Chapter 484
Inland of Northern Ufeiga, capital city Adis.
On the balcony of a hotel in Adis, Doro, dressed in a long robe, sat in a chair, gazing towards the distant Radiant Cathedral outside the city. While sipping a juice drink, she pondered the findings from her reconnaissance and how to unravel the secrets within the Radiant Cathedral.
“If I want to unlock the secrets within that temple, I must evoke a lightning strike and complete the decryption inside the hall. These movements are difficult to hide. If that Red Tier Muhetar is inside the Radiant Cathedral, my actions are likely to be discovered by him. Therefore, when I act, Muhetar must not be present in the Radiant Cathedral. As long as he is not there, it should be manageable to fool the others.”
“Because Muhetar is Red Tier, I dare not use a Small Zombie Puppet to monitor him since I am unclear of his movements. Fortunately, during this special time, there is a specific moment when he will definitely not be inside the Radiant Cathedral: that is during the next round of negotiations.”
With this thought in her mind, Doro had already determined the timing for her action—specifically, when Muhetar attended the second round of negotiations. Only then could she ensure she would avoid him.
Confirming the timing, Doro quickly outlined the general steps of her plan. Once everything was nearly prepared, she breathed a slight sigh of relief and turned to look at the tall palace on the other side of the city.
“The differences between the Sacred Summit and the Savior’s Incarnation Sect are too great. I had hoped to help Vania facilitate a peace agreement, but judging by the current situation… that hope is slim.
“It seems that after the final negotiations fail, Adis will become quite dangerous. I must quickly complete my main objective, and then see about protecting Vania’s safety. This time, I will not seek excessive gains. As long as I can obtain the Advancement Ceremony and retreat safely, it will count as a success. So I need to hurry…”
Gazing at the distant palace, Doro contemplated this. She then began to patiently wait for the appointed moment to arrive.
—
Time flew by, and soon a whole day passed quickly. The second round of negotiations was about to begin.
During the day, the envoy Vania from the Sacred Summit took her team to visit some tribes around Adis and was unable to return in time. Therefore, the original meeting time was postponed to the evening. As the sun set in the sky, the time for this second round of negotiations was approaching.
At night, with the moon just rising, outside the city of Adis, the Radiant Cathedral’s highest representative of the Savior’s Incarnation Sect, Muhetar, along with his most loyal and important followers left the Radiant Cathedral, where they had been living, and boarded a carriage, serious in demeanor, making their way to the negotiation site within the city. Each of their gazes bore a hint of gravity because the outcome of this negotiation would directly determine their subsequent actions.
After Muhetar and his retinue departed, the Radiant Cathedral fell into silence. By nightfall, there were hardly any citizens coming to pray, and the only ones remaining inside were a group of lower-ranking clerics from the Savior Faction and some soldiers from the Revolutionary Army.
As time passed minute by minute, just as the second round of negotiations began in the distant palace, the clerics and soldiers in the Radiant Cathedral went about their usual routines, engaged in their own activities. At that moment, a sudden thunderclap startled everyone.
Almost without warning, a bolt of white-hot lightning descended from the night sky, accompanied by a deafening roar. It struck one of the obelisks in front of the Radiant Cathedral, hitting the tip of one stone. Almost simultaneously, the electric light coursing from the struck obelisk sprang forth, connecting among the obelisks, momentarily illuminating the area outside the Radiant Cathedral with electric brilliance. Then, in an instant, both the dazzling lightning and the ear-splitting thunder vanished.
After the electric light dissipated, many people within the Radiant Cathedral rushed to the obelisk array, gazing in surprise at the scene before them. As several among them had seen tourism introductions in front of the obelisk array, they knew it had a lightningconducting effect, so their expressions were merely surprised, not reaching the level of astonishment. Instead, they began discussing whether this sudden thunder was a sign that the weather was in the process of changing.
