Lin Ze raised his hand and drew a crack in front of him.
As the blue-white arc flashed, the two people disappeared into the wasteland.
When Sirius came out of the crack, he tripped and fell into a clump of dead grass.
He lay down in the grass nest and took a few breaths. He got up and patted the grass clippings on his body. He looked up and saw a huge stone wall standing in front of him.
The stone wall is about twenty steps wide and about five or six feet high. Its surface has been smoothed by wind and sand, and no traces of carvings can be seen.
There is a crack at the bottom of the stone wall, which can only allow one person to pass sideways. The strange thing is that the stone wall is covered with thick white frost.
"Is this right here?" Sirius approached the crack and took a look inside.
"It's so dark inside, you can't see anything."
Lin Ze turned on the fluorescent wand and squeezed sideways into the crack.
The inner wall of the stone wall was unexpectedly smooth, as if something had been polished from the inside.
After walking for about ten steps, the passage gradually became wider and the top became higher, and the arched dome above could be vaguely seen.
The smell in the air became weird.
"Something's wrong." Lin Ze stopped.
"What's wrong?"
"Did you smell anything strange?"
Sirius sniffed and frowned. "It seems like something is rotten inside."
The two of them continued walking inside.
At the end of the passage is a naturally formed cave with a very high dome, and only a small part of it can be illuminated by fluorescent light.
The ground in the center of the cave has been artificially smoothed, and is paved with a smooth polished stone slab. The gaps between the stone slabs are filled with some kind of black filler, which glows dimly under fluorescent light.
There is a stone platform standing in the center of the stone slab. There is a depression as big as the mouth of a bowl on the surface of the stone platform.
The color of the edge of the pit is much darker than that of the stone platform, as if it has been soaked in liquid for a long time.
Lin Ze squatted down and touched it with his hand. There was a sticky feeling on his fingertips, and there was a layer of dark red paste on his fingertips.
"This seems to be... blood?" Sirius stood behind him, his voice deepening.
Lin Ze stood up and flicked the sticky things off his fingertips.
He looked back along the stone platform, and in the shadow of the back wall of the cave, he could vaguely see something carved on it.
He raised his wand and shined it.
The back wall is covered with murals.
The style of those murals was very similar to what he had seen in the underground passage of the sentry tower. The lines were rough and deeply carved, as if they were chiseled into the stone wall with a sharp tool. But the content of the murals stopped Lin Ze.
In the first painting, a man wearing a crown kneels in front of a stone platform, raising his hands above his head and holding a bowl in his hands.
There is a small circle painted on the top of the bowl. In the circle is a curled-up human silhouette, and inside is the small statue of the god.
In the second painting, the circle floats up from the statue, moves to the chest of the kneeling man, and penetrates into his body.
In the third painting, a kneeling man stood up, followed by a large group of soldiers. But the outlines of those soldiers were painted very lightly, like a group of shadows.
"These flowers seem to express... sacrifice?" Sirius walked to the mural and traced his fingers along the shadow-like soldiers in the third painting.
"As Arthur said, the king sacrificed his soldiers and exchanged their lives for something."
Lin Ze took his eyes back from the mural and fell back on the pit of the stone platform.
He raised the "space" finger bone, and magic power began to flow into the finger bone.
The outline of the earth beneath his feet unfolded in his mind.
The caves, passages, and stone walls are all as clear as palm prints.
Further outside, the stratigraphic structure of the wasteland, the depth of the frozen soil, the underground undercurrent...
As his vision continued to expand, he suddenly froze.
Directly below the cave, about ten feet deep, there is a huge cavity.
There were densely packed things stacked in the cavity, and those things showed a weak, intermittent pulsation in his spatial perception, like countless hearts beating at the same time.
"There... is something down there..."
Sirius leaned over and asked, "What is it?"
"I don't know, but there are a lot of them, roughly estimated to be tens of thousands, beating like a heart."
Lin Ze Pressed his hand on the stone slab, and the magic power seeped down along the cracks in the stone.
His consciousness sank deep into the ground along with the magic power, passed through more than ten feet of frozen soil and rock formations, and entered the cavity.
Piles of dead bones.
Some are complete, some are broken.
The bones have different shapes, and they are stacked in the cavity, layer upon layer, like a packed warehouse.
Those weak pulses came from the depths of the bone pile. Lin Ze followed the pulses deeper and found a fist-sized light spot at the bottom of the bone pile, dark red, beating continuously like a heart.
The heart was connected to countless dark red silk threads as thin as hair, and each thread was inserted into a withered bone.
Those silk threads draw something from the dead bones and transport it to the heart. The heart then transports the processed energy upward along another set of silk threads, through the rock formations and under the stone platform.
"I have to go down and take a look." Lin Ze said, using "Boundary Break" to directly open the space.
"Follow me." He said to Sirius.
The two walked into the chasm.
"This place hasn't had ventilation for many years..." After Sirius came out, he was forced to wear a Wandless Magic "Bubble-Head Charm" for himself.
Lin Ze The wand's light illuminates the entire cavity.
The piles of bones spread from the feet to the end of the field of vision, with layers of dead bones piled up into low mounds.
Those dark red silk threads shuttled between the bone piles, like a huge spider web, each thread beating slightly.
The heart is in the center of the cavity, suspended in mid-air, with dark red threads gathering around it, like a heart suspended by countless blood vessels. It is about the size of a fist, with an uneven surface, and the dark red luster turns bright and dark with the pulse.
"Is this... the body of that thing?" Sirius climbed up from the pile of bones and stared at the suspended heart.
"It should be."
During the conversation between the two, the heart suddenly beat violently.
Immediately afterwards, the dark red threads in the entire cavity lit up at the same time.
The pile of bones under his feet began to squirm, and the dead bones retreated to both sides as if they were alive, revealing a narrow passage leading to the bottom of the heart.
At the end of the narrow passage, deep inside the pile of bones, something was faintly glowing.
Lin Ze Go down the narrow path.
Sirius followed behind, his hand on the dagger at his waist, although he knew that the iron sword was basically useless in this situation.
When we reached the end, Lin Ze stopped.
A skeleton.
A skeleton sitting cross-legged.
There is a fist-sized stone embedded in the chest cavity of the skeleton. The surface of the stone is covered with densely packed runes and glows with a dark red light.
The skeleton's hands are held on the chest, and the two hand bones are hugging one phalange.
It is exactly the same as the "space" finger bone in Lin Ze's hand, but the color is darker, almost jet black.
The skull of the skeleton is slightly lowered and the mandible is open.