Chapter 190

“Let’s go inside, and you can see what’s there.” Professor Atkinson extended his hand at the direction towards the stairs: “I need to warn you, Mr. Yu, there are things we did not tell you about before you came here. They are our biggest discoveries in this site - but the sad thing is, we have great difficulties in telling you about them. And I meant literally. I trust that you would understand when you see them.”

“Now you’re talking. I am quite experienced in dealing with things that can’t be mentioned lightly.” Jianmen laughed, in his current chubbier and shorter avatar, his laughter sounded brighter, happier and warmer than it normally would.

When the Jianmen descended the stairs with Professor Atkinson and Dolores, he found himself in some kind of underground temple. Aside from the magical lights held by Professor Atkinson and Dolores, the walls and pillars in this underground temple were also emitting red light that provided limited visibility. There was another wide and tall altar at the center of the underground temple, and there were some kind of texts engraved on the pillars around the altar and standing by the walls. In the four corners of the temple, stood four statues of four creatures that look very distinct from each other, whose height was more than double the average height of all three people in this room.

“So, here it is.” Professor Atkinson couldn’t contain his excitement: “Mr. Yu, what you’re looking at, is at least in part, the residence of a powerful being that once existed in this world, I might say, even a ...”

“A god.” Jianmen continued, and tossed a piece of rock at Professor Atkinson, who caught the rock just in time, and when he took a look at the rock, he found that the rock had a crack in the middle: “This is something I picked up near the entrance. I suppose you are aware that the god that once resided here had fallen.”

Professor Atkinson cracked the rock open, and found that  the rock seemed to be scorched from the inside - there was a hole in the middle, and the internal wall of the hole seemed to have been turned to glass. The rock’s outer layer was intact, yet somehow the inside was burned, and the temperature of which was high enough to turn parts of its interior into glass.

“‘The rock that was burned from within’.” Professor Atkinson recited from one of the many books he read with a smile: “So I guess you’ve been doing quite a lot of prep work before coming here. Thank you!”

“Yeah of course.” Jianmen smiled: “I really want to help as well - I too am extremely curious about Godfall.”

“Well, then I hope what we’re about to do won’t bore you.” Dolores giggled: “We’re going to transcribe some of the texts on the pillars and walls, and if possible, we would like to record the appearance of those statues as well.”

“Okay, untranscribable text and undepictable statutes?” Jianmen narrowed his eyes and walked in front of one of the statues - this statue was one of a tall and slender slightly humanoid monster, with six arms on its upper body, exposed rib cage with two layers of bones and three legs and one tail; the monster had a long head but it barely had a face, for it had no eyes, but a whole head of tentacles with different lengths and thicknesses. Its head didn’t have a mouth either, but there was a strange crack on its creepily long and slim neck.

“This one looks fun. Must be a good one for video games.” Jianmen chuckled.

“We theorized that these four statues were the avatars of the fallen god, probably just the four. We don’t know what kind of god it was, but from the very little traces of residual energy we detected when we first found this place, it was either very weak, or very ancient. From the size of these altars, and comparing to the height of the stairs, it could be both.” Dolores said.

“We’ve been careful. The whole temple was protected by some kind of magic ingrained in the walls. We tried to chip off some small pieces of the wall and pillars for further study, but turned out much harder than we’d expected. ” Professor Atkinson continued: “What’s worse, was that the material that we chipped off went up in flames the moment it left the wall or the pillars. Until we find a way to peacefully disable the protective magic, we cannot bring anything back. That’s why we resorted to transcribing the texts and trying to record the statues.”

“That might just be the residual Godwill.” Jianmen nodded and said, with his hands hovering over the statue before him: “It is not technically magic, because most likely this is not intentional - if this was really a god’s altar, or a place of worship or even its residence, then this god will have some of its will ingrained within the very fabric of this place. The god did not even have to intentionally infuse the material or its building blocks - it just needs to will it this way, thinking about how this place was perfect the way it is, how it suits its taste and stature, then the power will automatically bless and reinforce this place.”

“Interesting… then how do you suppose to disarm this… Godwill so we can bring back something to examine?” Dolores asked.

“It depends on what you wanna bring back.” Jianmen sighed: “The side effect of Godwill is that it dissolves and homogenizes the material it blesses and reinforces. So what you encountered - the chipped off material burning in flames, I’d imagine it was because of that. In order for us to bring anything back for research and study, we’ll need to find a way to keep a portion of the power intact when we separate it from this place. ”

“Understood. I think we might need to bring more equipment for that.” Professor Atkison sighed while scratching his beard: “That’s… fine, we can concentrate on transcribing and recording for now.”

“There’s a gate here. Have you ventured through it?” Jianmen went before the wall that was furthest from the staircase, and found that there was a gate made of the same material as the walls and pillars, that seemed to be embedded right in that wall in a semi-hidden way. And when he extended his hand to get a feel of it, he sensed that there were very small traces of energy flowing into and out of the gate.

“Better not do that.” Dolores saw that Jianmen was about to push the gate, and immediately jumped to Jianmen’s side to stop him: “There’s another flight of stairs leading to further below. We tried walking down a couple of times, but we were not able to - something quite dangerous is lurking down there - the presence on the lower level we mentioned earlier.”

“We didn’t get a full view of what it was, even with our various attempts. Last time we tried, it almost completely destroyed our artifact of defense with just one blow.” Professor Atkinson walked over and said: “The unimaginable sheer power, and hidden in the darkness and the thick fog. Luckily for some reason it never seemed to come up to the upper levels, and from what we could tell - it was sucking the energy from above. I’d imagine it is feeding on the residual energy of this place.”

“Okay.” Jianmen nodded: “Let me go and have a look.”