18: Chapter 18 It Saw Me

As Lu Li gripped the hilt of the ritual dagger, the blade vibrated in his palm.

It was not a vibration in the physical sense. It was a tremor on a spiritual level, as if the knife had already known him before he even grasped it—no, not known him, but recognized something about him whose origin even he himself could not explain.

That tremor spread along his palm lines to his wrist, then stopped on the inside of his wrist bone, turning into a low, continuous hum.

"Don't touch that knife." The cultist's voice came from behind, as weak as a spiderweb torn by the wind. "It holds a grudge."

Lu Li did not let go. He pulled the dagger from the stone floor, rested it on his knee with the tip pointing down, and took the copper bottle of holy water from his waist pouch.

The dark green light in the Underground Channel Secret Room flickered the moment the holy water touched the air, as if something had been startled when the water molecules reacted with the spirituality.

The eyes carved on the stone walls turned toward him simultaneously—not in perfect unison, but one after another, as if every eye were an independent fish in the same tank, all smelling the bait thrown into the water at the same time.

"You said the array wasn't complete." Lu Li poured the holy water into his palm, watching the liquid cast a faint blue shimmer on his skin. "But the runes on the wall are already glowing. If the ritual hadn't started, these runes wouldn't light up."

"It's not starting." The cultist's voice suddenly became very soft, so soft it was as if he were telling a secret he didn't want a third person to hear. "It's breathing."

Lu Li spread the holy water evenly over both palms, then squatted at the edge of the array, looking down at the eleven completed star points on the ground and the last empty one.

The lines of the array were indeed glowing, but the light was not stable—it was pulsing slowly, brightening and dimming, with an interval of about seven or eight seconds between each pulse, the rhythm as steady as some long-dormant living thing recovering its breath.

Lu Li thought, if the ritual could not be directly interrupted, then he had to start with the structure of the array—if any anchor point was destroyed, the twelve-pointed star would have a missing corner, and the pressure would leak out from the breach.

He reached out to touch the nearest anchor item—a fragment of an Antigonus letter stained with dark brown smudges. When his fingertips were less than an inch away from the fragment, the bell deep in The Dark Channel rang again.

This time, the bell toll was closer than any before. It didn't come from the church overhead, but from beneath his feet, from somewhere directly below the secret room, from a stratum even deeper than Chanis Gate.

Immediately after, he heard footsteps.

The sound came from seven or eight steps behind him, offset by half a beat from the rhythm of his own movement. He took a step forward, and it followed half a beat late. He stopped, and it stopped a quarter-beat later, emitting a superfluous echo.

Lu Li's fingers froze above the letter fragment, the hair on his back standing on end. He had heard this sound in the corridor, but now it was closer—close enough that he could distinguish from the sound of the footsteps rubbing against the ground that it was not stepping on water, but on dry stone. Yet he himself was stepping in ankle-deep sewage with every step.

He was wading through water, yet the creature imitating his walk was stepping on dry land.

The cultist suddenly let out a suppressed moan. Lu Li turned his head and saw that the fingertips of the cultist's right hand were melting.

It wasn't the melting of flesh and blood—it was slower, more precise, closer to a transformation of material form after the laws of physics had been altered. The skin on the fingertips turned into a grayish-white, translucent substance, and a layer of fine scale patterns emerged on the surface, identical to the mold patterns he had seen on the stone walls of the secret room. As the scales spread, they emitted a faint rustling sound, like countless tiny fingernails scratching against stone at the same time.

"It is looking at me." The cultist lowered his head, covering his right eye with his still-functional left hand. His voice seeped out from between his fingers, muffled, carrying a kind of calmness that only remained after being repeatedly crushed. "It has been looking since just now. Not looking at me—it is using my eyes to look at you all. I cannot block its gaze."

Lu Li suddenly realized that this cultist had insisted on saying only one sentence from the moment he entered the Nighthawks' interrogation room until now—"It is still looking at me."

Everyone, including Dunn, had assumed he was describing a fear of being watched, thinking he was describing some kind of mental oppression. But he was not speaking in metaphors at all—there was truly something looking out through his eyes, using the blood vessels on his retinas to identify the spiritual wavelength of everyone in the secret room.

And the reason he refused to say what "it" was, was not because he was afraid of leaking secrets, but because he knew that once he spoke that name, that name would take root in the minds of those who heard it, and then crawl into more eyes along those roots.

Lu Li poured the holy water onto the letter fragment. The moment the holy water touched the fragment, it hissed, rising with a wisp of fine, grayish-white smoke.

The dark brown stains on the fragment receded a small circle under the effect of the holy water, but after the smoke dissipated, the stains spread back, like a beach refilled by seawater after the tide receded. The holy water was useful, but its effect was limited—the source of the array's contamination was not in these anchor items, but in the twelfth corner in the center of the array that had not yet been fully carved. And the carrier of that corner was the blood mark on the palm of the cultist's right hand.

He stood up and walked to the cultist, squatted down, unscrewed the holy water bottle, and poured the last bit of holy water onto the palm of his right hand. The moment the holy water touched the rune on his palm, the cultist's body arched violently, his back slamming against the stone wall, and a semi-suppressed howl escaped his throat. The scales receded half a centimeter from his fingertips, and the dark red mist at the edge of the mark on his palm was also suppressed for a moment.

Lu Li softly said a sentence he himself was not entirely sure about: "If the eye of the array is carved on your hand, then the way to destroy the array is not by killing you—it is by erasing it."

The cultist's howling stopped. He opened his eyes, tears and blood mixing as they flowed from the corners of his eyes, but the corners of his mouth actually twitched upward—not the stiff, forced smile controlled by external forces from before, but a bitter smile squeezed out from the deepest part of his chest after a dying man finally found something he could grasp.

