Chapter 652: The Ancestor's Gift (41)

"Our problem now is that we must at least shut down this Seal Land; I estimate it won't last more than a few hours." Clownfish was the first to turn his gaze away.

Du Zhengyi turned around silently, as if drawn by the blank wall; he blinked slowly, breathing softly, and after a few heartbeats, he suddenly opened the door and walked out.

Clownfish did not expect his movements to be so swift and sudden, and hurried to follow. Du Zhengyi's speed was so fast that he almost couldn't keep up; he couldn't even see how Du Zhengyi avoided the things outside, and he had to use Shixian twice in succession to ensure he could keep up with Du Zhengyi without falling behind.

Du Zhengyi passed through the corridor, weaving between several complex rooms; after two rooms, he shook off the Seal Beasts once more, and only then could Clownfish begin to keep up with Du Zhengyi on foot. They returned to a core area of the honeycomb structure, and after standing still, he realized that Du Zhengyi was also breathing slightly hard, showing that the rapid traversal just now had not been easy for him either.

"Rare to see you struggling." Clownfish smiled slightly.

Du Zhengyi turned his head to face him, "Don't provoke me."

"My mistake." Clownfish took a step back, keeping a distance from Du Zhengyi.

After a few breaths, Du Zhengyi reached out a hand to touch the wall carefully, focusing his mind to whisper the Secret Language to the Seal Land.

This was a long chant, using the Secret Language of the Ancient Ancestor Mage, yet the person chanting needed to carefully choose their words to ensure logical flow and complete requests; Du Zhengyi was quite accomplished in this. The Seal Land listened to his chanting, and the response came slowly; the white walls flickered with a fluorescent blue luster, and the previously empty room seemed to unfold like origami, extending several operating platforms and some structures whose purposes they could not identify.

"So, those blank rooms aren't actually empty, are they? Just like the lair of the Highland Mages." Clownfish said.

Du Zhengyi did not answer; he finished the last sentence of the Secret Language chant and walked to the platform at the very center. He pondered for a moment, pressed his palm onto the right surface of the desk, and countless fluorescent blue lines sprouted from beneath his palm, extending into complex, crisscrossing patterns on the platform.

Clownfish walked over and tilted his head to look closely at these patterns. Du Zhengyi finally spoke, "Can you understand it?"

"A little bit." Clownfish said, reaching out to swipe a few times on the tabletop; several monitoring windows floated out of thin air before them, revealing the biological activity in the four nearby corridors and over twenty rooms, along with energy display windows. "Surprised to find I'm as smart as your junior sister? Although I can't issue commands to the Seal Land in my mind like you, I can do it through manual operation."

Du Zhengyi ignored him, looking down at the constantly changing blue patterns on the platform as if reading text.

"According to my deduction..." Clownfish spoke up tentatively again, "You need to find the central control room of the Seal Land and complete certain operations manually. But how exactly do you plan to deal with the Seal Beasts? Are you planning to have everyone evacuate the Seal Land and then let the Seal Land self-destruct?"

No one answered him; the shifting blue patterns cast a fluorescent blue light onto Du Zhengyi's face, and Clownfish watched Du Zhengyi's face appraisingly.

"You've suspected me for a long time, haven't you? Even today you aren't willing to ask directly, still holding onto a last bit of hope, hoping I am my father." Clownfish said tentatively.

Du Zhengyi's fingers paused, stopping on a blue area. After a long while, he said, "How small are the odds of two Mind Archmages appearing in the same generation, and both Mind Archmages successfully escaping Qionglin's identification mechanism? How small do these two probabilities become when multiplied together? Tending toward zero."

"Since you can think of it, wouldn't your teacher be able to? Since that's the case, he was still willing to let Luo Qi go, it really is..." Clownfish looked at Du Zhengyi's stiff, dangerous expression and changed his tone, "It really is great wisdom."

Du Zhengyi lowered his head again, his fingers tracing a complex pattern on the platform; Clownfish felt the surrounding Environmental Magic drop rapidly, the noisy running magic gradually subsided, the environment began to turn cold, doors closed one after another, the magic for transporting personnel disappeared, and the elevators were successfully shut down.

"When the Seal Land was designed, did they not think to keep a Secret Language for killing all Seal Beasts with one click?" Clownfish asked as if to himself.

Unexpectedly, Du Zhengyi answered him this time, "Some Seal Beasts can be killed directly."

He raised his hand, and a string of Secret Language appeared in the air, looking into Clownfish's eyes. Clownfish smiled, "A gift for me, how generous."

Du Zhengyi ignored his joke, "As for which Seal Beasts can be killed directly and which cannot, I haven't found a pattern; you can try. However, this type of magic only takes effect within the Seal Land."

"It's magic that calls upon environmental energy." Clownfish said with realization, then added with some worry, "If the current environment is shut down, the magic might become ineffective."

"Correct." Du Zhengyi said.

