Chapter 183 — The Eternal Sleeper's Technology
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 4
The second half of Gao Yang's sentence seemed never to reach the half-elf's head. Amber had begun floating on air the moment she heard the first half; her mind raced through a full circuit and produced at least sixty schemes for making money and eighty for swindling, essentially all revolving around the core principle of "borrowing the tiger's ferocity." Unfortunately, she had been soaring for barely a few seconds before Gao Yang saw right through her. He glared: "If you dare use my name to swindle anyone, I'll slap you onto the wall!"
Amber rolled her eyes. "Can't you threaten me some other way?"
"Then I'll slap you onto the floor," Gao Yang waved a hand and turned to go. "Anyway—swindle and it's the wall, steal and it's the floor..."
But the honest Philip, once he had fallen into step behind Gao Yang, asked with concern: "And what if she steals something and then lies to you that she didn't?"
Gao Yang stopped and looked at Philip in silence. "...Have you ever considered a perm?"
"Huh?"
Gao Yang sighed inwardly: sure enough, the hardest part of being stranded in another world was that you couldn't trade memes with the locals—even when the other party was a willing straight man.
The two came to the underground hall Philip had discovered.
The magical force that had coiled through the hall had dissipated, and with it that oppressive, maddening aura; yet the place remained grim and horrifying. In Gao Yang's eyes, the platforms arranged in neat rows around the stone pillars resembled dissection tables giving off the stench of blood—and on those tables, the "lambs" awaiting slaughter were still alive.
Gao Yang noticed the tubular things connecting the victims' heads to the stone pillars, like some kind of biological tissue: tangled, growing blood vessels and nerves. Yet they had clearly not grown or mutated out of human brains. One end of them joined the base of each pillar, where a layer of swollen, twisted flesh and blood clung tight against the pillar's runes like some independent organism; their other end's connection to the human bodies was presumably the result of some parasitism (or perhaps surgery).
Because Philip had destroyed the runes on the pillars, the "biological tissue" clinging to them now showed clear signs of weakening and approaching death. They had begun to shrivel and split, a pale red fluid seeping from the cracks, and more than half of the victims connected to them were already dead.
Even those not yet dead were plainly beyond saving. They had been connected to those "nerve cords" far too long; their individual consciousness had long since been utterly erased, and their brain tissue had suffered irreversible, devastating damage. Their surviving brain nerve cells were merely supplying computing power to this vast "human-brain array computer," and with the dissipation of the magical force here, they would soon die.
The one thing to be thankful for was that they could no longer feel pain in the process.
"I can't identify what this thing is," Philip said, forcing down his disgust as he crouched with Gao Yang near the base of one pillar. He pointed with his scabbard at the biological tissue ahead, twitching and contracting. "Not even in ancient books recording the maddest black magic, nor in the frenzied ravings of heretical villains, have I heard of such a... creature existing in the world. The Eternal Sleepers are no druids; they have no power to reshape species or summon life. These biological tissues must have been found somewhere and cultivated specifically for soul extraction. But... where did they find them?"
"Perhaps the Congregation of All Things' End really did help the Eternal Sleepers cultivate these," Gao Yang frowned. "They are connected, after all."
Philip was astonished. "Would cooperation between Embershadow cultists really be so close?"