In the best-case scenario, a portal would appear, taking him straight to Inverted Lake in a single step.
Alas, that kind of luck was hard to come by. Getting something out of the experience right in front of him was already pretty good.
Daylight had broken, and the downpour had just let up, but the air was still damp.
Listening to the rainwater trickling all around him, Fu Qian casually kept fiddling with the artificial eye in his socket, looking quite pleased.
That was right. He'd actually managed to bring it out.
This was the legendary Realm of the Dead, the sort of place that made you think you might go in and never come back.
That alone seemed to prove that he might have chosen correctly. This lens core had some unusual properties?
Though he hadn't noticed anything especially remarkable so far.
Seen through the artificial eye, whose shape wasn't even particularly round, the scene was indeed abstract, a vivid illustration of the strange and bizarre.
But that was all. So far, it didn't even let him see ghosts in broad daylight.
Fortunately, he hadn't expected too much in the first place. He'd gone to the trouble of bringing this thing out for one reason: to have a fallback core he could take to the coordinates from last time and check out.
This wasn't pure guesswork. It was a logical deduction.
The key lay in a question he'd asked earlier: if a research organization like that had really discovered the Wise Dead, what would they want to use them for?
Guiding the way. That had been the answer earlier, no doubt.
But why guide the way?
Had they, like the Academy's expedition team, found some more ancient research tradition with instructions on this subject, then simply followed them?