Chapter 1242 — The Freebie
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Countless conjectures surfaced in Gao Yang's mind all at once—about the sentinel mentioned in the Book of Vild, about that faintly unsettling warning—yet no matter how he reasoned them through, every hypothesis ultimately lacked a crucial, decisive thread of evidence; in the end, all his deliberation amounted to nothing more than spinning his own head in circles.
"Vild said he knew nothing about this 'sentinel'?" Once roused from his brooding, Gao Yang could not help turning to Amber and confirming it one more time.
"That's what he said," Amber nodded. "In fact, he doesn't even know what's written in his own 'book.' If I hadn't suddenly taken it into my head to open it and have a look, he wouldn't have realized he could be opened at all—I'd say there's definitely something wrong with his mental state too. Like Maggie mentioned, Mojin's memories have plenty of gaps, and now it looks like Mojin probably suffers from something similar."
"...Do you think the thing that split Mojin Vild might be that 'sentinel'?" Gao Yang thought for a moment, then spoke up abruptly. "Let's suppose the sentinel is some dangerous entity of tremendous power we don't yet understand, and Mojin Vild brushed against it by sheer mischance during one of his adventures. That caused his split, and left in Vild's memory a powerful impression: 'Beware the sentinel.' But later, for reasons unknown, that portion of his memory vanished, leaving only a warning in the book—one that even he himself does not understand..."
Amber nodded along as she listened, and the moment he finished she said, "You know what, I was guessing the same thing... Plenty of stories are written that way, aren't they? Adventurers run into an ancient evil spirit, pay a terrible price, and leave behind a message warning those who come after—while losing their own memories in the process. I hear playwrights make the protagonist lose his memory whenever they can't write their way out of a plot corner..."
At the first half of Amber's sentence, Gao Yang felt rather comforted—it was genuinely gratifying, he thought, that the Scourge of All Creation's view aligned with his own—but then came the second half, and he immediately felt like a fool for having trusted Amber's mouth at all. He shook his head, struggled to shake off the interference this shadow-assault goose had inflicted on his train of thought, and his expression turned serious again. "Be that as it may, since you received that warning inside the shadow divine realm, this matter has to be taken seriously. I'll have Hedy arrange people to comb through every kind of text and see whether we can turn up any clues about the sentinel... And I'll also need to sound out Enya. As the oldest deity in this world, She surely knows more than you or I..."
Hearing Gao Song's arrangements, Amber wore a thoughtful look and suddenly muttered to herself, "Actually, there's one thing I'm quite curious about... Was that warning in the 'book' really written for us? Or rather... was it written only for us?"
Gao Yang's brow furrowed at once. "What do you mean by that?"
"My entering the shadow divine realm was a complete accident—and afterward meeting Vild, opening that book, and seeing the warning inside, that was even more unforeseeable. Under normal circumstances, how would any mortal end up in a divine realm that's been cut off from the mortal world for over a million years, and open a book that looks off from the very first glance? So... was the warning recorded in that book really meant for mortals to read?"
Amber's sudden question left Gao Yang dumbstruck as well, and only then did he realize there really was a blind spot in their thinking—the warning had been seen by Amber only through coincidence, and the warning itself never specified whom it was addressed to, yet he and Amber, driven by sheer mental inertia, had instinctively assumed it was written for mortals... Was that judgment accurate?