Leaving the secret chamber, Columbina followed expressionlessly beside Lessing, walking along the deep, dark underground passage.
The black-clothed guards walked silently in front and behind them, their footsteps echoing in the enclosed space.
Columbina spoke up: "I need you to remove that strange power inside my core. Otherwise, I cannot provide any help for your experiment."
The urgent priority was to regain control of her Spatial Authority. To prevent them from guessing her true intentions, she struggled to control every muscle in her face, ensuring no superfluous expression leaked out.
"That is only natural," Lessing said, walking half a step ahead of her to the side, without turning his head.
The two continued forward, and the passage gradually widened. Finally, they arrived at an extremely vast circular hall.
The rock walls of the hall were brand new, bearing huge mechanical chisel marks; the cross-sections of the rock were rough and dusty. This was obviously a space that had just been forcibly excavated.
Next to the hall, there were several rooms partitioned off with transparent material. Shadows moved inside them; a group of people in uniforms were busy around rows of instruments with flickering screens of various colors, and the faint sounds of low conversation and the hum of machinery drifted out.
Walking into the interior of the hall, Columbina's attention fell to her feet. On the circular stone floor, strips and circles of complex, regular patterns had been cast in silver-white and golden-yellow metal. They interlaced and nested within each other, forming a massive magic circle covering the entire floor of the hall, gleaming with a cold metallic luster under the light from unknown sources.
Lessing stopped and pointed to a spot at the very center of the formation. "You only need to be at the center of this formation and pour your power into these special metals below. Other than that, you don't need to do anything."
Columbina's gaze swept over the outer ring of the hall. It was filled with men in black, silently forming an encircling net.
She looked around and asked, "That Ikhtiyar seems to be absent. Who will help me lift the restriction inside my body?"
Lessing did not answer immediately. He raised his hand and signaled to the crowd in the outer circle.
A tall man stepped out of the shadows. He also had white hair, and his pupils were dark red. He walked up to Columbina, his face devoid of expression.
Lessing said to the white-haired man, "Help Miss Columbina remove the restriction in her body."
The white-haired man extended his right hand, palm facing up. "Give me your hand."
Columbina extended her left hand, hovering it about an inch above the other's palm, without making contact.
The next moment, she felt a long-familiar force—that foreign object wrapping around her power core like red-black flames—being slowly drawn away by an external traction force.
As that power left, the restriction was lifted.
Columbina's thoughts spun rapidly. It seems Ikhtiyar is not the only one who masters this sealing power. Perhaps many people here can do the same thing. I cannot let them get close to me again and send that power back in. At the same time, I cannot attempt to teleport immediately. They definitely have other backups to prevent me from escaping.
I must first probe the state of the surrounding space.
Thinking this, she immediately mobilized her newly regained Spatial Authority, extending her perception outwards to inspect the spatial structure of this area.
The feedback she received was strange. The surrounding space seemed to be shrouded in a layer of heavy, constantly flowing fog, blurry and unclear. She could not "see" the spatial nodes clearly as she usually did, making it difficult to lock onto any position she could safely reach. She could, of course, forcibly choose a direction to teleport, but doing so would be no different from jumping into a torrent blindfolded; she dared not predict where she would land.
Lessing seemed to detect the subtle energy fluctuations coming from her. He spoke up at the right moment to explain: "The spatial environment in this area is naturally very unstable. It is precisely because of this instability that the possibility of breaking through this world is higher. That is why we ultimately chose this place as the base for the experiment."
Columbina did not believe his words. If space itself were chaotic enough to affect teleportation, the rock strata deep underground here couldn't possibly maintain such a stable structure; they should have collapsed or twisted long ago. This is obviously artificial interference, specifically targeting my perception of space—a cage set up to prevent me from leaving.
I still need to observe and find a flaw... She suppressed the analysis in her mind and turned to Lessing, asking, "When does the experiment start?"
"It can start right now." Lessing made a "please" gesture.
Columbina said no more and walked straight to the core of the formation in the center of the hall. A soft circular cushion had already been placed there in advance. She stepped onto the cushion, sat down cross-legged, and extended her arms naturally to the sides of her body, palms facing down.
She began to channel the Lunar Force flowing within her body, guiding it down her arms and slowly pouring it into those cold and intricate metal patterns beneath her.
The formation reacted. The silver-white and golden-yellow patterns began to light up bit by bit, starting from beneath her, emitting a faint white glow that flowed slowly along the path of the patterns.
Columbina split a part of her mind to maintain the stable output of power. Another part of her consciousness closely watched every move of the group of men in black in the outer circle of the hall. At the same time, she continued to sense the space, but that "fog" remained thick, revealing no gaps she could utilize.
Probing space is not feasible; I have to change my approach.
She planned to probe the Ley Lines. After Greater Lord Rukkhadevata's "dream teaching," she had preliminarily mastered the ability to read information from the flow of the Ley Lines.
The Ley Lines connected almost every corner of the world. Using the Ley Lines would definitely allow for positioning as well. More importantly, the activities of Moon Spirits would inevitably leave traces in the Ley Lines. Once she found the Moon Spirits, the next steps would be easier to handle.
Having found a path of action, a faint hope diluted the oppression she felt. Columbina suppressed the excitement in her heart and sank her perception deeper underground, along that invisible yet vast flow of Ley Line information, and began to search carefully.
The flow of the Ley Lines here was steady and clear, not at all like the "spatial instability" Lessing had claimed.
Soon, she captured a wisp of a familiar signal in one direction. Inside a metal cage, the second Moon Spirit she had sent out from the secret chamber was locked up.
It was caught. No wonder it hasn't been able to return.
She silently noted that location and continued to search. Her consciousness spread out like a net, filtering through the Ley Line information of the experimental base and the surrounding area. Soon, she found traces of another Moon Spirit; this one was wandering in a certain area on the periphery of the base, seeming to want to enter the interior.
What surprised her even more was that she discovered traces of three other distinct Moon Spirits! These traces wove together chaotically deep underground, finally pointing towards many empty rooms built close to the surface.
In one of the rooms sat Coppelia!
____
👻🔥The Director is back! But with a brand new look, heheh...🔥👻
New Story: Classroom of the Elite: Black Sphere Academia
✅ Read 40 chapters ahead of everyone else.
✅ Get cool exclusive stuff and updates!
Let's hit these goals:
🎯 100 Powerstones = 1 extra chapter for the public!
🚀140 MEMBERS = 5 extra chapters on all stories for supporters!
👻 P - Walnut-chan