Clownfish looked at the still-running monitoring windows and saw at a glance that the light points representing biological entities inside had decreased by seventy percent. "Did you perform a purge before turning off the power?"

Du Zhengyi nodded.

"Before shutting down the entire Seal Land, will you perform a purge first?" Clownfish asked.

"Theoretically, the operational sequence is like that." Du Zhengyi answered in a flat voice.

"Are you sure it won't kill Mages?" Clownfish asked.

"Do you hope it will kill Mages?"

"Then for the remaining Seal Beasts, the two of us will have to purge them manually, and what exactly is left is still a blind box for now." Clownfish said; he walked toward the door, placed his hand on it, and stopped. "After walking out this door and clearing the Seal Beasts in this area, will you still want me to accompany you all the way to the central control room?"

He waited a moment, then with self-awareness, continued, "Understood, we'll definitely be going our separate ways."

Seeming to hesitate for a moment, Clownfish continued, "As a Mind Mage of my level, one always knows some things one didn't originally intend to know, such as the history of the Lotus Burners. The Lotus Burners are not a product of modern Mages; through many coincidences, I have absorbed sporadic memories of previous Mages. I have seen the Lotus Burners being repeatedly extinguished by Qionglin over the centuries, only to rise from the ashes again and again. The past isn't important, but I can tell you with certainty who the founder of this recent branch of Lotus Burners is."

The room was silent; Du Zhengyi seemed intent on being a dead man in front of Clownfish.

Clownfish turned around, "I swear by the name Luo Qi, everything I say below is true. The founder of this generation of Lotus Burners is Qionglin's First Archmage, your teacher, Head Venerable Pei Shu. The Du Family is involved, even going further than Pei Shu. Believe it or not, I just think you should know."

"What does this prove?"

"What does it prove?" Clownfish paused, "It proves your thinking is always so open, truly great. You really are receptive to this."

"What a thing looks like on the surface does not necessarily correspond to the actual situation." Du Zhengyi said.

"That's true; at the very least, this generation of Lotus Burners was initially just anti-Qionglin and didn't slaughter humans. Using the name Lotus Burner might just have been those few greenhorn Mages picking up a ready-made concept. However, the Lotus Burners eventually turned into a weapon; the previous leaders died too early for various reasons, and by a twist of fate, this weapon fell into the hands of that big idiot Zhao Laoda, finally becoming a weapon of mass destruction." Clownfish said.

Du Zhengyi's mind had been drifting away; he hadn't actually fully listened to what he was saying, as if it were the current Luo Qi standing here chatting with him. Even without seeing Clownfish clearly, he could still clearly distinguish Luo Qi's temperament mixed into that blurry mist, even carrying the same emotions Luo Qi would emit when commenting on such things; this familiarity made him feel close involuntarily. His mind was split in the chaos, pulled apart by contradictions; he could barely think.

One Luo Qi, two Luo Qis. The Luo Qi who pushed him onto the Yellow Springs Path, the Luo Qi who desperately walked toward taboos trying to save his life. The ghost that would make him fall into fear was Luo Qi, and the warm soul that trusted him completely was also Luo Qi. He had once prayed for Luo Qi to save Luo Qi, he was willing to sacrifice himself to Luo Qi to save Luo Qi.

What had he done? What had he encountered?

The balance of his mental world was about to be broken; countless memories of Luo Qi appeared in his mind in a chaotic, simultaneous rush. He wanted to process this information but couldn't; he wanted to store the memories away but couldn't do that either. Was the Luo Qi before him really Luo Qi? Was he the future of the current Luo Qi, or a Luo Qi from another timeline? Who changed the timeline? It was Luo Qi.

If he could face reality himself, he should also know that as long as Luo Qi refused to accept his death, the current Luo Qi would one day touch the magic of time. But when Luo Qi returned to that fatal point in time, he would encounter the person who dealt himself the fatal blow. Luo Qi would see himself. Would Luo Qi kill Luo Qi? Killing oneself—would it be dissolved as a paradox in the magic of time? If Luo Qi erased his own existence, he would disappear from the world completely, and the world would never have had such a Mind Mage who transcended the era.

He stared at Clownfish in astonishment.

"What's wrong with you?" Clownfish asked, his concerned voice having lost all disguise, exactly the same as Luo Qi's.

The door behind Clownfish was suddenly pulled open; Du Zhengyi reflexively pushed Clownfish away, just as he had pushed Luo Qi away countless times. "Careful!"

Du Zhengyi saw a pair of blue eyes. His own speed was too slow to deal with this kind of thing; he tried nervously to condense magic, but his scattered mind could not use magic; he felt as if he were already paralyzed.

More importantly, in that instant, he saw the shadow of thought in those blue eyes; it was no longer the purely savage humanoid animal they had encountered before. He froze for a moment, and a sinister smile appeared on the blue-eyed face.

Then it was too late for everything; he was punched in the chest and sent flying, and before his body even hit the ground, he knew his ribs were broken.

"Du Zhengyi." It was Clownfish, or was it Luo Qi calling him.