Chapter 1252 — Speculations About the Twins
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 4
"And the place where they met is just as curious," Amber said, pointing at the dust. "Look at these things that look like pillars, and the beams connecting them, and this structure like a dome — I'm no expert on architecture, but I can tell you this isn't the building style of any northern nation. The Silver Empire is a faint maybe, but their domes use a different kind of joinery..."
Gao Yang said nothing, only studied those "buildings" sketched out in dust for a long while before breaking the silence, as if thinking aloud: "Have you considered that there might be another possibility... another possibility regarding the elven twins who met Mo Jin here."
"Another possibility?" Amber was caught off guard for a moment. "What do you mean?"
"Every clue suggests that the Lerna sisters who returned from the borders of the Divine Realm in the Gondor era were very likely already replaced by some indescribable power, and that the real elven twins may have been left forever in a divine domain beyond mortal reach. So..." Gao Yang said slowly, thinking it through, his tone grave as he pointed at the two figures standing before Mo Jin in the dust phantom, "the two elves standing here... may not be those two 'freaks' from the Church of All-Ending."
Amber's eyes slowly went wide. She understood his line of reasoning, and was thrown into utter astonishment: "You mean the ones Mo Jin Wilder met back then were the 'genuine' Lerna sisters? The pair lost at the borders of the Divine Realm?! Then what's being shown here is..."
"It's only a conjecture," Gao Yang cut off the thread she was about to follow, his fingers unconsciously tapping the tea table before him. "The clues are fragmentary, interwoven, hard to join into a whole, but think about it — there are traces here and there. Mo Jin was split into two parts: one in the Shadow Divine Realm, one with half his body replaced by shadow dust. A change like that could not have happened in the waking world. On the other hand, the 'elven twins' we know of were cultists operating within the Church of All-Ending; six hundred years ago they were still active in southern Ansu alongside the fallen druids, so it's basically impossible that they crossed paths with Mo Jin, who had already gone north by then. And the last point..."
He paused, raised his eyes to Amber's, and his voice dropped: "You just said these pillars and domes don't match the architecture of any nation on the continent. So what if this place is some 'border of a Divine Realm'?"
Amber blinked, listening in a daze, and only after Gao Yang finished did she slowly react. She threw a look at the scene sketched in dust, her eyes nearly horrified, and murmured to herself: "The border of a Divine Realm... can a mortal go there and come back alive? Not every Divine Realm has been 'rendered harmless' like the War God's... And how did Mo Jin even get there?"
"He's Mo Jin the great adventurer — a man who could convert himself into an 'artificial shadow dweller' and rampage in and out of the Shadow World seven times without being killed. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if he blundered his way to the border of some Divine Realm," Gao Yang muttered with a strange expression. "And speaking of coming back alive... look at Mo Jin's current state. Would you call that 'coming back alive'? Maybe his present bizarre condition is one of the prices of peering into a Divine Realm..."
Amber nodded thoughtfully, then suddenly struck the table as if something had just occurred to her: "Ah! Wait! If your guess holds, then Mo Jin met the Lerna sisters lost at the borders of the Divine Realm about six hundred years ago... but those sisters disappeared in the Gondor Spark era!! Doesn't that mean they survived at the borders of a Divine Realm for four whole centuries?"