Several branch halls of the Hall of Shadows were built beside the mountain stairs, like layers of checkpoints, but Enya passed through without any obstruction.
Seeing this, Enya said.
“Not many people here.”
“A noble lady, some uninvited guests arrived today. All the experts in the hall were transferred to the city, leaving only the Nameless Guardian in the hall, so it seems rather quiet.”
The man explained patiently.
Enya nodded, showing understanding.
Upon stepping onto the plaza of White Deer Hall, a tall man was standing there.
His entire body was wrapped in pitch-black bandages, looking like a mummy, with his burly arms crossed over his chest, a longsword stuck in the ground beside him.
Speak of the devil, and he appears!
The guide man’s breath caught when he saw him.
Enya pretended not to know and asked.
“Who is this?”
“A noble lady, this, this is the Nameless Guardian I just mentioned!”
The man spoke with difficulty despite his inner fear.
“It is said that each great hall has a Nameless Guardian, an embodiment of the hall’s will, with the right to execute anyone except the hall master. Once they appear before you…”
“Oh.”
Enya replied indifferently, then slowly walked in front of the guide, sizing up this guy who had completely concealed his aura.
He had abandoned everything about himself, thus losing his sense of presence in this world.
The average person could not see his strength at all; they would think they were looking at an ordinary person.
If someone who had not trained in magic power, they might not even notice his existence. Such an assassin is very terrifying.
Enya raised her fair hand, untied the knot behind her head, removed the Whiteboard Mask, and casually dropped it on the ground.
Clack
The wooden mask hit the floor with a crisp sound. Her pale golden eyes looked at the person before her.
“Are you going to stop me?”
“…”
The Nameless Guardian did not reply, because he never spoke.
He held his longsword, but did not make a move. Instead, he turned directly and walked toward the higher stairs.
Seeing this, Enya stepped forward to follow. She was curious about what ability the Kill Hall Master had to survive under her.
The mountain peaks seemed to touch the sky.
This stairway could be considered a ladder to heaven, and one could imagine how long the distance was.
Only by walking upward at a steady pace would it take some time to reach the plazas of the two halls built beneath the thunderclouds.
After stepping onto the plaza, Enya surveyed the Hall of Shadows and the Hall of Slaughter on either side. One gray and one red made it very easy to distinguish them.
At that moment, the doors of the two halls slowly opened. From the opened gray and red doors, afterimages flashed out. Some landed on the plaza, while others slipped into the shadows.
The so-called Nameless Guardian had also increased from one to six.
They were all wrapped in black bandages, male and female, old and young. Some had hunched figures, some had burly bodies, and some were graceful and alluring.
Their weapons were also of different strange styles.
The six stood in six positions, blocking the last section of stairs to the summit. This formation looked like their last resort.
Enya’s expression was calm. Her pale golden eyes swept over these six.
“I understand your intention. Only by killing you can I go upward.”
She waved her hand, signaling to begin.
Enya let out a light breath, looking at the plaza full of pits and cracks, and the originally grandeur two halls, now turned into ruins.
She sighed at how such a scenic place had been destroyed in just a moment.
Just as she was sighing, part of the mountain finally gave way, collapsing down, followed by the sound of giant rocks exploding.
The black thunderstorm swirling at the peak became even more violent.
A wild gust of wind swept across, carrying away the bloody smell from the plaza that had lost a third of its area, and also tousling Enya’s hair.
She reached up to smooth the strand of silver hair blown onto her thin lips, then lowered her gaze to the bandaged man with only the upper half of his body left not far away.
He was the first Nameless Guardian.
“Huh?”
Enya suddenly paused, and she looked up at the sky.
Rain fell.
No, it was not ordinary rain, but completely black droplets!
She stepped over the corpses and came to the stairs leading to the peak. Without any hesitation, she stepped up.
Thunder, gale, black rain—none of them could hinder Enya’s steps in the slightest.
Soon she walked into the black clouds. Enya found that there seemed to be some spiritual contamination emanating here.
If an ordinary person came here, they would surely be infected in their soul and lost in the black clouds after not walking far.
But Enya was not troubled by that. The so-called spiritual contamination had no effect at all. Soon she finished the last section.
After stepping out of the dark clouds, she actually saw a starry sky…
Beneath the starry night, at the peak of the mountain, stood a small temple. Several stone pillars supported a triangular stone eaves.
Inside the triangle were carved lifelike murals.
The mural depicted a female figure of unknown face in the center, radiating a divine glow, with devout worshippers kneeling on both sides, but all of them had their eyes closed.
Enya arrived under the stone eaves. In front of her were three doors: one large and two small.
