Chapter 635: The Ancestor's Gift (24)

"This place is like a city," Luo Qi said while walking through the spacious corridor of the Seal Land. He darted forward two steps, making a larger movement in an attempt to attract Du Zhengyi's attention. He continued, adding, "A massive, fully enclosed city located underground."

Du Zhengyi's expression was very serious; their situation was actually quite dire, and his own Magic had already been pushed to a critical state; he might have to use Magic at any moment. The Seal Land itself did not make him feel afraid; familiar Magic surged in the air. He could feel the unease radiating from the people walking with him, but to him, this place felt as familiar as returning home.

"A massive, fully enclosed underground city!" Luo Qi said again, raising his volume, widening his eyes as he tried hard to attract/distract his attention. "Don't you find it strange?"

He did not find anything strange about it; rain falling from the sky was strange, wind blowing was strange, and earthquakes were especially strange; in his eyes, all of these were merely known conditions of the world. The corridor's Light Magic activated with his arrival, everything just like family welcoming his return. Liu Ziyi walked on his other side, busy monitoring and testing a large amount of Magic, too busy to hear what Luo Qi was saying; she might have been the only person who would be interested in Luo Qi's ramblings.

Luo Qi did not care that no one was paying attention to him; he continued on his own, "I mean, why is the city enclosed? I know you all will say, because this is the Seal Land, and a seal is of course enclosed. But then why build the Seal Land to look so much like a city? To prevent you all from being some country Mages who have forgotten what a human city means, let me remind you again—a city is a place that can accommodate at least hundreds of thousands of people living. Haven't you realized that most of this place is empty? I'm saying, you must have all imagined what the Seal Land looked like before coming here, right? Then did you imagine the Seal Land looked like a city? Did you think there would be decorations on the walls here? These decorations certainly aren't for tigers, lions, or kittens to admire. This place isn't a tomb at all, it isn't a place to seal monsters; this place is simply the place where the earliest Mages lived their daily lives."

He raised his head, his gaze suddenly shifting in one direction, his chattering mouth closing slightly. He turned his head back to glance at Wusu. "This is a city, a city of the Progenitor Mage. Perhaps at the very beginning, they didn't even build the city underground; perhaps it was only when they decided to leave that they sank the city underground."

His words were spoken to the air; none of the Battle Mages paid him any mind. Many of the Lotus Burners, however, were attracted by his words; this time, no one told him to shut up. Luo Qi suddenly had a strange feeling; he was standing among the Battle Mages of Qionglin, yet he was somewhat in tune with the vibe of the Lotus Burners, which was truly a bit ominous. The Lotus Burners were all weirdos among Mages, and he himself was also a weirdo among Mages.

More than one Lotus Burner was secretly sizing up Luo Qi; his words were stimulating them. They found it difficult to speak to Luo Qi, but they were all longing for Luo Qi to say something more. The eagerness in the Consciousness World was like countless rice bowls held out in front of Luo Qi, waiting for Luo Qi to serve them food.

Luo Qi thought with annoyance that he could actually be a popular little star among the Lotus Burners today; if he wanted to, he could stir up trouble among the Lotus Burners even without using Mind Magic. Although he could hurt them with a few words and could also try to twist their brains into pretzels in the Consciousness World, they were able to overcome their fear and dare to peek at a Mind Mage like him. Or, to look at it from another angle, the Lotus Burners loved adventure; the fear a Luo Qi brought them was far outweighed by the attraction a Luo Qi brought them.

It had nothing to do with Magic; it was Luo Qi's thoughts themselves that were attracting them, as if they were surprisingly similar at some point. Luo Qi felt genuinely disgusted, yet he couldn't help but fall into thought. The Lotus Burners were able to live freely in the Magic World, and the vast majority of them had not reached the level of High-Reaction Mage. Luo Qi had seen those high-reaction lunatics in the underground of Qionglin; the Lotus Burners were not crazy to that extent; they were just more ambitious, liked competition more, had a stronger will to survive, were more cruel, and liked war more... A thought flashed through his mind: compared to the vast majority of Mages who lacked imagination and preferred a comfortable life, these characteristics of the Lotus Burners were actually more like humans.

A Lotus Burner was not far from him. Luo Qi subconsciously turned his head to look at that Mage. Only a pair of eyes were revealed under the covering mask; those young eyes had been sizing him up, and even when he looked over, the other party did not evade. Luo Qi suddenly spoke, "You also think this is a city."

That young Lotus Burner answered his words without hesitation, "The moment I think that so many Mages once lived here, I get excited. In the future, we will also have a city, a country, a city and country of our own, only Mages."

Du Zhengyi finally gave Luo Qi a warning glance.

"Perhaps it was the Progenitor Mage and their servants, which is to say, us..." Luo Qi stopped abruptly. He saw Wusu's Illusion once again; several people wearing robes walked out from the depths of the corridor. The light in the corridor seemed to dim for half a moment; their robes shimmered with a soft light. Their faces were not perfect, but their beauty and elegance were awe-inspiring. Luo Qi stiffened for a while until the figures drifted away. He sensed Wusu's thoughts running at high speed, his attention highly concentrated; if this were spellcasting, he would surely have been able to mobilize high-energy Magic already. The particles of Magic in the air did not have a single ripple, and Wusu was not using Magic, yet he was enduring tremendous pressure.

Just as Luo Qi could not help but want to ask him again, two more people walked out from the depths of the corridor. This time it was somewhat unusual; the two people's robes were no longer glowing, and they were clearly arguing intensely about something. Even if they could maintain the elegance of ancient Mages, it could not cover up the two people's agitated emotions. They walked closer and closer, faster and faster, and the faces obscured by Chaos became clearer and clearer. Luo Qi watched in shock as one of them brushed past the oblivious Du Zhengyi. He could not say how much similarity there was in their appearance, but perhaps it was the posture, perhaps the expression, perhaps the temperament; they had many commonalities. That kind of commonality, Luo Qi had also seen in the memories of Shi Xiansheng; the Du Family members were always somewhat special.

Luo Qi saw from the corner of his eye that Wusu was also staring intently at the Illusion, as if he were seeing it for the first time just like him, and even comparing the similarity between the Illusion and Du Zhengyi just like him. Luo Qi's thoughts shifted, and he suddenly realized a simple truth: Wusu, like him, had inherited someone else's memories. It was just that Wusu's memories were older, more blurred, perhaps passed down through many generations, having passed through many heads that had already perished; those were memories from the Wushan Goddesses of the ancient era. Wusu said he also wanted to figure out what he was seeing; that was the truth, just like the ballads passed down by ancient peoples, where the true meaning had long been blurred after ten million years.

Luo Qi was shocked by this thought. The Goddesses were a self-contained school of Mages, and their world was always hidden in the blurred Illusions of Wushan; he hadn't thought deeply that they would be so unique. But the urgency of survival reminded him that he had no time for curiosity; he cast aside other thoughts and immediately realized that no one would pass down garbage to their descendants. Their ancestors would not pick some unimportant memories to pass down; they just could not interpret the meaning of these fragments.

That distant "Du Zhengyi" was arguing even more intensely with the person beside him; he slammed open a door in the corridor, and a cry of alarm in the real world scared Luo Qi so much he almost jumped. Reality and the Illusion seemed to overlap eerily; the person who cried out was Liu Ziyi.

"What's wrong?" Luo Qi asked hurriedly.

"The Motion Capture Magic suddenly failed," Liu Ziyi said. "We are half-blind now!"

(End of this chapter)