Chapter 484 : Books

T/N: Welp… I guess the term “Mystic Realm” is going back to “Inner Realm/World”.

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North Ufiga inland, in the capital city of Addus—Yadith.

On the balcony of a Yadith hotel, Dorothy, wearing a long robe, sits on a chair gazing toward the distant Light-Prayer Cathedral outside the city. As she sips her fruit juice, she reflects on the outcome of her reconnaissance, considering how to unravel the secret within the cathedral.

“If I want to unlock the secret in that temple, I have to call down a thunder strike and complete the puzzle inside the hall. All of that would be hard to conceal. If that Crimson-rank Muhtar is there, he might catch me in the act. Hence, when I make my move, Muhtar himself must not be at the cathedral. As long as he’s gone, I can deal with everyone else without much trouble.”

This is Dorothy’s train of thought. She has already decided on the timing of her plan—during Muhtar’s participation in the second round of negotiations. Only then can she ensure avoiding him.

Having confirmed her window of action, Dorothy quickly lays out a rough plan. Once everything is in place, she sighs lightly and glances toward the towering royal palace on the other side of the city.

“The rift between the Holy Mount and the Savior’s Sect is just too wide. Initially, I hoped maybe I could help Vania forge a peace agreement, but from the current look of things… that hope is slim.

“After the final negotiation fails, Addus could become quite dangerous. I can only do my best to accomplish my main goal quickly, then see how to keep Vania safe. This time, I’m not aiming for big gains—if I can just get the advancement ritual and get out safely, that’s a success. I need to hurry…”

Watching the distant palace, Dorothy ponders thus. Then she patiently waits for the appointed time.

…

Time passes swiftly. Before long, another day is gone, and the second round of negotiations is about to begin.

Because Vania, the Holy Mount’s envoy, led a team out to inspect a few nearby tribes around Yadith during the daytime and couldn’t return in time, the meeting was postponed until night. As the sun sinks beyond the horizon, the hour of the second negotiation draws near.

Night falls, the moon faintly emerges, and outside Yadith’s walls at Light-Prayer Cathedral, Muhtar—Savior’s Advent Sect’s highest representative in Addus—leaves the cathedral accompanied by his most trusted and important subordinates. Boarding a carriage with a solemn expression, they head into the city toward the negotiation site, each looking grave. The outcome of these talks will directly decide their next move.

Once Muhtar and his retinue depart, the Light-Prayer Cathedral grows suddenly quiet. Nighttime means almost no citizens come to pray; only a group of lower-ranked Savior’s Advent Sect clerics and some revolutionary army soldiers remain inside.

As time ticks by, and the second round of negotiations formally begins over at the distant royal palace, the clerics and soldiers at Light-Prayer Cathedral pass their evening much like any other, going about their usual tasks—until a crash of thunder startles everyone.

Almost without warning, the night sky is split by a blinding flash of lightning and a deafening roar. The bolt plummets directly onto one of the obelisks before the cathedral, striking the tip of its pinnacle. Nearly at once, crackling arcs of electricity leap from the struck monument, linking the pointed tips of other obelisks. In that instant, bright electric light illuminates the entire area outside the cathedral, and then—both the glaring arcs and the thunderous sound vanish as quickly as they appeared.

After the lightning fades, many inside Light-Prayer Cathedral rush to the obelisk array, all looking surprised by the sight. A number of them have seen the tourist sign out front and know the monoliths can conduct lightning, so they remain only slightly taken aback rather than fully astonished. Instead, they speculate whether this sudden thunderbolt might herald a change in the weather.

Just then, exclamations ring out from beyond the cathedral. All eyes turn toward the source of the shouting, where they see several oasis trees ablaze, evidently set on fire by the fringe effects of that lightning strike!

Seeing the flames raging outside, everyone in the cathedral is alarmed and rushes to extinguish the fire. Because the blaze proves unexpectedly intense, a great many people go to help—even the clerics praying inside the hall hurry out when they hear the commotion.

All at once, nearly everyone left behind in Light-Prayer Cathedral is drawn outside to deal with the spreading flames. The grand hall, supported by towering cylindrical pillars, is momentarily abandoned.

At that point, from the already-open ceiling above, a lithe figure drops straight down. Using the tall pillars to vault and spring between them, this figure descends into the empty hall. A closer look reveals a hooded and veiled woman dressed in tight black attire, shapely in form. On her back is another petite figure.

“We’ve arrived… thank you…”

Once Nephthys lands, Dorothy—wearing a robe and veil—slides off Nephthys’s back and onto the hall floor. Right then, Nephthys speaks softly beside her.

“Anything else you need me to do now?”

“Not for the moment… you’d best hurry back to a safe spot and lie low. After I finish what I need to do, I’ll let you know. At that point, I’ll probably still need your help getting out.”

Dorothy replied to Nephthys, and after hearing her words, Nephthys nodded and responded.

