Chapter 208: The Desire Stone and the Human Pillars

Wu Chang and He Yun passed through the small temple, heading toward the true location of the Stone Temple.

The small temple served as a boundary; beyond it, the air began to fill with thick calamity mist, forming a natural human exclusion zone far more effective than any gate.

After walking about fifteen minutes, Wu Chang and He Yun saw a massive metal gate, faintly visible through the fog-like calamity mist.

The design of the metal gate matched the one Wu Chang had seen in Zhuo Jie's resentment.

The metal gate resembled a bank vault door enlarged dozens of times; merely looking at it, no one would doubt its thickness—it could withstand a nuclear blast head-on without major issue.

Wu Chang was certain that using physical means to forcibly breach this gate was impossible—even in the Wasteland Realm, let alone the Second Layer of the Abyss, only the absolute top-tier powerhouses might manage it.

Unfortunately, the strongest walls often collapse from within.

The metal gate could block calamity mist, withstand nuclear blasts, but it could not stop a traitor within.

In Zhuo Jie's resentment, He Yun led her team through the gate's passage; now, the security door had been completely removed and replaced with a trivial electric door.

It was like a bank building an indestructible vault door, yet carving a tiny door right on it that could be pushed open with a single shove.

Without asking, this was surely Mercury's work.

The two passed through the small door and entered the space where the Stone Temple stood.

The calamity mist behind the metal gate was at least twice as dense as in Zhuo Jie's resentment.

The mist in the air had nearly solidified; for Wu Chang, who had not activated a protective barrier, passing through it felt like thousands of fine hairs brushing against his skin.

They were not merely hairs—they were thoroughly soaked in water, yet not clumped together, each strand distinct.

The moment they touched a person, they came alive, writhing like countless tiny tentacles, eager to burrow into his seven orifices and every pore.

Yet Wu Chang's spiritual insight and willpower prevented them from entering his body; they could only circle him once, then leave reluctantly.

The sensation was hard to describe—a slick, wet, chilling embrace enveloping his entire body. At first, Wu Chang was unaccustomed, but over time, he even began to find it akin to a massage, almost pleasant.

In contrast, He Yun's condition was far worse.

Since entering the Stone Temple zone, He Yun's brow had never relaxed; Wu Chang noticed she kept her lips tightly pressed, biting her lower lip with her upper teeth, as if enduring something.

He adjusted his pace, stepping beside her, and grasped her armored gauntlet.

"He Yun, are you alright? Do you need to rest for a moment?"

The instant Wu Chang grabbed her, a flicker of surprise crossed her face, but she did not struggle, allowing him to pull her along.

She shook her head. "I'm fine. I just feel this place is familiar—I've vaguely recalled some forgotten memories. These memories flash through my mind, making me unsure if they're real or not."

Wu Chang said, "You can focus more on those memories. Don't worry about vigilance or navigation—just follow me."

He Yun looked at the hand he held. "Alright. I'll leave everything to you."

He Yun closed her eyes and began sorting through the chaotic memories in her mind, while Wu Chang held her hand and walked through the thick calamity mist.

The mist clung to Wu Chang's body; though pleasant, it made movement extremely inconvenient.

Facing such dense mist, the technological flashlight He Yun had brought was useless; Wu Chang needed a supernatural lighting tool.

He reached out, pulling the Four-Sided Flame Lamp from his backpack.

"Item Skill: Flame of Ages"

"Skill Description: Consume 50 energy points or an equivalent amount of fire attribute energy to ignite the Flame of Ages. Once ignited, it burns continuously for the duration of one dungeon plane. During its burn, reduce ongoing damage taken by allied targets within its range. During its burn, gain immunity to one death. Cooldown for death immunity: one dungeon plane."

After fusing with the wick, the Four-Sided Flame Lamp no longer required per-second payment; a single 50-energy cost sustained its burn indefinitely.

For the old Wu Chang, 50 energy points were substantial, but now, it was negligible—effectively a free death immunity.

As the Four-Sided Flame Lamp ignited, the calamity mist recoiled violently, fleeing in all directions like a natural enemy.

Visibility, previously under two meters, instantly cleared a ten-meter radius of calamity mist—the world shifted from 270p to 4K clarity.

"Item Skill: Illuminate the Void."

"Skill Description: The Four-Sided Flame Lamp can command flames below your own rank and transform them into Flame of Ages, illuminating the false, dispelling plague, and repelling demons and monsters."

The effect of clearing calamity mist came from the Four-Sided Flame Lamp's "Illuminate the Void"—its ability to dispel falsehood and plague, perfectly suited for combating calamity mist.

With sufficient visibility, half the veil of mystery over the Stone Temple was torn away.

Just four or five minutes later, Wu Chang brought He Yun to the front of the Stone Temple's gate.

Gazing at the hundred-step staircase before them, Wu Chang was about to wake He Yun—when he turned and saw her eyes open.

"We're already here?" He Yun stared at the Stone Temple, surprised by how quickly they'd arrived.

