After stepping through the gateway forcibly torn open by Aeon, the first thing they encountered was a corridor illuminated by ever-burning lanterns.
Following behind Orsaga, Wanwan sniffed the air lightly. She recognized the scent of the burning oil—mermaid fat, a legendary substance said to burn for thousands of years without extinguishing.
Her heart tightened.
This place, to her, was the stuff of pure legend—something she had only seen mentioned in ancient texts.
Many of the martial world's greatest techniques—Longevity Sutra by Guang Chengzi, Heaven Demon Codex by Saint Sovereign Cangqu, Compassionate Sword Canon by the Nun of Cihang Jingzhai, and Black Sky Scroll by Huajing Yuan and Feng Lian—all had mysterious ties to this very location.
Originally, Wanwan had assumed they'd need to defeat various powerful factions just to gain entry here.
What she hadn't expected was for Orsaga to track down the elusive, mobile War God Temple mid-transit, and then rip it open by brute force.
She struck a wall beside the passage with her palm, only to raise a bit of dust.
"I don't know who created this place," she murmured, "but their power must've been immense…"
Walking ahead of her, Orsaga calmly shook his head.
"The formation structure is solid. Whoever built this place wasn't weak."
Though his physical body was still mundane, using Aeon's vision, he could clearly perceive the structure of the surrounding barriers.
They were layered upon layer of enchanted runes—unique to this world's system. He couldn't decipher all the details yet, but the sheer strength of the protective array was immediately evident.
Wanwan instinctively stuck out her tongue.
The builder of this place might've been a divine-level existence—but the man before her, even if not a god, had to be close.
Praising the craftsmanship of this place in front of Orsaga, she suddenly felt awkward.
After all, in his eyes, this entire temple might be nothing more than a fancy thatched hut.
With that in mind, she stopped talking and silently followed behind.
---
After walking through several kilometers of corridor, they emerged into an unimaginably vast subterranean space.
Their position was high above the ground—on a cliff edge—overlooking an alien ecosystem teeming with strange flora and savage beasts.
At a glance, Orsaga even spotted creatures like triceratops, tyrannosaurs, and titanic pythons. Who knew how these species had ended up here?
At the very center of this otherworldly domain stood a massive palace, cloaked in a soft, glowing aura.
Orsaga glanced at the alien sky overhead, then turned back toward the glowing palace.
"Come on. It's not far."
As he spoke, he retrieved Aeon from his spatial storage tool.
The mecha emerged, lifted both of them in its hands, and rushed toward the palace at breakneck speed.
Within minutes, they arrived.
As Aeon descended, before Orsaga and Wanwan could even touch the ground, a creature burst forth from a pool in front of the palace—a strange, dragon-like beast several dozen meters long, lunging directly at them.
Its leap spanned dozens of meters, faster than lightning.
Its entire body was covered in gleaming scales, short antlers jutted from its head, and its limbs ended in webbed claws.
Its gaping maw bristled with barbed teeth, and its strike had already broken the sound barrier.
Orsaga didn't even bother looking at it.
Still resting in Aeon's palm, his eye twitched slightly.
Aeon's mechanical eyes glowed crimson.
A cross-shaped beam of energy shot forth instantly.
It pierced the beast's armored forehead like paper, killing it on the spot.
"Clueless trash."
With a dull thud, the monster's corpse slammed into the ground.
Only now did Wanwan realize they'd nearly been attacked.
Her heart raced with lingering fear and gratitude—if not for Orsaga, this place would've been both opportunity and grave for her.
Once Aeon was stored again—its towering frame now over 50 meters tall and weighing over ten thousand tons—Orsaga led Wanwan to the palace's stone gate and pushed it open.
---
Inside the temple, they were met with a hall vast enough to house giants.
The space was so immense that Wanwan felt like a miniature person in a giant's domain.
She tilted her head upward, trying to glimpse the vaulted ceiling.
There, above them, was a celestial star chart carved into the roof—each star formed from radiant gemstones, shimmering with light like real constellations.
And directly across from the entrance, carved into an enormous stone wall, was a vertical line of ancient, seal-script characters.
They descended from the ceiling to the floor, spaced apart by over a hundred meters, with each character several meters wide—larger than an elephant.
It read:
"Heaven and Earth are unkind; all things are but straw dogs."
The moment she saw it, Wanwan felt a wave of emotion surge through her chest.
Tears welled in her eyes.
Her knees grew weak, as if compelled by some divine presence to kneel—
But Orsaga casually grabbed her arm and pulled her upright.
"Why kneel?. If you've got time to kneel, kneel to me instead. Don't tell me I'm worth less than some carved words?"
A professional demon, part-time dark god, occasional world-ending villain, and professional-level backstabber…
He wasn't exactly the noblest of figures.
But at least he was alive and kicking.
Whoever wrote those words on the wall? They were probably long dead.
Wanwan's sorrow was instantly disrupted by his mockery.
Her emotions, which had been spiraling moments before, evaporated completely.
She bit her lip in frustration.
"If only I were strong enough, I'd beat some humility into you right now…"
Helpless, she turned her attention deeper into the temple.
The interior of the great hall was bathed in gentle bluish-green light, emanating from a circular crystal embedded in the ceiling over 100 meters above—glowing like a miniature indoor sun.
At the center of the hall, a massive relief sculpture rose several meters high.
It depicted a heavenly figure in strange armor, wearing a mask, seated atop a dragon-like beast, descending from nine split layers of thick clouds from the upper left corner, diving straight toward a massive blood-red fireball in the lower right.
Beside each cloud layer, from top to bottom, were the words:
Ninth Heaven, Eighth Heaven, all the way down to the First Heaven.
At the top of the sculpture, one could see the inscription:
War God Codex l
To the left and right of this central piece were two massive stone walls, each lined with twenty-four other reliefs.
Each was labeled in sequence:
War God Codex II to War God Codex XLIX.
Orsaga stood before the central mural—War God Codex I—his eyes calmly scanning the image.
A faint sneer curled at the edge of his lips.
___
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