“Iros really said that?” Eko stared intently at Salyan, his voice filled with disbelief.
After their encounter, facing the captain of the guards, Salyan no longer held anything back. He laid out everything he had seen and heard, including his conversation with his teacher and the horrifying contents of those information blocks.
“So you’re saying this plague that’s spreading everywhere—he was the one who caused it?” Eko’s voice trembled faintly with rage.
“I’m afraid… yes.” Salyan nodded with difficulty. How he wished this wasn’t the truth.
“He’s gone mad?!” Eko’s low roar Ekoed through the empty darkness. “Leaving now? Going out there now is just diving headfirst into the continent’s turmoil, fighting those powers to the death, and in the end, just like last time, letting those uncontrollable human heroes seize the final victory?”
“Just for such a reason, he destroyed the entire Dungeon, killed more than forty of my elite ranger brothers! And now he plans to sacrifice even more elves?!”
“I’ll gut him myself!” Eko grew angrier as he spoke, killing intent boiling in his chest. He longed to plunge his twin blades straight into Iros’s chest and demand answers.
Yet trapped in this eerie, formless cage, his powerful strength had no place to be unleashed. All he could do was clench his fists until his knuckles cracked.
“Salyan,” Eko forced down his fury, pinning his hopes on the young mage before him, his gaze filled with desperate expectation. “The black wall blocking us suddenly vanished—was that your doing? Did you find a way to break free completely?”
Salyan could only shake his head helplessly. “It wasn’t me. I don’t know what happened either.”
“Then perhaps someone else found the method. Our top priority now is to see if we can gather everyone together!” Eko quickly calmed himself, making his decision.
Salyan expanded the glow of his Light spell to its fullest. The soft radiance dispelled the darkness as they began searching this void for their companions.
In the end, they found another of Iros’s students.
Unfortunately, the disappearance of the black wall had nothing to do with him either, and Iros hadn’t even tried to recruit him.
But no matter how hard they searched, they could not find the last one—Serdan.
Around the Divine Tree area, part of the black wall still remained standing.
To them, this meant one of two things: either Serdan had dismantled most of the black walls but remained trapped within the final section, or Serdan had chosen to side with Iros, leaving early while the wall’s disappearance had another cause entirely.
No matter which, the result was the same—they were stuck in a hopeless deadlock.
With no alternatives, they turned their eyes toward the floating black information blocks in the void, trying to extract clues from them.
But that was undoubtedly a painful method. Not all blocks were like those three diary blocks with only a few lines.
The blocks varied in size, and the one that had nearly driven Salyan mad earlier was actually among the smaller ones.
Each time they touched and received information, it was like a spiritual torture session.
Even when the three of them carefully chose only the smallest blocks and rotated turns in bearing the pain, they were still overwhelmed by the flood of information.
It wasn’t long before they had to stop this near-suicidal attempt.
Salyan’s head was spinning, filled with chaotic flashes of images and broken sounds. His focus slipped away, and even casting a Clear Mind spell had little effect.
The other mage was worse—he had already collapsed unconscious.
Even Eko, who clenched his jaw from start to finish without making a sound, betrayed his limits in his paper-pale face and trembling hands.
And after all that agony, their harvest was nothing!
They saw more scenes of the world after the mists spread, blood-soaked and tragic, but not a single clue about how to escape.
Despair crept over Salyan.
Clearly, his teacher hadn’t planned to starve him here. Which meant the teacher’s plan would be complete long before that happened.
And even if they did escape, they’d still need time to chase him down. That left them with even less time than they thought.
Lin Jun didn’t analyze each one in detail—he received them quickly, glanced over, and tossed aside anything irrelevant, stacking them in a corner to sort later.
Only when he came across something possibly related to controlling the Dungeon did he examine further.
The pile of stored information grew, but it wasn’t enough to pressure Lin Jun yet.
Compared to his last collection in the Abyss Void, this time carried no risk at all.
And though most blocks were discarded like garbage after a glance, in truth the useful ratio here was far higher than in the Abyss Void.
Even random images or fragments of sentences were infinitely more meaningful than the keyboard-smash gibberish of the usual Abyss.
Through Lin Jun’s quick sorting, he actually uncovered Iros’s method for controlling teleportation.
Because the Divine Tree had rooted itself in this static Abyssal space, any Abyss ritual performed within its range would inevitably be disrupted, losing its original effect and instead linking the tree to this place.
And part of the Dungeon’s control authority was hidden within the Divine Tree itself.
In other words, so long as Lin Jun performed any Abyss ritual, he could likewise invade the Divine Tree.
Of course, success wouldn’t be so simple. But one could only see the next step after taking the first.
…
In the elf encampment, Serdan handed Pelagel a bundle of materials.
“This is for setting up some kind of magic circle? But what can you even make? The teacher really entrusted you with this…?”
Serdan was speechless. It wasn’t that he looked down on his dear friend, but Pelagel was a ranger. His spellcasting level was barely two or three at best.
Enhancing arrows with magical power was one thing. Setting up a circle—even the lowest tier—would be pushing it.
But Pelagel only smiled. “Just watch. I guarantee you’ll be surprised.”
When he dropped his backpack of arrows in front of the young Divine Tree sapling and began using those materials to draw a circle, Serdan’s surprise turned to horror.
That wasn’t a backpack at all—it was a disguised puji!
And before he could even recover from the shock, Pelagel gripped an arrow and drove it straight into his abdomen…