At this moment, a cry of alarm arose from outside the Radiant Cathedral. The people gathered in front of the obelisk array turned their gaze toward the source of the shout, and they saw several oasis trees outside the Radiant Cathedral were ablaze. It was clear that the previous lightning strike had affected the area outside the obelisk, igniting the trees!
Seeing the raging fire outside, the people inside the Radiant Cathedral felt a jolt of alarm and rushed to extinguish the flames. The fire seemed unexpectedly large, leading many to act, including clerics who had been praying in the hall, now startled by the commotion outside, who also rushed over to help put out the fire.
In an instant, all the people left inside the Radiant Cathedral were drawn to the spreading fire outside, gathering towards it. The once spacious hall, supported by numerous tall columns, was now devoid of anyone within it.
At this time, from the already open ceiling of the hall, a lithe figure leaped down. This figure maneuvered among the tall pillars, vaulting and jumping, landing on the empty floor of the hall. Upon closer observation, it was a woman dressed in a black fitted outfit with a hood and a mask, her figure graceful, and at that moment, she carried another small figure on her back.
“We’ve arrived… thank you…”
After Nephnis successfully landed, Doro, dressed in a robe and veiled, slid down from Nephnis’s back onto the floor of the hall. At that moment, Nephnis gently spoke.
“Is there anything else now?”
“Not for now… you should hurry back to safety and hide. I’ll notify you once I’m done. You might even have to help me get out then.”
Doro responded to Nephnis while she nodded, continuing her reply.
“Okay, then I’ll take my leave. Good luck…”
Having said that, Nephnis promptly left, continuing to leap by using the pillars, making her way up to the roof of the hall. After watching Nephnis leave for the time being, Doro breathed a slight sigh of relief.
It was evident that the lightning strike was orchestrated by Doro. With her control abilities, it was impossible for her to accidentally let the lightning hit the trees. The reason those trees caught fire so easily was due to the flammable substances her zombie puppets had arranged beforehand. During the lightning strike, they ignited the trees, generating flame enough to keep those inside occupied for a while.
To the people of the Savior’s Incarnation Sect, the Radiant Cathedral was merely a temporary outpost. There was nothing particularly important worth protecting inside, so the main combat power was concentrated around Muhetar, leaving behind a relatively careless force. This allowed Doro to smoothly carry out her ploy and infiltrate.
After Nephnis evacuated, Doro immediately began to act in the empty hall. She swiftly approached the altar dedicated to the Savior of Radiance and meticulously stepped upon the tiles inscribed with numbers in General Language.
The moment the lightning struck the obelisk array, Doro’s monitoring Zombie Bird noticed the pattern formed by the arcs of electricity jumping between the obelisks. It was a lightning script from the First Dynasty representing the number nine. Thanks to Balar’s research on the mathematical texts from the First Dynasty, Doro was able to recognize various numbers in lightning script.
Incorporating the numbers from the lightning strike into the hall’s mathematical puzzle, Doro quickly solved all the answers to the puzzle. Now, she was stepping all the answers into the designated solving area in front of the altar.
In merely about ten seconds, Doro had stepped all the answers into the altar. Then she began to wait amidst the sounds of commotion outside, anticipating the changes around her.
One second, two seconds… gradually, more than ten seconds passed, and nothing changed in the empty hall. There were no sounds of mechanisms activating, nor were there secret doors or passages opening. Faced with this scenario, Doro was momentarily taken aback, feeling a flicker of concern that maybe her decryption thought process was flawed. Was this indeed how to solve the temple’s riddles? Or perhaps after seven thousand years, the mechanisms here had broken down beyond repair?
Filled with deep anxiety, Doro furrowed her brows. At that moment, an odd change occurred in her surroundings.
In Doro’s eyes, the hall before her suddenly became ethereal. Everything within her sight began to blur, even taking on a semi-transparent phenomenon.
