Chapter 654: The Ancestor's Gift (43)

"Turn the elevator back on," Luo Qi said to Liu Ziyi, his tone so firm that Liu Ziyi did not refute him immediately, though her face was full of hesitation.

Not far from him, Guan Xinyue shuddered as if she had caught a chill, then turned around and said to him in an unfriendly tone, "Why didn't you deal with that primitive? Luo Qi, you just let him run off like that? I don't know if you noticed, but he was practically a human, a human! He didn't run like he was panicked at all; he knew where he was going. Don't you think that's a danger?"

Luo Qi looked at Guan Xinyue suspiciously, "You seem especially sharp today."

"Does that mean I hit the nail on the head? Then why aren't you taking the time to deal with him?" Guan Xinyue said with dissatisfaction, her expression devoid of patience.

"Don't worry about him, we have more pressing matters to handle," Luo Qi said, wanting to ask Liu Ziyi about the progress of restarting the Teleportation Magic. Perhaps he could provide some help; they still had a Great Mage here, and Wusu, this Great Mage from Wushan, seemed to have a unique school of inheritance regarding the magic of the Ancestor Mages.

But Guan Xinyue wouldn't let it go, "Luo Qi, he was practically a human! Why aren't you worried? Do you know where he's going?"

Even though Luo Qi did not want to be distracted, this pointed question, driven by a strong tone, made him subconsciously recall the destination that "person" had wanted to reach in a flash of thought. That place was where he had just been; there were containers there that he could not explain and could only try to understand. The containers held humans who were more like humans, and those humans had aged into dry bones within minutes of leaving the containers. He did not know why this "person" had instinctively fled to that place after being injured, but regardless, thousands or even tens of thousands of years had passed, and anything coming out of there could only be dry bones; they posed no threat to them. Once he found Du Zhengyi, they would eventually shut down this Seal Land, and no matter if the creatures inside were humanoid or egg-shaped, they would be eliminated. His current mood and moral standards did not support him in discerning whether the things here deserved to die or were harmful; things in a grave were supposed to be dead through and through.

"Luo Qi, he is a human!" Guan Xinyue said stubbornly, her pitch rising sharply, "This is the lair of the Ancestor Mages, you should know better than anyone that there might still be remnants of the Ancestor Mages..."

"Shut up." Luo Qi turned his head abruptly and glared at her, sternly cutting her off.

The most terrifying remnants of an Ancestor Mage's lair were not the Seal Beasts, nor some Jurassic little pet pack of an Ancestor Mage; the most terrifying remnants were the surviving Yajian of the Ancestor Mages. Luo Qi certainly knew about this possibility better than anyone else, because he was a Mind Mage, and even more so because he had been hit by it before. But they could not remind the Lotus Burners of this point. In the past, in an environment of their own people, they could of course speak freely, but now they were only in a temporary reconciliation with their mortal enemies, and Luo Qi's nerves were much tighter than he let on.

He stared angrily at Guan Xinyue. Perhaps it was the anxiety and tension in his nerves affecting him; he looked at Guan Xinyue's deep brown eyes and suddenly saw a rare storm brewing beneath her irises. The emotionally agitated girl's Yajian radiated sharp edges, vaguely almost pricking the tentacles of Luo Qi's Yajian. Luo Qi instinctively did not want to know what his friend was thinking, did not want to pry into his friend's privacy; he subconsciously took half a step back in the world of Yajian, reinforcing his Shield to block the intense Yajian permeating from Guan Xinyue. She had always been a person with a firm will, a human whose will almost possessed tangible power, but for that will to overflow to this extent was a completely different matter. Luo Qi was somewhat worried that she was on the verge of a mental breakdown, but after a careful look in the midst of the chaos, he felt it was not the case. He had no time to ponder Guan Xinyue at the moment and could only set this matter aside for now; evaluating mental health was something the Scholar was better at anyway.

Returning to the question Guan Xinyue raised, Luo Qi actually did not know if there would be fragments of an Ancestor Mage's Yajian here. To be fair, if there were fragments, there was a tiny possibility it could be Du Zhengyi's ancestor, and Luo Qi realized he still had a glimmer of optimistic hope that he might run into him. But in reality, there was no such luck; it was definitely more likely to encounter fragments of a female Ancestor. He understood the other possibility Guan Xinyue was worried about: a "person's" brain being occupied by an Ancestor Mage, this "person" finding a way to run out of the Seal Land, and then mingling in human society. The consequences would inevitably be unimaginable; neither humans nor the Mage World would ever have peace again.

However, that was not right. A female Ancestor would take a risk to occupy someone else; Leader Zhao was an optimal candidate. Putting himself in their shoes, even Luo Qi would choose the incompetent yet addicted Leader Zhao. He was not powerful, but his power in the secular world was not small, and his status was more suitable. If an Ancestor's Yajian fragment existed and was powerful, it would choose Leader Zhao; if the Ancestor's Yajian fragment existed and was so weak that it could only choose that "Neanderthal," then it was not worth fearing at all.