The main door of the temple was almost five meters high, and it was also carved with exquisite paintings.
One door showed the various sufferings of the mortal world, and the other showed prosperity and peace.
The main door was left ajar, revealing a hint of pitch black.
Enya walked closer.
She did not reach out to push the door, but it opened by itself. Inside, contrary to expectations, it was not filled with blackness; instead, there was light from an unknown source, which seemed to be forcibly locked here by some power.
After she stepped inside, her hard-heeled boots broke the silence.
The crisp tapping echoed in the wide corridor.
Before long, Enya passed through a half-open door and came to a circular hall. In the center of the hall was a huge platform, which seemed to be a place to put a statue, but on it rested a black wooden coffin.
It looked very new, so new that Enya thought if someone were lying inside, the corpse probably hadn’t changed at all.
“Is this the coffin Zeta mentioned?”
The coffin’s appearance was ordinary, even too ordinary. It was so ordinary that Enya thought it strange. After all, to match such a large temple, having such a shabby coffin showed a bit of disrespect to the Goddess of Night.
“That Cicada Shell…”
Enya suddenly remembered the Cicada Shell that was still in her hands, suspected to be the mortal body used by the Goddess of Night before she became a god.
Earlier in that alternate dimension, it had been placed in a stone coffin.
Enya wondered if someone had stolen the Cicada Shell from this place, buried it elsewhere, and carved on the stone coffin the words they wanted to say.
‘Very likely!’
Enya walked up to the wooden coffin, reached out and knocked on this coffin for the dead. Confirming there was nothing special, she directly lifted the lid. Sure enough, she saw no flesh or bones.
“Sigh…”
Seeing nothing, Enya felt a bit disappointed.
‘Life-size figurines of the Goddess of Night—not one less, not two more. I’d take as many as there are.’
‘A goddess figurine!’
‘A real-life movable version!’
‘I thought there would be a second one, but there wasn’t even a single bone…’
Enya looked at the piece of darkness inside the coffin, as solid as a substance.
She reached out and poked it. When her fingernail touched the black solid, it created a ripple.
“It’s like water.”
The darkness in the coffin was as pitch black as the Black River’s water.
Enya roughly understood what this was. She stood up, performed a small jump, and directly jumped into the coffin, quickly sinking into the black liquid.
Then, she arrived in another dimension.
Crack
Enya stepped on the bones and looked at this world paved with white bones.
She thought again of Antiros’s special dimension, the world of the dead that could be reached through the Thorn of the Bramble Tree, which also paved with countless white bones.
But one difference was that Antiros’s Thorn Tree world contained not only human skeletons but the skeletons of all things in the world—whether magical beasts or various intelligent races, and even some extremely powerful beings.
But now, what Enya stepped on were just human bones.
At that moment, a voice sounded.
“You have come.”
“I have come.”
“You were not supposed to come.”
“But I have already come.”
Enya looked toward the direction of the voice, where there was a blood-red figure.
Wearing dark red armor, with a messy mane of blood-red hair, he sat cross-legged on the bones, with two longswords beside him.
The Kill Hall Master!
He rose from the ground, his armor clattering. He lifted one longsword onto his shoulder and dragged the other on the ground.
The Kill Hall Master turned to face Enya.
When Enya saw that spiral mask that looked like coagulated blood, she suddenly thought of something. After thinking for a moment, she asked.
“What relationship do you have with Asades?”
“Heh, there has been no relationship for hundreds of years.”
The Kill Hall Master was not as stingy with his words as his subordinates.
“I know you, Enya, the only Ordinary-blood Sword Saint, the Dragon Slayer, the pioneer of the Potion Cultivation Method. Zephyr even calls you Saintess, and now you have become the Dragon of Destruction.”
“Is that so?”
Enya shrugged noncommittally. She didn’t care at all about all those titles.
“You said hundreds of years? You mean you’ve lived for hundreds of years?”
“No.”
The Kill Hall Master lifted his head. He should have been looking at the pitch-black sky, but stars could not be seen here, only outside.
“I have just… lived over and over again.”
“…”
This statement startled Enya.
The Kill Hall Master shifted his gaze back to Enya, twenty meters away.
“What about you?”
“? ”
Enya didn’t quite understand the question.
The Kill Hall Master chuckled.
“Your face… I have seen it a long, long time ago.”
“You must have seen my great-grandmother.”
“Is that so?”
“I have a daughter now. Once this matter is settled, I have to go home as soon as possible to accompany my child. She has exams coming up.”
Enya also laughed lightly, without any atmosphere of life-and-death struggle.
The Kill Hall Master was silent for a moment, then spoke again.
“Do you want to take back your things? A part, or everything?”