Chapter 106: The Luck of Being a Legacy Candidate

Finally making up his mind, An wrapped the door in his Qi this time to keep it from collapsing, then carefully opened it.

Stepping inside, he looked around.

Row after row, laid out like sunken beds in a garden, each one held thousands of small eggs, each about the size of a human head.

'Eh... this reminds me of that movie Alien, and those facehuggers.' Stopping at the very first section, studying the eggs, he decided against touching them, there wasn't really any need to. He had already read everything useful straight from the Qi radiating off the eggs, right down to a rough idea of what the creature inside actually looked like.

'Hm, looks like some kind of bat, with two pairs of wings, snow-white skin... Oh! And it doesn't have a brain? Interesting.' He studied a handful of eggs from different sections, trying to gauge just how identical these creatures really were.

'They really are clones... matching right down to the number of hairs on specific patches of skin. So why don't they have brains? I'm not sensing any kind of device in their bodies that would let something control them... Wait.' He suddenly started scanning the creature's spine.

'Just as I thought, the spinal cord's intact. So are they controlled through the spinal cord? Through the nervous system, specifically?' Looking around, he kept walking forward.

'Maybe they've got something like a queen? No, that doesn't seem reliable. If a queen's capable of controlling millions of these creatures, her mind would have to be at least as sharp as a human's, which creates its own problems for whoever wants to keep that queen under control...'

'Hm, so these creatures must be controlled through some kind of device. Judging by the technology around here, whoever built this place probably had something like an artifact for it. But for a single artifact to control this many creatures at once, it'd have to be absurdly powerful.'

'Even my own mind, with dozens of artifacts to help distribute the load, wouldn't be enough to manage even a fraction of an army this size.' A little tangled up, unable to land on a theory that satisfied him about how these creatures were being controlled, he shook his head. 'Maybe I just can't grasp the scale or rank of whatever artifact this actually is.'

'Oh, I'm getting close, this has to be the right floor, and judging by the Qi in the air, the pills are sitting right at the center of this room... a pretty massive room, at that.' Having already walked some four hundred meters, An could see the actual target of his visit ahead, but knew he still had another five hundred meters or so to reach the center of the room.

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Reaching the center of the chamber, An stopped in front of a huge, perfectly square pool, filled entirely with old pills.

Each wall of the pool was riddled with several hundred thousand tiny holes, through which vapor from the pills was drawn out and carried away through tubes.

'Two pipes running to each section... Interesting design.' Looking into the nearest section, he spotted two small grates at the bottom, covering the pipe leading out from the pool of pills.

'How many resources did it even take to keep all this running?' Grasping the sheer scale of this production line, or rather, this incubator, he felt a flicker of genuine surprise. 'Even an entire sect's budget probably wouldn't be enough to keep just this one floor running nonstop.'

Waving a hand, An pulled a few pills closer to himself. 'All I can tell from the Qi coming off these is that they were made using spirit cores, but whatever plants and catalysts were used, that information's long gone. And honestly, whatever faint traces of the plants still linger, I can't identify them at all.'

Looking up, he spotted a massive metal apparatus with a compartment directly above the pool. 'So the metal dolls find the beasts, drag them up a floor, extract their spirit cores, and feed them into this production cauldron. The cauldron churns out pills nonstop, probably meant as some kind of supplement, something that helps the eggs, or rather, the creatures inside them, properly absorb whatever they're taking in from the bodies stored one floor up.'

He destroyed the pills and looked around. 'What about the spirit plants and catalysts needed to actually make these pills, though... Did I miss something? Or was one of the upper rooms serving as some kind of massive garden? Maybe the one with all that stifling humidity?'

Pushing off the floor, he flew up to the industrial cauldron, carefully opened its lower hatch, and stuck his head inside.

'Ho, another huge cluster of runes in here... Hm, a few of these runes look just like the ones I saw up on the capsules. Maybe it was all wired into the main formation.'

'Still, it's genuinely impressive that whoever built this managed to automate the whole refining process using nothing but runes and a formation... Doesn't that basically mean alchemists back wherever this person came from are useless?' Closing the cauldron's hatch, An dropped back down and headed toward the back wall, where he'd spotted yet another staircase leading down.

Reaching the staircase, he started down. This descent took over an hour. 'Hm, isn't this a little too deep? At this rate I'll hit the border of this whole Sacred Land.'

He finally reached a set of doors that, unlike the ones before, were made of wood inlaid with patterns of precious minerals.

Checking them over several times and confirming they were safe, he tried opening them. But the moment he used his Qi on them, the doors didn't budge an inch.

Looking it over once more, he pressed his hand against the handle, made of something that looked very much like gold.

"Hm?" The instant he gripped the handle, the runes on the door lit up. Caught off guard, An tried to pull his hand back, only to find he couldn't. "Oh! Shit!"

Whooosh!

The door suddenly blazed with light, and An found himself pulled inside, straight into a teleportation portal that had opened out of nowhere.

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"AGH! I almost threw up..." He hit the ground, his whole body shuddering, he'd never experienced teleportation this rough before. 'Though... I'm not even sure I can still do it anymore.'

'What is this place?' Getting to his feet, he looked around. For the first time in his life, he found himself in a room so blindingly white that the light seemed to swallow his own body.

