Chapter 194: The City That Descends

Chapter 194: The City That Descends

“I do feel a little impatient, but not especially irritable…” Wearing the triple crown and deep blue vestments while holding Sea God Scepter, Klein carefully examined his own condition.

This meant that the Tyrant card could indeed suppress Sea God Scepter’s negative effects to a certain extent, but it could not erase them entirely.

Klein used meditation to calm his emotions, then turned his gaze toward the pile of miscellaneous items in the corner.

“Groselle’s Travels? This is currently my strongest defensive item, and it also has wondrous uses. The problem is that it was created by another ancient god, the Dragon of Imagination, Ankewelt. According to Little Sun, that Dragon King once belonged to the same camp as Calderón’s master, the Ancient Death, the Phoenix Ancestor Gregrace. No one knows whether this travelogue will trigger unnecessary changes… Caution comes first. Better not bring it.

“Like Azik’s copper whistle, that mutated paper figurine also cannot be contained. It carries the residual aura of the artificial Death… That might bring a certain deterrent effect when exploring Calderón, but it also hides enormous risks.

“The Priest of Light Beyonder characteristic? It can effectively restrain undead and is the natural enemy of the residents of the City of the Dead. But it is still only a material and hasn’t been made into a mystical item, so the role it can play is rather limited. Its negative effects are also extremely severe and very unfriendly to me in spirit body form. Besides, lightning can likewise purify the dead. Since I’ll already be holding Sea God Scepter and Sea’s Word, there’s no need to bring the Priest of Light characteristic too…”

One thought after another flashed through Klein’s mind as he ruled out the remaining items in the junk pile.

His left palm, wearing the human-skin glove, held Sea God Scepter. With a light lift of his right hand, he made the Sea’s Word cane fly up on its own and land in his grasp.

Then Klein, dressed as a pope, altered the appearance of his spirit body, hiding all his facial features beneath the shadow of the triple crown.

He slowly stood. The deep blue vestments stirred in the wind, and the bone scepter shone with dazzling splendor.

With a single step, Tyrant Klein passed through the Summoning Door and emerged from the candlelight into the real world, arriving inside a fairly spacious washroom.

After containing the Luck Stealer charm and the Death Knell revolver within his body, he opened the door and returned to the sitting room. He manipulated Winner Enzo over and had him take the black Sea’s Word cane.

After thinking for a moment, Klein drew out the Death Knell revolver again and handed it to Hell Admiral Ludwell.

Once all this was done, he took his two marionettes and, relying on the Beyonder ability of Traveling, headed straight for the spirit world coordinates Miss Magician had provided.

The journey went relatively smoothly. The aura of the Tyrant made the strange and bizarre spirit world creatures along the way too afraid to approach, or even to look directly at him. Before long, Klein arrived at his destination.

The scene before him was not fundamentally different from the rest of the spirit world. Dense and vivid blocks of color overlapped. A faint mist lingered in certain areas. From the various depths, pairs of eyes moved away one after another.

As the cape attached to his papal vestments swayed slightly, Klein made a brief distinction, then had Winner Enzo and Hell Admiral Ludwell enter a patch of mist that looked thin and ordinary.

All at once, the vision he obtained through his two marionettes opened up, reflecting a magnificent city that should have existed only in myths and legends.

This city was unlike ordinary ones. It did not develop upward, but extended ring after ring down toward the end of an underground abyss. Overall, it gave the impression of an inverted mausoleum.

The buildings inside came in many different styles, but all of them were equally strange. Some were towering pale stone pillars with enormous monolithic houses carved atop them. Some were long and rectangular, with doors set into the rooftops and not a single window. Some were built underground, with a tombstone standing at the entrance. Others were made from white bones, chaotic and fragmented.

The closer the buildings were to the bottom of the underground abyss, the more intact they were. The nearer they were to the upper layers, the more collapsed sections there were, filled with the decay and ruin brought by time.

Klein had the two marionettes stop at the edge of the city and look down over everything, but he still could not see what the buildings at the very bottom looked like. That place was shrouded in deep darkness, as though no light had reached it for thousands, or even tens of thousands, of years.

After a brief examination, Winner Enzo lowered his head of his own accord and recited in a low, hoarse voice in ancient Hermes:

“The Fool that doesn’t belong to this era;

“The mysterious ruler above the gray fog;

“The King of Yellow and Black who wields good luck…”

The moment he finished, Klein, who was outside Calderón, heard illusory, layered prayers by his ear and distinguished that they came from a man whose voice had been deliberately roughened.

“It’s the prayer my marionette just made…” Klein let out a breath of relief and muttered silently, almost imperceptibly. “This means Calderón does not block the gray fog. At least, the outer region does not block it. I can enter.”

Even so, he was in no hurry. Instead, he manipulated Hell Admiral Ludwell, making him raise his left arm and open his palm.

