Chapter 656: The Ancestor's Gift (45)

Luo Qi stared blankly at the frozen crystals on the ground; the rapid cooling seemed to have extracted the phantoms of magical creatures from the void. He raised his head and glanced distractedly at the dim walls, which had once again become gray and dull after losing their luster. Yet, Luo Qi felt as if he could see countless cracks on the walls of these ruins, countless lives once created or captured by the Ancestor Mages were breaking free from their shackles, escaping from the seals the Ancestor Mages had set with millennia as their unit of time.

He turned his head with a trace of bewilderment to look around at his friends or enemies. Familiar, friendly faces, unfamiliar faces he loathed, confused faces, faces intoxicated by the shock of Progenitor Magic, and Liu Ziyu's face, focused intently on the Problem Magic. What he saw himself, however, seemed to be a different group of people—people who had once lived here, omnipotent yet as ordinary as them. He quickly pieced together the world of the Ancestor Mages; the problems they encountered in their final moments were now almost clear.

They were able to create Seal Beasts, drive them with their minds, and could even transmit their own Yajian into the minds of the Seal Beasts as if downloading, using the Seal Beasts like wearable equipment. They could, of course, also create bodies identical to their own. The brains of the Seal Beasts were incomplete; the creators had suppressed the emergence of their selves, and the soulless Seal Beasts were merely walking corpses operating on instinct. They could, of course, also create humanoid puppets.

Luo Qi thought once again of the Sandbox he had been thrown into. Qionglin said those Sandboxes were spaces inherited generation after generation, spaces that could be completely isolated from the outside world, where they trained Mages.

But what did the young Mages know? The young Mages discovered cities enclosed within the Sandboxes, inhabited by walking-corpse-like humans, with complex situations and variable test conditions, naturally suited for training Mages. To the young Mages who had lost their ancient memories, the Sandbox was a testing ground, a dangerous trial ground where Magic could be used safely. It was just like a child finding a rocket launcher built by an adult, but mistaking it for a climbing frame to exercise their courage and agility. If... no, deep down Luo Qi knew there were no "ifs"; the Sandbox should have been a small, enclosed experimental space driven by Magic. He had originally thought the Sandbox was the masterpiece of some evil Ancestor—most likely the one whose copy he had already encountered—conducting experiments on humans in the shadows in a place even more secretive than the Seal Land. But if things were not that simple, or if she was not the mastermind, the Ancestors had long been experimenting with creating human bodies.

They needed healthy human bodies, needed complete human brains, and yet needed to suppress the self-awareness generated during the brain's development process. In that series of explorations and experiments, exactly how many failures and semi-finished products were produced? Could there be some cities of humanoid creatures that needed to be hidden? That was why that city was so much like a human city, yet possessed cultural characteristics that had never existed.

Luo Qi felt a wave of nausea. All mortals must die, but if a mortal has already reached an extraordinary stage, whether they can accept dying calmly is indeed a difficult problem. The Ancestor Mages had long gone too far; they were too curious, too self-righteous, too greedy. They created countless creatures, and they could travel across distances further than Luo Qi could comprehend. Luo Qi clearly remembered the scenes he saw in the memories of the Alien creatures, their memories of their own ancestors, and the environments they lived in were definitely not the Earth he was familiar with, nor did he believe Earth could evolve such creatures. So they were also collecting creatures from countless worlds; they collected the Alien creatures, and perhaps they also collected this non-carbon-based creature that devoured energy. Unfortunately, any creature that can devour energy would be a disaster, especially at a time when Magic Energy was already in decline. In the final days of the Ancestor Mages, these creatures must have added to their burden.

Luo Qi could already piece together some of the Mages' final days. They must have constantly created healthy, beautiful bodies, changing their bodies like changing clothes, forever young, beautiful, healthy, and vibrant. Until one day, he did not know what went wrong—perhaps it was an epidemic, perhaps some natural degradation mechanism of the creature caused the spare bodies to fail—the Ancestor Mages dared not change lives at will anymore, and the true apocalypse descended.

Based on Luo Qi's current understanding of the Ancestor Mages, that must not have been the first great disaster they caused. They must have caused a catastrophic disaster somewhere, in some world, leading to the exhaustion of the energy that Magic relied on, and their fate also reached its end. They brought their collections from countless worlds, perhaps traveling on great ships, perhaps on flying birds, or perhaps the great ships were the flying birds; in any case, they arrived in this world, and while they were at it, they collected the local dinosaurs. This seemed to roughly infer the time they arrived here.

Luo Qi imagined what it would be like when their final moments arrived. Did they die like mortals? The Highland Mages said they ascended to heaven, like immortals. That description did not sound like they went to other worlds. If they could leave, they should have taken these collections with them, just as they had brought them here. They must have been unable to leave; perhaps it was energy exhaustion, or perhaps their physical lives had limitations, and they could no longer wander to another world. Ascending to become immortals—no matter what this actually meant, it was irrelevant; gods would not pay attention to mortals. But could there be some Ancestor Mages who never left? Would they seize the brains of mortals, generation after generation, reincarnating continuously with the metabolism of mortals, always standing among the Mages?

Suddenly, Luo Qi felt a chill down his spine and could not help but look at those faces. Could a real Ancestor Mage be standing among the Mages, calmly watching him? However, no one was paying special attention to him right now; almost everyone was behaving as they should. Luo Qi persuaded himself to set his mind at ease; at the very least, he could check the brains of all the Mages here; they could not block him, nor could they lie to him completely.

Then, what about the brains he could not check?

A thought that made his whole body cold flashed by: the brains he could not check.

"Du Zhengyi?" His emotions were too chaotic, and he spoke out subconsciously.

"Huh?" Majiang immediately chimed in, looking around, "Where is Du Zhengyi?"

