Chapter 146 — The Ones Still Living
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
Catching Gao Song's gaze, Hedy too looked over out of curiosity, then began laboriously trying to make out the ancient script on the wall—but before she had finished deciphering it, Gao Yang took the initiative and explained what that one line meant.
Everyone present was instantly stunned.
"What... what does that mean?" Amber stared blankly at the line of text, which seemed almost like a declaration, and said with evident disbelief, "Under normal circumstances no one would come out with something like that... and written in a place like this, no less!"
Hedy, for her part, made a connection: "Only by defying the gods can humanity endure... does that mean the gods want humanity to perish?"
"Matters concerning the gods are very often steeped in symbolism and metaphor—you can't judge them by the surface meaning of a single sentence," Gao Yang said somewhat absently, though what surfaced in his mind were those appalling truths he had heard when he established a connection with the Eternal Slate fragment.
Then he turned to Byron: "You mentioned finding surviving manuscript materials here?"
Byron nodded. "Yes, over here. But they're quite fragile—after we found them, we didn't dare touch them."
The surviving manuscripts had not been sealed away; they lay scattered in disarray on a table not far off. It seemed that for some reason, the personnel here had not taken this batch of materials with them when they evacuated. The manuscripts were made of the enchanted parchment that mages of the Gondo Empire era commonly used for keeping records, and it was precisely because of this special material that they had weathered over a thousand years of erosion while exposed to the air.
Yet although the manuscripts themselves had not rotted away, much of the writing on them had faded and weathered beyond recognition. Gao Yang gave them a rough scan and concluded that at least half of them were no longer legible.
Fortunately, the other half remained.
Hedy had long been prepared. She had brought freshly enchanted scrolls and a ceremonial quill. The moment she saw those precious ancient manuscripts, she unrolled a scroll and let it float in midair beside her; then, quill in one hand and the other hand hovering above the fragile ancient parchment, she began an obscure and arduous incantation. Magical power surged around her, and the quill suddenly leapt from her fingers, flew to the scroll of its own accord, and began writing at furious speed.
The characters on the parchment were faithfully reproduced and transcribed by the magical force—both the clearly legible parts and the damaged, hard-to-read ones. And each time she finished "scanning" a sheet, Hedy caught her breath for a moment, carefully lifted the original ancient manuscript, and placed it into a small box she had prepared in advance.
Though the contents of the manuscripts had been preserved, the original antiques were still quite valuable, and it was naturally better if they could be saved as well.
Gao Yang stood beside Hedy, quietly marveling at the convenience of magical power while watching the contents appearing on the scroll with rapt attention.
Because he had to extract readable, meaningful information from a great mass of damaged and distorted characters, he read slowly—but even so, certain unsettling phrases gradually pieced themselves together. This did not seem to be research notes, nor even a diary; after stringing the words into sentences, Gao Yang felt they were like the ravings of a madman, filled with dreadful fantasies and metaphors:
"...I watched it, and it watched me from out of that festering flesh... it is within me, and I must go into it as well...
"No one will survive. The day of the end is near... acts of desecration cannot let us linger on...