Only then did she realize something was wrong—why was the visibility so clear? Had the mist vanished?

She looked at the Four-Sided Flame Lamp in Wu Chang's hand. "Did it clear the calamity mist? I've noticed that whether it's you or the things you carry, they all suppress calamity mist—as if…"

Seeing He Yun hesitate, unable to speak, Wu Chang finished for her:

"As if it appeared specifically to resolve our current predicament."

He bowed in knightly fashion, solemnly declaring: "Moved by Young Lady He Yun's peril, the Peaceful Knight answers the call."

He expected her to tease him—but instead, she turned and stepped onto the stairs first.

"Hurry up. Now is not the time to dawdle."

Wu Chang smirked inwardly, thinking women were truly hard to understand, then raised the Four-Sided Flame Lamp and caught up to her.

Before he could speak, He Yun spoke first:

"Just now, I remembered part of my memory."

Wu Chang asked, "What kind of memory?"

He Yun gazed at the top of the stairs. "It's probably the memory of when my brother and I first entered the Stone Temple."

"I remember—it was shortly after my brother was elected leader of Underground Shelter #88. Shelter #88 couldn't produce its own energy; most of the time, we obtained energy by trading with neighboring Shelter #87."

For a long time, the two shelters were steadfast partners—until Shelter #87 elected a geocentricist leader. Upon taking office, he sealed the shelter and halted all trade, plunging several nearby shelters into an energy crisis."

"Later, some shelters could no longer endure it. They united, tricked open Shelter #87's gate, slaughtered everyone inside, and seized all energy."

"When my brother learned of this, he declared himself a geocentricist too, sealing Shelter #88's gate. Because he refused to join the massacre, he wasn't one of 'them.' Shelter #88, though it didn't produce energy, had fully automated farms and automated livestock factories. After securing energy, they'd likely turn next to food."

Here, He Yun sighed.

"At that time, Shelter 88 was practically in a wait-for-death state — whenever its energy ran out, that would be the moment they had to open the shelter's doors and face a war."

"At that point in time, we discovered the underground energy mine."

He Yun suddenly stopped, turned her head to look at Wu Chang, gazed at the Four Directions Year-Fire Lamp in his hand, and said:

"The discovery of the energy mine was, for us, like this lamp in the mists of calamity. It gave everyone hope, turning the supporters of geocentrism from the original 5% to 95% in an instant."

"To investigate the energy mine thoroughly, we dispatched a large number of people to dig underground continuously, and finally, following the energy reactions, we found this stone temple." At this point, Wu Chang and He Yun had finished climbing all the steps and arrived at the platform before the temple.

Wu Chang noticed He Yun's mood seemed off and asked: "Are we going in now?"

He Yun nodded and said: "We've come this far — how could we possibly stop here."

After entering the temple, He Yun suddenly changed direction, grabbed Wu Chang's hand, and said: "Come with me."

Wu Chang:?

What's that supposed to mean — the way that sounds is just like "Come on, follow me inside."

Though he didn't know what He Yun meant, Wu Chang still followed her inside, except the things in the room weren't quite what he had imagined.

It was a room resembling a burial chamber, with two open stone coffins placed inside.

One of them was empty; in the other stone coffin lay a stone-carved human figure, with a sparkling pink diamond embedded in its chest.

Exactly the same as the "Desire Primal Stone" on He Yun.

The two stone coffins were placed on the left and right sides of the room, and between them stood a small stone stele.

Seeing the stele and the stone figure, He Yun suddenly groaned, a look of pain crossing her face, her legs going weak. Just as she was about to lose her footing, Wu Chang hurried forward to support her.

!

Seeing that He Yun couldn't recover in the short term, he could only gently lower her down, then let her lean against him.

This was the first time in Wu Chang's life that he had a member of the opposite sex leaning on his shoulder, but he couldn't feel anything pleasant about it — the reason was simple: the mecha He Yun wore was way too hard and uncomfortable.

Although her custom-made mecha wasn't much thicker than Iron Man's, it was after all sharp-edged and angular, with no softness to speak of.

He Yun clutched her head and struggled for several minutes before recovering from the intense headache. She gazed at the stone figure in the coffin, her face full of confusion.

"Why would there still be a human stake here?"

Wu Chang asked: "Your condition — is it related to this so-called human stake?"

He Yun lifted her head from Wu Chang's shoulder, sat on the ground shoulder-to-shoulder with him, and said:

"I hadn't finished what I was saying earlier."

"We found this stone temple back then. We sent three or four batches of people in one after another, and not a single one came out alive — instead, plenty of monsters escaped from within. But given the situation in the underground shelter at the time, my brother and I couldn't afford to give up on this place, so the two of us didn't send anyone else and entered this temple ourselves."

"Then we got trapped inside this temple. We didn't know how long we were trapped — it felt like a week, it felt like a month; time lost its meaning there. Just when we were about to break, we stumbled into this room."

He Yun pointed with her finger at the pictographic characters on the wall by their room's doorway and said:

"This Offering Chamber."