"You are smarter than the people who came to The Dark Channel to find me before." He reached out his trembling right hand, palm up, his tone suddenly relaxing.

"But the eye of the array cannot be erased; it can only be transferred. The moment you destroy it, the mark will transfer to your hand. Have you thought about taking my place?"

At that moment, Lu Li's consciousness was hooked away by an invisible hook.

He stood on a grayish-white wasteland. Beneath his feet were countless shattered stone slabs, each carved with the same eye symbol as the secret room walls.

The sky had neither Sun nor Moon, only a stationary scarlet disk hanging on the horizon, its surface densely covered with mouths that kept opening and closing. Those mouths opened simultaneously, repeating the same word in an ancient language.

Lu Li didn't need to understand that language to know what it said—because that word had been ringing in his own mind for three whole days.

Thief.

A silhouette was slowly rising at the end of the wasteland. It was too large, so large that the horizon could not contain any part of it, so large that Lu Li could not piece together its complete shape within his field of vision.

Its form was never exactly the same each time it appeared in his field of vision—one moment it looked like a mass of entangled, translucent tentacles, the next it looked like a twisted, deformed spinal bone, and the next it was just a corner, a type of corner that shouldn't exist within the category of geometry, sharp, pitch-black, and just half an inch of it protruding from below the ground plane made every neuron in his brain scream at once.

He couldn't look away. Not because it was attractive, but because it occupied every possible direction in his field of vision. No matter where he looked, it was in his peripheral vision.

Then it spoke. Not with a mouth, not with a voice, but using Lu Li's own memories.

Every sound in his memory—Dunn's deep voice when assigning tasks, Daly's laughter, the off-key tune Leonard hummed while on patrol, Old Neil's muttering when explaining the principles of extraction—were all borrowed by the same will and spliced into a Sequence of syllables that belonged to no one. It was flipping through his memories, not with violent tearing, but with a slow, precise, and scholarly deliberation. Every page it turned, that memory grew colder than before.

But when it turned to a certain page, it stopped.

That was a fragment of his life before he transmigrated. One summer evening, he was sitting in a rented room eating a bowl of instant noodles, it was raining outside the window, and a documentary whose name he had already forgotten was playing on the TV.

This image floated quietly in Lu Li's consciousness, without any Beyonder characteristic, without any Sequence Pathway, without any Fate Anchor, without any trace belonging to the world of mysteries.

The will paused for a moment and then suddenly asked a second question. Unlike the first, this sentence was no longer stating a fact it had discovered—it was truly with a hint of uncertainty, spoken in the low tone of Klein speaking at a future Gray Fog meeting: You came from the outside.

Lu Li opened his eyes.

He found himself kneeling on the floor of the secret room, his hands supporting him on the stone bricks, cold sweat from his forehead dripping into the groove at the edge of the array one drop at a time.

His spirituality consumption was nearing exhaustion, but the dark green light in the secret room was fading—not disappearing completely, but it was much weaker than before. The eyes on the stone walls no longer turned, and the extra footsteps had also disappeared. Only the cultist remained leaning against the wall, the rune on his palm still glowing with a faint dark red light, but the spread of the scales had completely stopped.

"You were distracted for less than five seconds just now," the cultist's voice was so hoarse it was almost inaudible, "but your eyes—your eyes were glowing just now. Unlike me. I have seen people marked by Him; their eyes turn into snake pupils. You did not. The light in your eyes is gray."

Lu Li stood up, leaning against the stone wall, tightened the cap on the copper bottle of holy water, and put it back into his waist pouch. "The main consciousness of the array has retreated. The Sealing Maintenance Team will seal this secret room within two hours, and by then you won't be a cultist—you will be a witness."

The corners of the cultist's mouth twitched again, this time closer to a real smile, but the smile was halfway drowned out by another low bell toll surging up from deep within The Dark Channel. The bell was still ringing, and the interval between each toll was still shortening.

Lu Li bent down and passed through the low doorway of the secret room, walking back along the corridor he had come from. The beam of his flashlight cut a narrow path through the Darkness, and the refraction at the edge of the light beam had returned to normal.

The temperature of the sewage beneath his feet was also dropping, returning from near body temperature to ordinary cold.

But when he walked out of the iron grate door, he noticed one thing. His folded coat was placed on the stone slab of the well rim, and there was a moth on the gray brick next to the coat.

It wasn't an ordinary moth—it had two eyes on its wings, not the mimetic eye-spots of a butterfly, but real eyes with pupils and iris patterns. The moth was still alive, its wings trembling slightly, its two eyes staring straight at the direction of the iron grate door's exit, as if it were waiting for him to crawl out of The Dark Channel.

Lu Li squatted down and cupped the moth in his palm. It did not fly away, but stayed quietly in his palm, the eyes on its wings watching him without blinking. There was no hostility in those two eyes, no corruption, no abnormal spiritual fluctuations that he could judge with his Fate Anchor.

They were just watching, calm and focused, as if recording his face, recording the only person to walk out of the Underground Channel Secret Room.

He carefully lifted the moth and placed it on the outside of the well rim, facing the direction of the church bell tower. The moth paused on his fingertips for a few seconds, then flapped its wings and flew away, the eyes on its wings flashing one last time in the moonlight, blending into the gray night of Tingen City.

Lu Li put on his coat and pinned the holy emblem back inside his collar.

The bell tower of Iron Cross Street stood silently in the distance; the bell tolls had stopped for the moment, but the string deep in his spirituality that had been plucked too many times was still vibrating at an extremely low frequency.

He walked back along Iron Cross Street, the fragment of the worm of time in his hand lying quietly in his pocket, the dark light on its surface no longer flickering, leaving only a touch of warmth in his palm.