pjbooks Chapter 1010 Candle
Chapter 1010 Candle
There was a few breaths of silence on the other end of the jade talisman before a brief but solemn reply came: "Received. The support team will depart immediately. Please keep communication open."
Mo Yuan put away the jade talisman, lowered his head, and looked at his hand gripping the narrow knife. His hand had stopped trembling, but his knuckles were still white from clenching it. He remembered many things—he remembered the first time he met Lin Qiye, the man standing in the arena's training ground, a black iron spear held horizontally behind him, his expression indifferent, as if uninterested in everything around him. He remembered their first mission together, Lin Qiye swiftly dispatching a beast, then turning and leaving without even glancing at the spoils. He remembered at the Rock Bone Pass, Lin Qiye carrying Mr. Xun, dragging Ajiu along, and braving the giant claw that descended from the sky, carving a path to survival from the brink of death.
He hadn't known Lin Qiye for long, but he considered himself fairly familiar with the man—silent, reliable, not good with words, yet always ready to step up at the most crucial moments. He had never felt any threat from Lin Qiye, even though the other man possessed that unsettling power of the Blood Demon.
Until just now.
Just now in the hall, when Lin Qiye turned around, what Mo Yuan saw in those pale golden pupils reflected more than just battlefield composure and decisiveness. There was something far more ancient, far deeper, something that seemed to have finally awakened after countless ages. That something wasn't hostility, not malice, but an instinct—an instinct that would make any lowly being involuntarily submit at a single glance.
Mo Yuan was unwilling to admit it, but when he was running away, his legs inside his trousers were really going weak.
That's not fear.
That was reverence.
It is an unconditional awe of a higher level of existence, etched deep in the bloodline and driven by genetic memories spanning countless generations.
"What exactly is he?" A-Jiu suddenly asked, her voice having regained some of its calmness, but hidden within that calmness was a hint of trepidation she herself was unaware of, like a child hearing a wolf howl in the jungle at night for the first time, instinctively lowering her voice even though she was far away.
Mo Yuan shook his head.
"I don't know. But it's definitely not as simple as the 'successor of the master' that the monster mentioned..."
He stood up and picked Ajiu up again.
"Let's go. We must get back as soon as possible."
……
Lin Qiye looked in the direction where the two disappeared, then turned around and walked deeper into the mountains.
He didn't turn around. Not because he didn't want to, but because he had something else on his mind.
The remaining fragments of consciousness in his mind were slowly merging, like piecing together a pile of torn ancient books. With each piece pieced together, he gained a deeper understanding of the origin of the drop of blood within him.
The being referred to as "Master" is named—Candle.
There was only one character. Its form didn't belong to any known writing system, but Lin Qiye understood its meaning the instant he saw it. In that ancient language, the character simultaneously contained two meanings: "light" and "end." "Light" signifies illuminating everything, while "end" signifies reaching the very end. The seemingly contradictory images of light illuminating everything and the end of the end being forcibly woven into the same name were, in themselves, an extremely lonely declaration.
He was the first ray of light at the beginning of the creation of all the heavens and myriad worlds.
This is not a metaphor, not a figure of speech, but a fact. In the chaotic era before time and space had taken shape, he was the first ray of light in that endless darkness. That light gave birth to consciousness, condensed into form, and then, over countless years, personally cleaved the chaos, separated light from darkness, and gradually restored order from the disorder. Those supreme beings who later ruled all the heavens and myriad realms, tracing their origins, can more or less trace their power back to him.
He is the ancestor of all people.
Then everyone joined forces to push him off the throne.
Lin Qiye didn't stop. He walked through the cooled altar ruins, across the bone-like floor riddled with holes from the erosion of the light slurry, and into a passage deep within the hall he had never traversed before. This passage was narrower and more cramped than the previous caverns, and the walls on either side were no longer the grayish-white of fossilized bones, but a more primitive dark gold—like a crystalline layer formed after some extremely dense primordial energy had accumulated within an ancient beast for most of an era. At the end of the passage was a door.
It was called a door, but it was actually just a thin black membrane embedded in the tube wall, with an extremely faint fluorescent blue light flowing across its surface, like the mucous membrane of some kind of living tissue. Lin Qiye walked in front of the membrane, and the dark golden light within his body lit up on its own. Sensing his presence, the membrane slowly cracked open from the center, like a vertical pupil slowly opening and then slowly closing—as it closed, the crack swallowed Lin Qiye inside.
Behind the thin film is a small space.
There was no fluorescent blue light, no dark red bodily fluid crystals, nothing that should be present in the internal structure of an ancient beast. There was only a pure, suffocating dark gold. The entire space seemed to have been cut out independently from the inside of the ancient beast's body. The four walls and the dome were completely covered by a layer of dark gold material of unknown texture. Countless fine light patterns flowed on the surface of the material, each light pattern pulsating slowly according to its own frequency.
In the very center of the space, a crystal the size of a fist floated. The crystal itself was colorless, but under the reflection of the dark golden light, it presented a complex and indescribable hue—as if all the extremes of color had been incorporated into it, making it impossible to discern any color at all. It hovered in mid-air, slowly rotating, and with each rotation, the pulsating frequency of the surrounding light patterns would adjust in sync, as if engaging in some kind of dialogue that had lasted for countless years.
Lin Qiye stopped in front of the crystal.
He could sense that this crystal was on a completely different level from the fluorescent blue crystal clusters outside. The fluorescent blue crystal clusters were merely crystals formed from the sedimentation of ancient beast blood and primordial energy; they were inanimate objects, remnants, and dregs. But this crystal before him was alive. It contained a complete and complex consciousness structure within it. Although it was far inferior to the intelligence of a true living being, it already possessed basic sensory abilities and memory storage functions. It was the drop of blood that Candle had dropped here before being dragged into the void rift, a vessel for inheritance that had been tempered within the ancient beast's body for countless years.
His fingers touched the surface of the crystal.
The moment they touched it, the light patterns in the entire space abruptly stopped pulsating. The next second, all the light patterns lit up simultaneously, reaching an extreme brightness that almost melted the space itself. In the extreme light, the colorless crystal finally revealed its true color—not dark gold, not fluorescent blue, but a gentle, warm golden yellow, like the color of sunlight filtering through a window on a winter morning.