"During the time we were trapped in the temple, I tried to decipher these pictographic characters, and from records in many corners of the rooms, I learned the past of this temple."

As He Yun spoke, Wu Chang came to understand the past of the stone temple.

What was worshipped in the stone temple was a deity called the God of Desire. When first discovered, Its divine power was not strong, and It was quite easy to talk to.

All It needed was enough grain offered to It, and It would use Its divine power to summon herds of beasts for people to hunt.

Offer It delicious fruit, and It would bestow fragrant fine wine upon Its believers.

As long as believers satisfied the deity's desires, the deity would bestow divine grace, fulfilling the wishes of the believers who had presented offerings.

This return was often ten times, a hundred times what was given.

With growing material abundance, human desires kept sprouting — from the original need to solve hunger and warmth, to wanting gold, silver, and gems, to wanting more wisdom and martial power, and even more land and authority.

Human desires grew rapidly, but the God of Desire's desires grew even faster than humanity's.

Starting from wanting gold, silver, and gems, the God of Desire began to thirst for human souls.

If not satisfied, It would manipulate people's desires, materialize them into monsters, and destroy everything It had once bestowed.

To appease the deity and obtain more divine gifts, people had no choice but, at every important occasion, regardless of whether they had wishes, to first offer the deity enough souls.

To comfort themselves, people could only say that those chosen as offerings would, after death, have their souls enter the deity's divine kingdom, becoming guardian gods to shelter the others.

And they called these offerings human stakes.

But as time went on, the God of Desire's pickiness about offerings had exceeded the bounds of human understanding.

It stopped being limited to concrete requirements like gender, age, skin color, hair color, or birth date and time, and became abstract demands like "souls that sparkle with light" or "those naturally beloved by people."

If these couldn't be met, the old rule applied: send in the monsters.

After being tormented several times, the believers, caught between satisfying the deity's desires and struggling to keep society running, chose to find a way to kill the God of Desire.

So, once the God of Desire made demands again, the believers went through untold hardships and finally found two qualified human stakes.

As human stakes, before they died, they would receive a blessing from the God of Desire — the God of Desire would hand the "Desire Primal Stone" to the human stakes, letting each of them write one wish on the stone stele.

Any wish written on the stone stele, the God of Desire would fulfill — this was the divine contract signed with the believers back when the God of Desire was still weak.

So the two human stakes, bearing their mission, wrote down their wishes.

Those were: to seal the God of Desire, and to sink the temple underground forever, never to see the light of day again.

Bound by the divine contract, the God of Desire could only seal Itself away in shock and fury.

Wu Chang asked in confusion: "These believers of the God of Desire carved even the intelligence on how they planned to murder the deity into the temple?"

He Yun shook her head and said: "They didn't carve everything out. I deduced the conclusion based on scattered complaints inside the temple, records of numerous disasters, and the last two wishes on the Desire Stele."

Wu Chang let out a breath. No wonder — splitting up an assassination plan and carving it into the deity's own temple was ruthless work. If they really did it that way, even Lü Bu compared to this group of believers could be considered a filial son.

After hearing He Yun say so much, he had actually already caught on to what she was trying to convey.

He asked: "So you used the 'Desire Primal Stone' to leave this stone temple?"

He Yun took out the pendant, looked at the Desire Primal inside, her gaze very complicated.

"We took the Desire Primal Stone, and before we could find the Desire Stele following our memories, we discovered that the vanished temple entrance had reappeared before our eyes. Thinking about it now, from the moment we were trapped in the stone temple, we had already fallen into the God of Desire's trap."

Wu Chang took the opportunity to ask, "Then after you went out, how did you deal with the Desire Origin Stone?"

He Yun paused for a moment, her tone somewhat bitter as she said, "I discovered it could manipulate the energy in the energy mines, and to a certain extent control the Calamity Fog, so I chose to devote all my strength to studying it."

Wu Chang sucked in a sharp breath, thinking to himself, you woman really aren't afraid at all—your analysis of the information was all neat and tidy, but when it came to actually doing it, how come you didn't learn a single lesson?

Indeed, the only lesson humanity learns from history is that humanity cannot learn any lesson from history.

He Yun felt Wu Chang's gaze and knew what he wanted to say, so she defended herself:

"Our situation at the time left us no choice at all. The energy in the energy mines isn't infinite. Studying the Desire Origin Stone might repeat the same mistakes and ultimately lead to destruction, but if we didn't study it, the underground shelter would have collapsed within a few months."

He Yun sighed and steered the topic back.

"My memory of the Stone Temple is very vague, but I faintly remember things about the Human Stake and the Desire Origin Stone. I said before that I acted expecting the worst outcome—so-called worst outcome meaning becoming a Human Stake, using myself to seal this temple."

He Yun seemed to think of something, her voice trembling as she said:

"But I remember very clearly that my brother and I each took one Desire Origin Stone back then. After the Desire Origin Stones were taken, the Human Stake in the stone coffin turned to ash. Both stone coffins should have been empty—so why is there now an extra Human Stake?"

(End of Chapter)