“Alright, then I’ll leave now. Good luck…”

With that said, Nephthys immediately departed, using the pillars to hop back and forth until she reached the roof above the hall. Dorothy watched as Nephthys took her leave, then let out a small sigh of relief.

It was obvious that the thunder strike just now was Dorothy’s doing. With her level of control, it was impossible for her to “accidentally” direct lightning into the trees. Those trees were so flammable because Dorothy had a corpse marionette beforehand apply a large amount of accelerant to them, igniting them when the lightning struck. The resulting blaze would be enough to keep the people left behind here busy for a while.

In the eyes of the Savior’s Advent Sect, Light-Prayer Cathedral was merely a newly repurposed temporary base, without anything especially important to protect, so most of their vital forces were concentrated around Muhtar. The ones left here were relatively casual in their guard, allowing Dorothy to slip in with a simple trick.

Once Nephthys withdrew, Dorothy—now alone in the spacious hall—got to work. She hurried to the altar that had been repurposed for worship of the Radiant Savior and began precisely stepping on the floor tiles in front of it, stepping on the numerals inscribed in Universal Script.

The moment Dorothy caused the lightning to strike the obelisk array, her airborne bird corpse marionettes observed the arcs of electricity bouncing between the monoliths’ tips. Those arcs formed a character from the First Dynasty’s thunder-shaped writing, representing the digit nine. Thanks to Balaar’s research on the mathematics of the First Dynasty, Dorothy could recognize all the numerals in that Thunder Script.

Bringing that lightning-derived digit into the math puzzle inside the hall, Dorothy now had its final missing condition. She quickly solved the entire puzzle and was currently entering each solution on the “answer tiles” before the altar.

𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

It took scarcely ten seconds for Dorothy to step out every answer. Afterward, with the commotion still echoing outside, she waited, listening for any sign of change nearby.

One second, two seconds… Around ten seconds passed. Yet nothing changed in the empty hall: no device whirring to life, no hidden door or passage opening. Seeing this outcome, Dorothy paused in mild surprise, inwardly worrying whether her reasoning might be flawed. Was this puzzle not actually the correct method to unlock the temple’s secret? Or perhaps, after seven millennia, the mechanism was broken beyond function?

With such misgivings, Dorothy frowned. Just then, a sudden shift broke the stillness.

Before her eyes, the surrounding hall grew hazy. Everything in her field of vision turned blurry, even becoming semi-transparent in places.

Shapes became blurred and translucent, yet their outlines stood out with stark clarity, faintly glowing. The walls’ surfaces appeared indistinct, while their edges were sharply highlighted. The spacing of the floor tiles, the structural lines of the columns—all these details stood out to Dorothy’s gaze. The finer aspects of each object were blurred away, leaving only the basic shapes used to construct them—like a carefully rendered painting stripped back to its line art, or a massive 3D game environment with the rendering removed and everything shown in a raw, unrefined state.

In this stark, minimal space, row upon row of odd text emerged, filling almost the entire empty hall. Many of these characters were blurred or damaged in some way, making them impossible to interpret completely.

There, above the altar that had formerly belonged to the Radiant Savior, a strange symbol materialized. Unlike the sun-disc radiance of the Radiant Savior, this particular emblem took the form of an opened eye—its upper lid covering the top half of the pupil, while seven jagged lightning-like lines radiated out from the lower half, spreading across the lower portion of the eye. Three of those lines extended beyond the eye’s boundary.

At this peculiar sight, Dorothy’s eyes widened a bit, curiosity gleaming as she studied her surroundings.

“So this is what happens when the puzzle is solved? The temple changes into this state? No, that’s not right—it’s not that the temple itself changed, but rather I’ve entered some hidden space within the temple…”

Such were Dorothy’s thoughts. To avoid getting caught off guard by someone suddenly returning to the hall, she’d stationed multiple bird corpse marionettes to constantly monitor Light-Prayer Cathedral. Through their vantage, she could see that the cathedral itself remained unchanged—only her own perspective had shifted. From one bird marionette perched above the hall, Dorothy saw her own body gradually become transparent before disappearing entirely after finishing the puzzle steps. Hence, she deduced that the cathedral hadn’t undergone any major visible transformation in reality. Instead, she herself had been moved into a space overlapping it—or perhaps deeper within it.

Dorothy reasoned all this inwardly as she walked around this world of sparse lines and countless floating words, heading to the hall’s entrance. She saw the priests and guards laboring to extinguish the fire outside, but from her vantage, they had lost most of their details and colors—appearing like outlines hustling to and fro. Meanwhile, none of her corpse marionettes, still anchored in reality, could spot her at all. Dorothy also noticed a distinct boundary at the edges of Light-Prayer Cathedral in this space; she couldn’t perceive anything beyond it.