Illusory light suddenly burst forth, then collapsed inward around a single point, forming a pair of bronze double doors.

The doors were somewhat blurry and extremely illusory. Their surfaces were covered with countless mysterious patterns, giving off an indescribable sense of deathly silence and depth.

With a creak, the mysterious bronze doors moved backward and opened a crack.

Through that crack, Klein saw darkness of the deepest and densest kind.

Within the darkness, pallor surged. It sometimes rose and sometimes fell, like a river rushing through a lightless night.

On both sides of it, enormous pale stone pillars vaguely appeared. They were extremely similar to those in Calderón, yet even more exaggerated.

At that moment, pairs of transparent eyes and nameless faces suddenly surfaced, crowding the slit in the illusory bronze doors. They were impatient to pass through.

Klein’s eyes stung slightly. He hurriedly had Ludwell clench his left hand.

Clang!

The illusory doors covered in mysterious patterns were pushed by an invisible force and slammed shut, disappearing from Winner Enzo’s sight.

“This mysterious gate that separates life from death and leads to the Underworld seems to have had its destination altered. Behind it is no longer the Underworld, but Calderón’s core region—the deepest part of the underground pit?”

Wearing the triple crown, dressed in papal vestments, and holding Sea God Scepter, Klein nodded thoughtfully.

If so, many abilities of the death spirit domain would be rewritten in Calderón and undergo mutations.

With this understanding, Klein once again had Hell Admiral Ludwell raise his left arm.

The left half of the marionette’s body swiftly turned illusory, tinged with spots of gloomy green, as if it had become a wraith or ghost.

His upper arm and forearm no longer obeyed the rules of reality. They abruptly stretched a long distance, and his palm became abnormally pale, with an illusory face protruding from it.

That face had its mouth half open. Its tongue was sharp like a snake’s forked tongue and covered in white fur.

The tongue shot out a great distance at once, carrying an unreal feeling, as though it could directly drill into a human body and suck out the soul.

“As expected, the Death Envoy ability Ludwell obtained through the Underworld creature inside his body has mutated. Not only has it become more powerful, it has changed from extracting spirit bodies at a distance to directly sucking them out…”

Standing at Calderón’s entrance, Klein had his marionette Hell Admiral display all sorts of Beyonder powers belonging to the Death domain, category by category, allowing him to grasp how they differed from normal.

Their common feature was that they had all become stronger!

Then Klein had Winner Enzo use his own special traits, the Blood Flower ring, and the various abilities attached to Sea’s Word to conduct experiments, arriving at one conclusion after another:

“Fate-related powers are unaffected…

“Lightning is suppressed and has weakened considerably…

“I can’t fly too high…

“Wind blades, singing, illusory scales, balance, and water curtains show no change…”

After these experiments were complete, Klein had Winner Enzo and Hell Admiral Ludwell follow the pale steps at the entrance and descend one step at a time, approaching the very edge of Calderón, where all the buildings had already collapsed.

When they were close to two hundred meters away, Klein raised his right hand and pressed the face hidden within the shadow of the triple crown. Then, holding Sea God Scepter, he stepped into the thin mist.

His head grew slightly dizzy, and the scene before his eyes changed abruptly. He had entered Calderón, the City of the Dead.

Suppressing the impatience in his heart, Klein made the glove on his left palm instantly deepen in color.

His body then turned illusory and was dyed in darkness, becoming a shadow. Only Sea God Scepter in his hand continued to emit silver-white and blue-green light.

Using the concealment of his spirit body and the suppression of the Tyrant card to cover this up, Klein floated diagonally forward and merged into the shadow of a collapsed building, secretly following behind his two marionettes as he began a preliminary reconnaissance of Calderón’s outer region.

As he moved through it, Klein gradually sensed something unusual.

It was too quiet here!

So quiet it was as if the entire city had died, without even insects surviving.

Yet according to Magic Mirror Arrodes and Red Light Aiur Moria, when the Phoenix Ancestor Gregrace uprooted Calderón and threw it into the depths of the spirit world, She had not allowed the city’s residents to leave beforehand. Ordinarily, spirit world creatures would occasionally enter as well.

But at this moment, in this outer region, there were no living beings at all. Not skeletons, not living corpses, not even one or two stray bones that were not part of the buildings.

Klein’s spirit grew increasingly tense. Through Winner Enzo and Hell Admiral Ludwell’s vision, he examined his surroundings even more carefully.

During this process, “his” gaze swept across a broken pale pillar and saw, inside the ancient, ruined house atop it, a disc polished from gold.

The disc’s smooth surface reflected a human figure, but the one corresponding to it was not Winner Enzo.

It was Klein himself, wearing a triple crown and deep blue vestments.

This Klein’s body was surrounded by an eerie chill. His face was deathly pale, and there was no light in his eyes, as though he had been dead for a very long time.