Chapter 390: Exploring the Library

The Bronze Gate doors glimmered with a corpse‑wax sheen in the blizzard. When Ao Li's World‑cutting Blade split the ice‑bound latch, the gap exhaled not a musty odor but a warm wind scented with sweet, fishy amniotic fluid. Qinglin's God‑slaying Crossbow suddenly locked onto the tower top, and the alarm of soaring radiation index resonated with a fetal heartbeat.

Gongxu Yue's mechanism box shot out three hundred sixty bronze mirrors, each reflecting a different scene inside the tower—some mirrors showed bookshelves oozing Brain Fluid, others displayed living books gnawing at visitors, "We are stepping into the cognitive Zigong."

####【Afterlife Book Prison】

The handrails of the tower's spiral staircase were assembled from vertebrae, each bone segment engraved with fragments of the Gui Xu Fetal Treasury Sutra. Lín Jìn's Star Sand right hand brushed the bone surface, and Nirvana Fire burned a hidden hologram: ancient Dragon Clan priests were tanning prisoners' skins into book pages, their screams sealed within the ink.

In the three‑level Forbidden Book Zone, Qingxu, a disciple of the Lingxiao Pavilion, triggered a cognitive trap. When he drew the Great Void Star Canon, the pages suddenly erupted into massive mycelial webs, and the readers clinging to the web were being transformed into human‑skin book demons. True Immortal Zixiao's sword cleaved the massive web, and the broken mycelium splashed the saliva of a silver‑haired infant.

"Watch out for ink poison!" Gongxu Yue's mechanical arm deployed a distillation device, collecting the saliva into a specially crafted jade bottle. The liquid boiled inside, gradually revealing the blue of the North Star Tower—its body was a ten‑thousand‑fold enlarged replica of an Abyss Return Ruler, its scale inlaid with Ying'er Ruchi.

####【Shadow Demon Illustrated Handbook】

At the center of the seven‑layer circular chamber, a crystal‑material Shadow Demon Codex floated. The instant Qinglin's God‑slaying Crossbow shattered the shield, the codex instantly disintegrated into three hundred sixty memory fragments. Each fragment reflected a different form of the Shadow Demon: some were quantum beasts pieced together from villagers' memories, some were guardian forms of cosmic embryos, and the most terrifying fragment displayed the true form of the Shadow Demon—indeed the Abyss Return Ruler itself, wrapped in an umbilical cord by the Twin Children.

"Cognitive projection..." Ao Li's Inverse Scale suddenly pricked, and crystal fragments reassembled around her. When the final fragment returned to place, the codex's cover opened the pupil of a black‑haired infant: "Sister Little Dragon Girl, guess who the Shadow Demon is?"

True Immortal Zixiao used blood as ink to draw the Taiyi Soul‑locking Formation in the void. The moment the formation touched the codex, countless umbilical cords burst from the pages, dragging everyone into the Shadow Demon's birth memory—

####【Fetal Prison Truth】

In the boiling Gui Xu amniotic fluid, three hundred sixty Dragon Clan holy remains were being melted into molds. The Twin Children laughed as they poured captive souls into the molds, the creation power of the silver‑haired infant and the annihilation entropy flow of the black‑haired infant alternating to scour. When the first Shadow Demon broke free from the mold, its vertebra bore Ao Li's dragon pattern, and its claw‑heart opened Lín Jìn's Star Sand pupil.

"So we..." Gongxu Yue's mechanical arm suddenly mutated into a Shadow Demon claw, "are all material!"

The memory scene suddenly collapsed, and everyone fell back to reality. The floating Shadow Demon Codex had turned into a jade basin phantom, and the basin was soaking the very consciousness fragments they had just been ripped from. The silver‑haired infant's phantom was fishing with an umbilical cord, the line's end tied to the core of Qinglin's God‑slaying Crossbow.

"Cognitive is bait~" the black‑haired infant crawled out from the bookshelf's shadow, toyed with a model of the Bronze Coffin sealing the Dark Abyss Society, "Wanna play the sealing game?"

####【Gui Xu Covenant Script】

At the observatory atop the tower, everyone discovered that the core of the Bronze Armillary Sphere was missing. When Ao Li embedded the newly‑born Inverse Scale into the gap, the instrument suddenly grew into the form of an Abyss Return Ruler, and its surface displayed blood‑red covenant script:

**1. The Shadow Demon is the Abyss Return Ruler's tendril**

**2. Sealing requires the Burial Coffin Sacrifice of the mother of cognition**

**3. Darkness forever gestates within the bright Xie Dai**

Lín Jìn's Star Sand right hand suddenly clamped Ao Li's throat, and the Vermilion Bird Zhengtong flickered madly: "You are the key..." Deep within his pupil, the silver‑haired infant was weaving a God‑slaying Rope with Nirvana Fire.

Outside the North Star Tower, fetal cries suddenly rang out, and the missing villagers crawled out of the snow. Their celestial spirit caps were all flung open, their brains transformed into pulsating chaotic soul marrow, and they knelt before the Abyss Return Ruler at the tower's summit.