“It feels a bit like stepping into some “inner realm.” So far, it seems that in here I can see and hear the real world, but the real world can’t sense me…

“So is this ‘inner realm’ the actual secret the temple hides? As expected of the First Dynasty’s legacy—to create something like this. I’d thought solving the puzzle might reveal a secret passage or something…”

With those reflections, Dorothy turned back into the hall, gazing at the vast number of inscriptions floating in midair and at the holy emblem hovering at its center.

“That eye-shaped crest… must be the holy symbol of Heaven’s Arbiter. So indeed, this temple was originally built to worship Heaven’s Arbiter—that’s whom it once enshrined. And all these words floating in midair… tsk, though I can tell they’re in the First Dynasty’s language, so many are blurred or fragmented. Occasionally I see some Universal Script, but it’s just meaningless fragments…”

Dorothy examined the scene inside the hall and silently wondered.

“What exactly is this strange space used for?”

She murmured softly, and the moment her words fell, the countless floating characters around her suddenly began to shift. They swam through the air like fish—rather like how text would rearrange itself in Dorothy’s Literary Sea Logbook. Before long, a new block of text formed in front of Dorothy. To her surprise, it was written in Universal Script—characters she could understand. They described the function of this space.

“So it’s called the ‘Temple of Revelation Runes’… and it’s basically a library.”

Reading the content spelled out in Universal Script, Dorothy comprehended it all at once. She now realized the space served as a library.

The Temple of Revelation Runes was devoted to Heaven’s Arbiter, and like other Revelation temples of the First Dynasty, it was both a site of worship and a repository of knowledge. For ordinary people, it had seemed just another temple, but only someone who could read Universal Script and solve the lightning-rune puzzle—carrying out the “Revelation” offering to Heaven’s Arbiter—would be admitted to this hidden realm.

In the study of the mystic, the physical realm is sometimes called the “surface world,” representing only part of the complete world—its outer shell. Think of it like a pocket watch: the physical world is the visible face of the watch and its moving hands, something everyone can see, while places like the Netherworld, the Dreamscape, and Heaven lie beneath that dial. These hidden gears—powering and regulating the watch—are collectively the “inner world.”

The inner world makes up most of the complete cosmos, vastly exceeding the surface world’s scale. It’s analogous to the muscles and organs under the skin, the internal force behind the surface realm’s functioning, and the dwelling place of gods and other denizens. Dorothy now found herself in a sort of shallow inner realm—a space created via mystical power, lying beneath the surface world but not quite reaching the deeper tiers of the inner world. Beyond being a library, the temple served as a testing site and could assist in the city’s defensive measures.

A library, a place of worship, an exam station—melding rites, research, and education. Such was a hallmark of a temple devoted to Heaven’s Arbiter. Even after seven thousand years, it retained vestiges of its mystical function, thanks chiefly to the temple’s innate spirituality collection system, known here as “Lightning Harvest.”

Those obelisks out on the temple plaza did more than generate the random puzzle numbers used for the ritual. More critically, they could transform incoming natural lightning into spirituality, feeding it into this hidden space to keep the entire mystical system running. Over thousands of years, who knows how many lightning bolts they’d captured? The accumulated power had sustained the temple’s concealed realm in a dormant state all this time.

Seven millennia prior, during the First Dynasty, this “Temple of Revelation Runes” had belonged to a large ancient city—distinct from modern Addus. In that vanished civilization, only astute Revelation Beyonders had the qualifications to solve the sacred puzzle, complete the offering, and gain entry to this concealed library for knowledge. The library itself came equipped with a convenient query system that readily retrieved whatever information a visitor sought. Dorothy’s casual remark just now had inadvertently triggered that query mechanism, prompting the library’s self-introduction to appear.

Realizing she was standing in a First Dynasty library, Dorothy’s enthusiasm ignited. She glanced at the myriad symbols around her, only to discover that very few were legible to her.

Likely because of thousands of years without maintenance, compounded by the ravages of war, the temple’s mystical system had sustained significant damage. Many of the characters were scrambled or missing. Even the undamaged ones were mostly in Thunder Script, which Dorothy couldn’t read, and the minority in Universal Script often required a certain clearance level that Dorothy herself didn’t meet. She surmised these were for specially ranked temple personnel. The library’s introduction page apparently required only the presence of a Revelation Beyonder to display in plain text, making it among the few items Dorothy could read outright.

So some sections were damaged, others were in Thunder Script she couldn’t interpret, and parts of the Universal Script demanded a reading privilege she lacked. Dorothy grew anxious that the information she sought might also be unavailable.

Taking one more look at this unusual realm, Dorothy inhaled, then spoke aloud to the library.

“I’d like to access the information on the Revelation Path advancement ritual for Crimson-rank.”

She muttered in Prittish, but because the library’s query interface seemed powered by something akin to Universal Script’s cross-lingual communication, it understood her. The system began scouring for the data she wanted.

Before long, countless symbols swarmed toward her like tadpoles, converging in front of Dorothy to form an article. Glancing over it, Dorothy exhaled in relief.

“Thank goodness—I can read this…”