The substance of things grew obscure, while their outlines became sharply defined and emitted a faint glow. The walls became vague yet with distinctly visible edges; the gaps between the tiles, the structure of the columns—everything sharpened in clarity to Doro’s view. The details of the objects faded, yet the foundational shapes that constituted them became evident. It was as if a beautifully crafted painting was reverted to its most basic line draft, like a large AAA game scene stripped of renderings; everything returned to a distorted, primitive state.
Within this simplistic and pure space, a series of peculiar characters floated into existence. The vast empty hall was nearly filled with these strange characters, but many of them were blurred or fragmented, making it hard to recognize them in their entirety.
Before Doro’s eyes, atop the altar belonging to the Savior, a peculiar symbol materialized mid-air. Unlike the sunlit halo of the Savior of Radiance, the symbol depicted an open eye, the upper eyelid covering the top half of the pupil, while the lower half emitted seven wavy lines resembling arcs of electricity, filling the entire lower sclera while three more radiated beyond the eye.
Witnessing this marvelous transformation, a strange expression filled Doro’s eyes. She widened them slightly, curiously surveying every corner of the scene around her.
“This change, is it the result of solving the puzzle? After the puzzle is solved, does the temple transform into this? No, it’s not the temple that has changed; I’ve entered some hidden space within the temple…”
As she observed the phenomenon before her, Doro thought to herself. To prevent anyone from suddenly returning to the hall, she had several Zombie Birds constantly monitoring the entire Radiant Cathedral. In the sight of these Zombie Birds, there was no change within the Radiant Cathedral; only the temple had transformed within Doro’s own perspective.
Among the Zombie Birds Doro was using for surveillance, one was directly looking down at the scenario in the hall from above. Within the view of this particular Zombie Bird, Doro saw her own body becoming gradually transparent and then disappearing after stepping through all the answers. Thus, Doro concluded that the phenomenon before her was not a significant change occurring within the Radiant Cathedral, but rather that she had been transported to a space overlapping with the Radiant Cathedral… or perhaps deeper within the Radiant Cathedral.
With various thoughts swirling in her mind, Doro began to walk forward in this space filled with numerous characters, reaching the entrance of the hall. She looked at the clerics and guards busy trying to extinguish the fire outside. In her body’s perspective, they had lost most of their details and colors, appearing as mere moving lines. However, in the eyes of her Zombie Puppets in the real world, she was completely invisible; at the edge of the Radiant Cathedral, Doro could clearly see an evident border, beyond which, she could not perceive anything.
“This feels akin to entering a hidden realm… Currently, in this hidden realm, I can see and hear images and sounds from the real world, while the people in reality are oblivious to my presence.
“This hidden realm… is it the secret contained within this temple? Truly, it is the inheritance of the First Dynasty, directly creating such a thing. I thought that after solving the riddle, some hidden door or passage would appear…”
As she contemplated the scene before her, Doro sighed in her heart. Turning back into the hall, she began to examine the large swathes of text floating in the air, along with the sacred glow suspended at the center of the hall.
“That eye-like holy emblem… must be the celestial judgment of the Judge of Heaven. As expected, this temple was originally constructed to venerate the Judge of Heaven; he is the deity initially worshipped here.
“And those characters floating in mid-air… Tsk, though I can tell they are in the language of the First Dynasty, many look blurred or damaged. Occasionally, I can see words in General Language, but they are all meaningless terms…”
While analyzing the scene within the hall, Doro found herself harboring a question within her mind.
“What exactly is the purpose of this strange space?”
Murmuring thus, just as she finished speaking, countless floating characters suddenly began to shift. They began to swim through the air like fish, changing form, resembling the passages in her Navigation of the Literary Sea. Soon after, a segment of new text appeared before Doro. She was surprised to discover that this text was actually written in General Language, forming a content she could comprehend, and this content elucidated the purpose of this space.
“Enlightenment Mark Temple, so that’s it… the purpose of this space is essentially a library…”
Looking at the content composed of General Language before her, Doro felt a sense of understanding dawn upon her. She now knew the purpose of this space: it was indeed a library.
