Rivers of the Night-Chapter 410: Keys

’No, there’s a solution.’

Theron bent down and checked the corpses before him. The half that fell below was a head, leaving the lower bodies of both intact.

Soon, he had found what he was looking for. Digging through their spatial rings, he pulled out two pieces of wood that radiated Mandate aura.

Keys.

They weren’t like the plaques nor the badges, but they had the same essence at their core. Theron had already guessed that controlling and wielding Mandate was the core of what separated the true members of this guild from everyone else.

If they wanted to create the perfect prison, then it would, of course, be in their best interest to close it off in a method that was unique to them.

That made it tricky for Theron. He could suppress, crush, and eliminate Mandate from his body. But actually controlling it was a different matter entirely.

The fact he was referring to it as "Mandate" at all wasn’t even necessarily correct. Strictly speaking, a Mandate was a path completed by Laws, formed together and created from a fusion of them.

This was more akin to residual Tribulation energy—bits and pieces of the Heavens’ fury—not manifested in essence, but instead as a pure pressure on the soul.

This was why it wasn’t sparking with lightning. However, just being around it could oppress and suppress people, even to the point of crippling their cultivation if it went too far.

Now, Theron was holding two halves of a key, presumably uniquely marked with the Mandate Marks of the two guards he had just killed, and he wasn’t sure if he could even use them.

He looked to the door. Or, rather, the smooth rock face. It didn’t look like a door at all, but rather a dead end. The fact that the guards were, well, guarding it—and the ledge itself—was the only giveaway that it was a door at all. Otherwise, it would look like the smooth, curved surface of a polished stone.

Theron walked up to the door and pressed a hand against it.

’Hm?’

His eyes slowly narrowed.

’I see. Clever.’

Theron turned back and leapt off the ledge again. Soon, after a few more grappling maneuvers, he made it down to the Mana Crystals. His eyes scanned the region until he found what he was looking for.

The Ancestor Veil had done something Theron hadn’t expected. The irony in the fact that the door didn’t look like a door was exactly the fact that it wasn’t.

They must have rolled something over it, sealing it away after Scholar Mcintyre had made it through the first time. That meant that it was a decoy.

If it was something that could be easily moved in and out of the way, there would have been no point in rolling it over the entrance in the first place. It was likely that it was a semi-permanent, or maybe even permanent, solution.

But then how did the guards get in and out?

If they had a method of making it up, Theron would have noticed them from the flickering change in the light. Luckily, Theron had a trick up his sleeve.

With a nudge, he pulled the visor off the head of the corpse and put it on himself. He looked at the world around him in a completely different light until he found what he was looking for.

Right there. There was a dim section in the sea of blazingly bright Light Mana Crystals.

He shot toward it, his feet tapping continuously along the jagged crystal edges until he made it to the edge of it all.

’It is here.’

He pulled out the two halves of the key again, and simply by their presence alone...

Chi.

An opening formed, and Theron slipped in.

He moved fast, knowing that time wasn’t on his side. If the guild was smart, they would definitely have a way of monitoring when this door opened and closed, and he hadn’t known the guards were there in the first place, so he wasn’t able to time his escape properly.

Right now, speed was the name of the game.

Theron plummeted fast, the hole closing up behind him.

He reacted quickly, bouncing from one side of the wall to the next in case there was a great distance to fall. In the end, he was correct. There was at least a 50-meter drop before he rolled to the bottom.

Theron scanned the region with his Third Eye immediately, only to find that there wasn’t any of the security he was expecting. But this wasn’t too much of a surprise either.

The guards and their locations were a dead giveaway before. If they stationed guards here, it would be as good as signaling that there was a secret entrance right here.

’Where am I?’

Theron smelled Water Mana in the air immediately. Well, not Water Mana per se, but instead a running river that wasn’t too far. He was in a forest, seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

’There might be someone monitoring this region. However...’

Theron walked through the cave for a moment until he found a small pool of water. And then he slipped inside.

He allowed the current to carry him, his body seamlessly fusing into the water. Quietly, he sank into Veinsong, allowing the waters to begin to heal his body.

As he allowed himself to rest for the first time in several days, he knew that his plan was unfolding.

...

The cage was eerily silent, a single bead of blood with a buoyant Mandate Mark floating atop it. All of a sudden, the blood bead gave way and splattered, the concentrated ball of red expanding to the point the cage was covered in it.

But what was most important was the Mandate Mark itself. It collapsed.

The moment it touched the ground, it seemed to implode, the cage shaking.

Right then, a familiar White Veil’s eyes snapped open, his expression changing wildy.

"Oh no."

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