given Old Neil earlier. The backup anchor for the twelfth sigil was indeed in the drainage Dark Channel in the direction of Iron Cross Street.

And at this moment, at that very location, Herwin Moir was tracking the cultist carrying the final fragment of the Blood Source alone.