"It's nothing, I'm thinking, using the process of elimination," Luo Qi said, biting the bullet. "Don't disturb my thinking."

"Eliminating that he isn't this crystal? You're really smart," Majiang said indifferently.

Of course it couldn't be Du Zhengyi; it was just that his own obsession with Du Zhengyi's brain was too deep, and his first reaction was always him. As for the rest, the rest were actually clear at a glance... Deep in his Yajian, he whispered that name, "Pei Shu."

Suddenly many things made sense, but a huge fear and vigilance made Luo Qi firmly stop his thinking and hide it deep in his mind. He did not have any evidence; he was just speculating, this was just his suspicion.

He should return to more realistic matters. What were more realistic matters? Luo Qi struggled to turn his thoughts away, inducing himself not to think about the name "Pei Shu" again. His ability as a Mind Mage made him instinctively vigilant about many things. He hurriedly scattered his thoughts, letting his thinking lose linearity and regularity, starting to shift from Mind Mages—the Ancestor Mages were all Mind Mages, and the Alien creatures were also Mind Mages. No, the Ancestor Mages were not Aliens, but the Ancestor Mages were very similar to Aliens...

Luo Qi froze again. The Ancestor Mages were somewhat like Aliens, and what was more like Aliens than the Ancestor Mages were the Wushan Mages. Alien creatures relied on mind abilities to form groups, or rather... tribes. When a new member appeared in each tribe, they added the new member to the Mind Chain, sharing their memories of knowledge and sharing their experiences. Therefore, newborn Aliens also possessed partial memories of their ancestors. Just like Great Mage Wusu standing here, he vaguely remembered sporadic fragments of the Ancestor Mages' memories; those memories came from the inheritance of the Wushan Mages. Of course, the premise for doing this was that the participants were all Mind Mages, or that a large number of powerful Mind Mages participated. When Mages did this, they were very clumsy, not as natural and smooth as Alien creatures; this was determined by their physiological structure itself. Just like Shi Xiansheng, she passed a large amount of memory to Luo Qi, but it was very difficult for Luo Qi to "think" of it naturally. How to retrieve from memory remained a big problem he had to face, and now he had no teacher to guide him.

Put this way, the situation was more like the Ancestor Mages had studied the Alien creatures and imitated their mode. The way the Ancestor Mages passed on knowledge should be similar to humans and Mages today, both requiring the establishment of schools. Perhaps, in the distant past, they had been inspired by Alien creatures and tentatively learned their methods. The Wushan Mages of today might be the inheritors of this experimental mode.

The Ancestor Mages had infinite curiosity; they collected creatures from different worlds and studied them, perhaps not for enslavement and possession, but perhaps also to learn from them. Perhaps... they also learned something from these non-carbon-based creatures before them? Luo Qi subconsciously reached out to touch the crystal, but Majiang stopped him with quick reflexes, causing Luo Qi to lose his balance and kick the crystal.

The crystal shattered into three pieces instantly like a professional scammer, and what drove the Mages crazy was that each piece split into three more. One of them burst out of the Mages' freezing zone, vanished suddenly, and the Magic Energy flickered slightly. The Battle Mages quickly filled in with Freezing Magic, but this time it didn't freeze anything.

But at the very moment Luo Qi touched and approached the crystal, a scene unfolded before him, and he saw Du Zhengyi's face. Du Zhengyi was staring in his direction in astonishment, but his gaze failed to focus properly. Luo Qi suddenly realized that Du Zhengyi hadn't seen anything, he had only felt it.

"Du Zhengyi!" Luo Qi roared in shock, reaching forward to pull him.

Majiang grabbed Luo Qi's outstretched wrist and pulled him backward, away from the pile of shattered crystals.

"What's going on?" Majiang asked in a low voice, about to start diagnosing Luo Qi.

"I'm fine," Luo Qi said hurriedly, surprised as he stepped back two paces, looking around again to confirm everything. "I'm fine, it's not here, I just saw Du Zhengyi. But not here, it was another room, a room I haven't been to."

He stopped retreating abruptly. He could be certain that these crystals, these crystal Slimes, or whatever they were, were alive. They had consciousness; they, or he, had just seen Du Zhengyi. That might be the reason Du Zhengyi turned off the teleportation elevator; Du Zhengyi felt it was unsafe and didn't want them to go over. But this thing had come over on its own; perhaps because Du Zhengyi had turned off the energy in that section of space, these energy-eating things had instinctively followed the radiation of the energy and found their way here.

Luo Qi's thoughts turned, and he hurriedly asked, "Did the split pieces freeze?"

"No, they disappeared," someone answered him immediately.

"Disappeared, that's right," Luo Qi understood. The crystal creatures had appeared in such a short time, and he was very clear that they had appeared from the void. Since they could move in another space, the reality space could not stop them from moving; their space-movement ability must be very strong. The Ancestor Mages trapping these creatures might have been studying the ability of space movement, and perhaps some "Magic" came from the study of these crystals.

"We are now..." Luo Qi's words were only half finished when a voice came from behind his head.

"Du Zhengyi." A hoarse voice.

Luo Qi turned around quickly, Wen Lin was faster than him, blocking in front of him, not letting him take a single step forward. They looked together at the figure at the end of the corridor. The tall human with blue eyes appeared again. At such a distance, Luo Qi could not be sure if it was the one who had been injured earlier, and the pervasive smell of blood also blocked his sense of smell.

"Is he the one talking?" Luo Qi asked in a low voice, regretting his loud voice earlier.

This time, the blue-eyed one said slowly, "Du——Zhen——gyi."

"Damn, are you learning to talk? Evolving pretty fast, huh!" Luo Qi said angrily.

"Du——Zhen——gyi."

"Now I'm going to be pissed off," Luo Qi said unhappily in a low voice.