Lin Jie lay prone at the bottom of the duct, peering down at the hall through the gaps in the wire sh. His Silencer was already drawn.
The white-robed cultists were still busily working before the massive cultivation tanks, focused on their record books filled with cinnabar talisman scripts and glass asuring cylinders covered in graduations. They were completely unaware of the breathing sounds of the uninvited guests above their heads.
Everything seed absolutely perfect.
All Lin Jie had to do was kick open that grate. If the four of them descended like divine soldiers from the heavens into the crowd, they could control the situation before those mad scientists even reacted.
But Lin Jie suddenly signaled for everyone to stop.
Because the man standing in the center of the altar, with his back to them, stood with his hands clasped behind him, as if listening to so rhythm that ordinary people could not hear.
Suddenly.
He let out a soft sigh.
"Since you're already here, why not co down and witness it?"
Yan Xilou slowly turned around and looked up.
His eyes pierced through the distance of dozens of ters, locking firmly onto Lin Jie, who was concealed behind the dark exhaust vent.
A gentle smile played on his face.
Lin Jie's heart tightened. He instantly understood one thing.
From the very second they had stepped into this base, this man had already known of their arrival.
All the defensive oversights, all the infiltration routes, even including that ventilation duct entrance—they had likely all been left open deliberately by him.
This was not a perfect stealth assault.
"Let's go down."
Lin Jie released his fingers, which had been tightly gripping the grate. Instead, he felt a sense of relief, as if things had turned out exactly as he expected.
He kicked open the wire sh.
With a loud crash of tal hitting the ground, four black figures leaped down one after another from above, landing on the circular walkway.
The surrounding white-robed cultists, busy with their tasks, did not show much surprise or panic upon seeing the intruders. They rely stopped their work, silently retreated to the edges of the hall, and left the central stage to their leader and these special guests.
Evelyn raised her buzzing Tesla Coil Glove. Julian leveled his Discipline. Nadia held her Parang horizontally before her chest.
Only Lin Jie slowly sheathed his blade.
He stepped forward, coming to a halt less than ten ters away from Yan Xilou.
The two n stood facing each other before the cultivation tanks.
The eerie Corpse-Scent Arum unfurled its crimson petals beside them, while the embryo suspended in the fluid silently observed everything.
"We et again, Brother Lin."
Yan Xilou gave a slight nod. His tone was as elegant as if he were receiving guests in his own study.
"Since we parted in Egypt, I have often thought of you. The man who could withstand the divine impact of Osiris and still not abandon his comrades in such a desperate situation."
"I've thought of you too," Lin Jie's voice was cold and hard as iron. "Especially when I think of William still lying in bed, hovering between life and death."
"That was a necessary sacrifice."
Yan Xilou did not avoid the topic. A trace of apology flickered in his eyes.
"That British soldier was strong. His willpower was admirable. If our positions were different, I might have invited him for a cup of tea. But he stood before the wheel of history, and wheels have no emotions when they crush obstacles."
"The wheel of history?"
Lin Jie let out a cold laugh. He pointed behind him at the massive cultivation tank, brimming with deformity and profanity.
"You call this history?"
"Turning living people into monsters, stitching beasts onto human bodies, feeding a man-eating demonic flower with the flesh and blood of countless innocents, and finally creating this thing that is neither human nor ghost."
"This is your so-called history?"
Facing Lin Jie's questioning, Yan Xilou turned around, gazing obsessively at the creature suspended in the fluid.
"Monster?" he softly repeated the word. "No, you are mistaken. This is cultivation. This is sublimation. This is the only ladder for the insignificant individual known as an ordinary person to ascend to the heavenly court."
He walked over to a redwood table covered with various ancient thread-bound books and Western microscope slides. He picked up a scroll of yellowed parchnt.
"Those who live under the light can never understand that kind of despair."
Yan Xilou's voice suddenly beca low and oppressive, like the sea before a storm.
"The once glorious empire has beco a zombie."
He whirled around abruptly, his eyes burning with a near-mad fla.
"I too once tried to save it using other thods."
"I went to the West. I studied physics, chemistry, those damned chanical structures. I thought that if we could also build guns and cannons, if we could also learn those clever tricks, we could take back what we lost."
"But I was wrong."
Yan Xilou shook his head, a bleak mockery appearing on his face.
"We have fallen too far behind. Even if we start chasing now, it will take one hundred, two hundred years. And during that ti, this country would have long been carved up."
"Conventional thods can no longer save the nation."
"In this world of the weak being prey to the strong, the only way not to be eaten is to make yourself into a monster more terrifying than the predators."