Unknowingly, Luo Qi turned his head to look for Leader Zhao's figure, only to find that he had already walked near them, with Wusu following him politely, and the Lotus Burners making way for them.

"Why is the little girl so agitated?" Leader Zhao looked at Guan Xinyue with a smile.

Luo Qi could almost feel the Yajian radiating from Guan Xinyue immediately turn entirely toward Leader Zhao, as if a fire-control radar had shifted, and he felt a weight inexplicably lift from his heart.

"Seeing a Neanderthal really makes me excited," Guan Xinyue said, full of sarcasm, "Do you know? Neanderthals and our human ancestors, Homo Sapiens, once lived on Earth together. On the surface, they looked very similar. But Neanderthals were taller, more agile, with fair skin, beautiful features, long legs, and blue eyes and blonde hair, and they even had reproductive isolation from Homo Sapiens. What else? Right, and their IQ was too low, so they couldn't organize into a society at all, only huddling together in small groups of three or five. Sound familiar?"

Luo Qi listened impatiently, vaguely thinking that some anthropologists' genetic research suggested there might still have been a small number of Neanderthals who produced offspring with humans, and Neanderthal gene fragments had been found in the genes of humans in some regions, just like... just like the Du Family were rare descendants of a union between an Ancestor Mage and a human.

Leader Zhao glanced at her; the progress of human genetic research could not stir his interest. He looked at Guan Xinyue with a half-smile and spat out a few words dryly, "Cute bookworm."

"Xinyue, what... are you talking about?"

Luo Qi was stunned and turned to see that it was indeed Liu Ziyi who had asked. Her attention had completely left her work. Luo Qi was burning with anxiety, and what was more worrying was that he suddenly realized not everyone was as indifferent to the status of Mages as he was. An ominous atmosphere began to permeate this garbage heap of the Ancestor Mages; he had been too careless, not even realizing when it had started. Ironically, apart from him, the only other person who might be completely unaffected was Leader Zhao; perhaps it was exactly the two of them who, from the bottom of their hearts, did not take Mages seriously.

"Ziyi." Luo Qi wanted to pull the person who could solve the problem back to the task of solving the problem itself, "We are still trapped here."

"Wait, Luo Qi." Liu Ziyi swept away all the magic symbols floating in front of her, and Luo Qi's heart went cold. "What is going on here? What is Xinyue talking about? Why would a Seal Beast be humanoid... why are we..."

"Where do we come from?" Luo Qi suppressed his anxiety and put on the calmest expression he could, "It's not appropriate to discuss philosophical questions here."

Secretly, he was evaluating, evaluating whether he should influence Liu Ziyi mentally, whether he should forcibly change her thoughts.

This was his last moral bottom line. He knew that if he crossed it, he might fall forever, falling into a game player who played on private servers, finally sinking into complete nihilism.

His hand curled into a fist, his nails digging into his flesh. He looked at Liu Ziyi, "Liu Ziyi, you know what I am; I can turn my thoughts into your thoughts. If you don't want that, obey my verbal command now and restore the Teleportation Magic."

The pressure from this small person spread throughout this corner of the Seal Land. He did not use Mind Magic. If he had really used Mind Magic, his friends might not have noticed at all. But by saying it so frankly, he might lose his friends, but that was that.

"Guan Xinyue, you shut up too. You and I, collectively known as intelligent beings, I don't care about anything else, and you aren't a biology expert yourself."

Guan Xinyue did not make a sound, and no one else wanted to talk back to Luo Qi right now.

It took Liu Ziyi two sentences' worth of time before she spoke, "Even if I could activate the Teleportation Magic now, I wouldn't be able to find the destination of the previous Teleportation Magic."

Luo Qi thought for a moment and said, "Check which areas have had their Magic Energy shut off."

"Since the Magic Energy has been shut off, we have no way to build a teleportation system. You've at least seen how the Pendragon Orbital System works; the destination of a teleportation also needs energy guidance..." Liu Ziyi said with dissatisfaction.

Luo Qi interrupted her chatter, "The area where the magic was shut off must be the area where Du Zhengyi is."

Liu Ziyi, who was just about to open her mouth to drown him in technical details, paused, "Oh, that's true..."

"Then we can walk there," Luo Qi said gently.

"Oh," Liu Ziyi said reluctantly. She stood there stubbornly for a few seconds, then started working again.

"A lot of Seal Beasts were systematically killed just now; it must be that Du Zhengyi has activated something. The probability of us encountering danger has already decreased a lot. In this situation, we have to go help Du Zhengyi and the little clownfish," Luo Qi said.

Wen Lin, standing behind him, immediately agreed, being the first to break the gloomy atmosphere from just a moment ago. However, what made Luo Qi a bit uneasy was that Leader Zhao was the second person to express his stance, and his eagerness to move forward was even more intense than Luo Qi's.