Hilde nodded.
With that confirmation, Arthur hesitated no longer.
He pressed both hands onto the bronze platform. The inscriptions and magic array on the floor flared to life, blue-white light pouring from the grooves of the inscriptions and illuminating the entire basement.
The hum of the operating array grew louder and louder, and the basement walls began to tremble faintly.
Countless white light beams rose from the ground, very thin, like some kind of tentacles. They twisted in the air for an instant, then precisely found Arthur's position and stabbed into him from his back, waist, and abdomen all at once, piercing through his body.
Arthur's body went rigid. His mouth opened and closed slightly, but no sound came out.
No blood flowed from the places where the white light beams pierced his body. Around the wounds, a bronze sheen faintly surfaced, and inscriptions were spreading along the light beams into him.
His eyes were still slightly open, his pupils trembling from the pain, but his body could no longer move at all.
Hilde looked at Arthur, frozen in place, and fell silent for a few breaths before turning her head away.
"Yes. Who could say otherwise?" she murmured softly, then walked to the set of inscriptions she was responsible for and activated the final protective barrier of the array.
The light in the basement grew brighter and brighter, the hum sharper and sharper.
The power of the array climbed wildly upward along Arthur's body, piercing through the basement ceiling and the foundation of the Tower of Erudition, connecting all the way toward the top of the tower.
At the top of the Tower of Erudition, the sealed passage was now being torn open at a speed visible to the naked eye.
The moment the array fully activated, Arthur's consciousness