Earlier, when Salah and the others had drunk from the Holy Grail, Pan Long had watched from the side and noticed something.
Something very interesting.
The water in the Holy Grail was nothing more than ordinary mountain spring water. Whether it was in the Holy Water Basin or the Holy Grail, before they drank it or after, it remained the same.
Yet after drinking from the Holy Grail, their vitality had indeed increased enormously. Barring some accident, every one of them would live a long life. Reaching a hundred would be no trouble at all.
Which raised the question: where had that extra vitality come from? And how had it increased?
Pan Long carefully observed each person as they drank, studying what happened at the instant their vitality increased. At last, he began to see how it worked.
"Drinking from the Holy Grail" was merely a ritual. Complete the ritual, and one received a vast amount of extra vitality.
That vitality came from the Abyss below. It rose through channels in the mountain and filled the church and the hidden chamber.
Only by drinking from the Holy Grail here, then, could one continually gain vitality and attain eternal life.
The Holy Grail itself... was merely what activated the ritual.
There was certainly something peculiar about the cup. It could be called a magic artifact—but the other cups were magic artifacts too. They simply worked in the opposite direction.
Drinking from the wooden cup increased vitality; drinking from the other cups reduced it.
They were like two switches: one turned it up, the other turned it down.
In short, the cup mattered, but the real keys were the ritual as a whole and the source of vitality beneath the Abyss.
So he was curious. He wanted to know exactly what was