He pointed at the enormous cultivation tank.
"The Westerners have science, industry, those steel machines powerful enough to destroy the world. But what do we have?"
"We have five thousand years of history. We have those powers buried in ancient texts and legends—absurd yet truly existing forces."
"Since n cannot defeat machines, then we will create a deity."
"A deity possessing absolute power, capable of ignoring those physical laws, capable of tearing an entire fleet to shreds single-handedly... a True Immortal."
"Madman," Evelyn couldn't help but curse. "This isn't science. This is a cult."
"Science?" Yan Xilou laughed. "Young lady, your so-called science is rely a set of rules used to explain the surface of this world. In the deeper world, your science is as laughable as blind n trying to describe an elephant."
He threw the parchnt scroll in his hand toward Lin Jie.
Lin Jie reached out and caught it.
It was an ancient manuscript written in a mixture of Latin and Chinese characters.
The paper was already brittle, with clear burn marks on the edges. It looked like a sole surviving copy rescued from so disaster.
On the cover of the manuscript was drawn a strange symbol.
It was a blooming black lotus. Coiled in the heart of the lotus was a snake biting its own tail.
That was... the Ouroboros.
The symbol of the Eternal Serpent cult.
Lin Jie's pupils contracted.
He had always thought the Black Lotus and the Eternal Serpent were rely in a simple cooperative relationship of mutual benefit. But this symbol hinted at a deeper origin between the two.
"Do you think I dread up this plan out of thin air?"
He threw the scroll of parchnt in his hand toward Lin Jie.
Lin Jie reached out and caught it.
It was an ancient manuscript written in a mixture of Latin, Chinese characters, and so kind of code only alchemists could understand.
The paper was severely brittle, with clear burn marks on the edges. It was clearly a sole surviving copy rescued from so disaster.
Lin Jie warily glanced at Yan Xilou. The other man didn't seem in any hurry to make a move.
Lin Jie lowered his head, his gaze falling on the first page of the manuscript.
It was a slightly scribbled diary entry. Between the lines emanated a barely concealed fanaticism and trembling.
"In the twenty-eighth year of the Wanli era, I, Matteo Ricci, have finally reached the heartland of this ancient empire."
Lin Jie's fingers turned the crackling pages. The tiline of the diary jumped forward several months.
"I encountered 'it' by the canal in Linqing, Shandong."
"It was a stormy, thunderous night. To avoid inspection by the officials, I took shelter in an abandoned City God temple. There, I saw a group of ragged people performing so kind of secret ritual."
"What they worshipped was not a clay statue of a deity, but a... woman enshrined upon a lotus pedestal."
"No, she was not human. When I approached, I slled familiar sulfur and an exotic fragrance. Under the illumination of the lightning, I saw her true form—her skin was semi-transparent like white jade, but the veins flowing within were green sap. Her legs had no feet; instead, they were countless white, wriggling rootlets burrowing deep into the earth!"
"She was a 'vegetable demon' cultivated to sentience, a living variant of a mandrake! Those ignorant believers called her the 'Holy Mother' and desperately begged her to bestow divine power."
"What happened next overturned my understanding. The female demon opened her mouth. Imdiately, I felt a force so imnse it was suffocating violently pour into her body."
"Spirit Invocation! That was the legendary 'spirit possession' of Eastern mysticism! She, with a demonic body, actually bore a sliver of a true deity's will!"
"In that instant, she beca impervious to blades and spears, even able to manipulate thunder and fire from thin air. But this state lasted only a few short minutes. That 'deity's' power was too overbearing. Her vegetal body simply could not withstand it."
"After the ritual ended, I watched as her body rapidly withered and collapsed like a rotting apple, turning into a pool of foul-slling pus. The believers wailed and cried, thinking it was divine punishnt."
"But I understood."
"I trembled as I recorded all this. This was precisely the 'descent' technique I had desperately sought in the West but could not obtain! The Gnostics tried to capture the 'divine spark,' but always failed because the vessel shattered. And these Eastern heretics, they knew how to draw down divine power, but they did not know how to preserve it!"
"The flesh! The flesh is the key!"
"Ordinary flesh and blood bodies, even demonic ones, are too fragile. If I want a deity to permanently reside, if I don't want that epheral destruction, I must find a perfect vessel capable of bearing infinite energy."
The diary's content beca more chaotic here. The handwriting was filled with anxiety and desire.
Lin Jie quickly flipped through until he saw a hand-drawn map.
"In the thirty-third year of Wanli, I finally used rcury alchemy as an exchange to knock on the door of a hidden Daoist temple behind the Celestial Master's mansion."