"Hm?" Suddenly sensing something, An activated his Qi Armor at full strength.

"Welcome, Candidate!" A black-and-white hologram of a young woman materialized out of thin air. Her eyes and hair were black, her body pure white. Around her, like a blur, hung a dark clump of energy that traced her outline, keeping her from blending into the room entirely.

Dressed in a light gown, a gentle smile on her face, she bowed toward An.

Freezing in place, he frowned, afraid to make even the slightest sound, while never once stopping his effort to read everything he could from the Qi of this hologram and the pure white room around him.

'I can't make out anything... just faint signals coming off her, telling me nothing except that she exists and that she's standing in front of me... Am I trapped? Is that it?'

Never taking his eyes off her, his first move was three steps back, settling into a more defensible stance, ready to react quickly if he needed to.

Rising out of her bow, the hologram noticed the wary look on his face and smiled slightly. "Candidate, I assure you, there's no need to fear me! I was programmed to administer the trials for candidates seeking to inherit my creator's legacy, the Great Master Bo!" She pressed her fingertips together in a little steeple.

"How do I get out of here?" Not sparing a single thought for her talk of legacy or anything of the sort, An went straight for the thing that actually mattered to him.

Looking at him, the woman's hologram hesitated slightly. After a few seconds of thought, she smiled again. "Candidate! Great Master Bo prepared a series of trials to identify and find a worthy heir, one who will inherit not just his knowledge, but his experience as well!" With a strange, unsettling pride in her eyes, she crossed her arms over her chest.

"Stop!" An raised his voice slightly. "I said, how do I get out of here, not tell me about the owner of this place."

"I... Configuring. Searching. Matching... Candidate-" The hologram suddenly froze, her voice shifting into something far more robotic, before returning to normal a moment later, apparently unable to find the right protocol, she started over from the beginning.

"Enough! I'm not a candidate. I stumbled onto a door with runes by accident, and it teleported me here... And if you're about to tell me it was fate, or some nonsense like that, no! The truth is, a huge amount of time's passed since this place was last maintained, and the massive formation outside, the one running the giant incubator, broke down, which is the only reason I ended up here at all. By accident! Not a candidate!" Frowning, still braced and ready, An kept his eyes locked on the hologram's face. He knew perfectly well that reading emotion off her expression was pointless, given she wasn't even a sentient being, just a machine, but she'd been rendered in such fine detail that he found himself assuming her expressions mirrored a human's regardless.

"Candidate-"

"I'm not a candidate!"

"Candidate-"

"You brainless machine..."

"Candidate-" Every time he cut her off, she simply started over.

Realizing there was no point talking to her, An started trying to analyze everything around him instead. 'What's even the point of such a dim-witted hologram? Maybe her creator never imagined any candidate would actually want to leave. Or maybe, since this whole place is basically falling apart, her intelligence was scaled back just to preserve some baseline functions, like greeting candidates, and not much else.'

'Hm, that probably means she can't actually hurt me... especially with this level of autonomy…'

Tuning out the chattering hologram entirely, An focused everything on the white room itself, trying to find even a trace of Qi anywhere.

"Every candidate, before beginning the trials, receives certain privileges: access to a brief summary report for each trial... a three-hour rest period between trials... access to the laboratories, which store information relevant to completing the trials..."

'This isn't good, I can't find a single Qi flow carrying any information about this room. It's like I'm completely sealed off in here.'

"The Great Master's cultivation path represents the absolute pinnacle of knowledge ever discovered by any sentient race..." Eyes practically glowing, the hologram kept going on about her creator like some kind of one true god, fanatical in a way that made sure to glorify him in every single sentence.

"Wait! You said access to laboratories? What do you mean by that?" He cut her off, refocusing his attention on her, specifically, on those particular words that had just come out of her mouth.

"Yes, Candidate! Great Master Bo! His greatness made it possible to travel between laboratories to gather data that could assist with completing the trials! Only the Great Master could accomplish such a thing! But the Great Master, master of all masters, set certain limits! Only specific rooms are accessible to candidates!" With her hands folded and a huge smile that gave An genuine chills, she nodded her head.

"I want to gather information about the trial in the incubator laboratory! Now!" He stressed every single word separately, nearly shouting them, hoping this mindless hologram could somehow match his request against whatever database she was working from.

"At once, Candidate! But first! Present your key, so I can set up your return teleportation!" The hologram reached both hands out toward An.

"Um, you already did that. You already used my key the moment I first arrived in this room." He didn't miss a beat and answered quickly.

"Candidate- Error. Error. Candidate- Error. Candidate, confirmed! Teleportation activated! Glory to Great Master Bo!" After a few flickers of static, she waved a hand, and a portal appeared out of nowhere, right beneath An's feet.

Wooosh!

Opening his eyes, he found himself back in front of the door that had teleported him into the white room in the first place.

'Ha, and here I thought I'd be stuck in there forever... That hologram's AI is unbelievably dumb.' Turning, he started climbing the stairs quickly. 'Glad I managed to get out of there, at least... Great Master Bo, sure, whatever you say.'

Climbing the stairs, he suddenly stopped. "Hm? Who's that?"

Up above, on the fourth floor down, where the dried-out corpses lay, An sensed chaotic Qi. He knew immediately someone was up there, and that a fight was already well underway.