The Enlightenment Mark Temple is a temple dedicated to the Judge of Heaven. Like other temples of the “Enlightenment” from the First Dynasty, it functions not only as a site of religious worship but also as a repository of knowledge. For ordinary people, it is merely a common temple, but only those who understand General Language and solve the lightning script riddle, completing the veneration of the Judge of Heaven as “Enlightenment” extraordinary beings, can enter this hidden space where knowledge is archived.
In the context of mysticism, the real world is referred to as the manifest world, being a part of the complete world, the surface of the world. If we were to use a pocket watch as a metaphor, the real world is the dial visible to all, along with the moving hands upon it. Dreams, the dream realm, heaven, and other such places would be beneath that dial, where various gears mesh and operate to provide power to the dial, determining the time displayed—this is known as the hidden realm.
The hidden realm encompasses the vast majority of the complete world, vastly overshadowing the manifest world, akin to the muscle and organs beneath the skin—internal factors driving the operation of the manifest world, hence also serving as the dwelling for various deities and creatures of the hidden realm. The position where Doro found herself was like a shallow layer of the hidden realm, created using extraordinary power beneath the manifest world but not yet reaching the depths of the hidden realm. Furthermore, this temple also served as an examination site and assisted in the city’s defense against enemies.
Library, place of worship, examination site… The merging of religious worship and education is a characteristic of the Judge of Heaven’s temple. Even after seven thousand years, this temple continues to harbor residual extraordinary functions, largely thanks to the temple’s inherent spirituality collection system. In the introduction before Doro, this was referred to as “Lightning Collection.”
The obelisk array in the courtyard of the temple does not solely serve to generate random numbers for sacrificial decryption; more importantly, these obelisks can convert incoming natural lightning into spiritual energy, transporting it to the hidden space to maintain the ongoing operation of the extraordinary system. For thousands of years, this lightning collection system has undoubtedly captured countless natural lightning strikes, converting them into spiritual energy that has kept the temple’s hidden space in standby for millennia.
Over seven thousand years ago, the Enlightenment Mark Temple was part of a different ancient city temple, distinct from Adis, in a now-extinct city of the First Dynasty. Only the wise “Enlightenment” extraordinary beings could complete the sacrificial decryption to enter this hidden library and acquire knowledge. This library featured convenient search capabilities, allowing visitors to easily find desired information. Doro’s words had inadvertently activated this search mechanism, thus retrieving the library’s introduction.
Having realized that she was deep within a library of the First Dynasty, Doro was suddenly filled with excitement. She began scanning the various texts surrounding her, but found that the number she could understand was extremely limited.
It seemed that due to several thousand years without maintenance, coupled with the ravages of war, the temple’s extraordinary system had experienced considerable damage. Many characters appeared fuzzy or damaged, and some intact ones were written in lightning script, which Doro could not decipher. Among the few remaining contents in General Language, many were beyond Doro’s reading capabilities as well. She speculated these General Language texts were meant for those with special status in the temple, with the library’s reading requirements apparently suitable for only “Enlightenment” extraordinary beings. Only a select few contents were accessible for Doro to comprehend.
With damaged content, unreadable lightning script, and General Language that Doro couldn’t meet the criteria to read, a sense of anxiety gripped her as she realized that despite the vast amount of content in this library, her access was decidedly limited. This phenomenon sent Doro’s heart racing, worrying whether the information she sought would turn out to be problematic.
Having taken a quick glance around the peculiar space, Doro took a deep breath and then spoke to this library space.
“I wish to access the content regarding the Advancement Ceremony for the Red Tier path of ‘Enlightenment’.”
Murmuring such, though she spoke in Prit Language, the library’s retrieval system, seemingly using a cross-linguistic communication technology similar to General Language, could still comprehend her request and began assisting Doro in searching for the desired data.
In no time, countless characters swam toward her like tadpoles from the surrounding air, gradually forming an article before Doro. After glancing at the article, she let out a long sigh of relief.
“Thank heavens, I can understand it…”