"That mad Daoist, obsessed with elixir refining, showed the ultimate secret of Daoism—Inner Alchemy. Refine essence into qi, refine qi into spirit, refine spirit to return to emptiness. They attempt, through cultivation, to forge a mortal's body into an indestructible, diamond-like 'immortal body' to ascend to heaven in broad daylight."
"Although their theories are filled with Eastern mystical taphors, I keenly perceived the core logic: This is a biotechnology that transforms life at the cellular level, strengthening the body's durability through energy circulation!"
"In that mont, it was as if a thunderbolt struck my brain. All the puzzle pieces ca together!"
"If we use Daoist 'Inner Alchemy' to reshape the flesh, forging it into an indestructible crucible; then use 'Spirit Invocation' as the fuse to open a channel to the higher spiritual realm; finally combine 'Human Transmutation' and 'Homunculus' theory to perform flesh-level chirism on an embryo..."
"Could we artificially create a... living god?"
"A being possessing a deity's might, yet having the stability of a mortal body... a Walker on Earth?"
"This would be a miracle surpassing Jesus Christ! This would be the endpoint of human evolution!"
The last page of the manuscript was a terrifying anatomical diagram.
It depicted an infant placed within a Daoist alchemical cauldron.
But the infant's body was marked with countless Western alchemical symbols, surrounded by complex astrological charts and biological diagrams representing different UMA characteristics.
At the infant's spinal position, the line was deliberately thickened, with a small note: "Requires implantation of a 'dragon's' spine bone to bear the spiritual force of the mineral vein."
Lin Jie closed the manuscript, feeling a deep chill.
That was precisely the prototype of the "Living Holy Embryo" before him.
This was not rely a mad experint. This was a distorted spark born from the collision of Eastern and Western mysticism in dark corners, spanning three hundred years.
"Finished reading?"
Yan Xilou's voice sounded at the right mont, pulling Lin Jie back from that ancient madness to reality.
"That missionary proposed the theory, but he failed. Because the technology of that era could not support such precise biological modification."
Yan Xilou spread his arms as if embracing the enormous cultivation tank.
"But now it's different. I have completed what he left unfinished."
"I have revived his dream, in my own way."
"However, after that missionary returned to his country, he brought this theory back to Europe," Yan Xilou continued. "He beca an elder of the Eternal Serpent cult. The cult's attempt in Paris to summon an Outer God through the 'Ascension Ritual' was actually a branch of this theory."
"But they took the wrong path."
A flash of disdain passed through Yan Xilou's eyes.
"Those arrogant Westerners only wanted to pull a god down, or turn themselves into gods. They pursued ethereal spiritual ascension, ignoring the importance of the physical vessel."
"The so-called summoning of Outer Gods is rely inviting a wolf into the house. That summoned thing is fundantally uncontrollable; it only brings destruction and madness."
"But I am different."
Yan Xilou pointed at his own chest.
"I am Chinese. I understand the Dao. I understand the harmony of yin and yang."
"What I want to create is a deity of our own."
"This Living Holy Embryo was cultivated using the purest infant embryo, fused with the flesh and blood of dozens of powerful demonic creatures, supplented by the life energy of that Corpse-Scent Arum as an incubation bed."
"It has no soul. It is a blank slate."
"The mont it fully matures, I will inject my own consciousness into it."
"It will possess the power of a dragon, the wisdom of a human, and the might of an immortal."
After saying this, Yan Xilou let out a long sigh.
He looked sowhat weary, but that ntal exhilaration made his entire person seem to glow faintly.
This was not rely a madman's delusion.
This was a distorted spark born from the collision of Eastern and Western mysticism in dark corners, spanning three hundred years.
Lin Jie closed the manuscript.
He had to admit that Yan Xilou's logic was, to so extent, self-consistent, even grandiose.
If viewed from the perspective of that decaying dynasty, this was indeed a straw of possible salvation, though dripping with poison.
"Pity."
Lin Jie shook his head and casually tossed the manuscript onto the ground.
"Your 'deity' is built upon the piled corpses of countless innocent lives. The villagers you captured for experints, the cultists you turned into monsters—they were also people."
"And."
Lin Jie's gaze beca sharp as a blade.
"You miscalculated one variable."
"What variable?" Yan Xilou frowned slightly.
"That thing." Lin Jie pointed at the cultivation tank. "It is not a blank slate."
"Life finds a way. When you forcibly fused together all that flesh and blood filled with wildness and chaos..."
"It had already birthed its own will."
"That is... hunger."
"Pure, all-consuming hunger."
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