The Record of Unusual Creatures

Few people knew that the crystal mount of Asurmen had a vast and mysterious interior, let alone the ancient gatekeeper who had been guarding the great sacred place throughout human history. Those who were eligible to enter Asurmen were the popes of the goddess of creation. Through the gatekeeper, the popes could open or close the various chambers of Asurmen at will.

The gatekeeper opened a light door silently. When the door frame flickered a few times, it seemingly stabilized into a portal. On the other side was a crystal chamber filled with a faint halo. Pope Auguste VII nodded slightly to the gatekeeper and stepped into the gate.

The portal shook a little and then closed. August VII arrived at the Astral Chamber inside Asurmen. It was a pyramid-shaped space, where the four walls gradually narrowed and converged into a single point at the top with a large white crystal suspended there, giving a humming sound. Mysterious runes and images moved around on the walls and floor. But humans could only understand a small part of these things even after thousands of years of research by the wisest scholars of the church.

Most of the inside of Asurmen was of such pyramid shape. The only difference between them was size and lighting. It took the scholars many generations to decode the name of some of the chambers, but they were still clueless about the specific functions and operation mechanism of the cells.

The pope was now in the Astral Chamber.

The Astral Chamber was the inscribed name of the entrance and exit from here to other areas, so there was meaning to this name. But the scholars of the church always found the name bemusing. The name Astral Chamber suggested that it was a place to observe the stars or store materials of astrology. But there was no opening in this place at all to watch the sky, and the equipment in the room also had nothing to do with astrology.

In Collow, astrology was an abstruse subject. This world had an ancient sky that had never changed. It was a star image that stayed on the boundary of space when it is isolated from the material universe. The Collow people did not know this secret, but it did not prevent them from knowing about their world from the stars. The stars were static, but there were various illusions produced by the undulating Sea of Carnos projected into the sky. These lights drifted on the natural chessboard formed by the stars and reacted with the starlight to generate turbulence, from which the astrologers would infer the trend of the Chaos and the length of the year of the Order. It was safe to say that the history of astrology of human was as long as the existence of Collow. People in this world were no strangers to astrology.

But there was nothing in the Astral Chamber of Asurmen that was related to astrology. There were only mysterious crystals, of which one of the biggest pieces had strange text flowing on the surface, year after year. Auguste VII believed that this text had some significant meaning. But unfortunately, scholars had so far failed to decode the secrets in this text.

The runes in Asurmen was too esoteric. Even if the pope printed out all the runes and gave them to the highly esteemed linguists to analyze, no one could understand every sentence of this sacred place.

The old pope came to the crystal tower in the center of the Astral Chamber while the gatekeeper followed him silently. As always, the crystal tower was filled with text that no one could understand, but when sensing the arrival of the pope, the text receded to a side and other symbols and images appeared in the air.

Auguste VII placed his hand on the crystal tower and carefully touched the ridges on the surface of the crystal column, and the image in the air changed.

It turned into the image of Collow in the form of a hologram.

But this image was blurry and shaky as if the device was malfunctioning. Some of the text floating on the map was not legible at all. The entire holographic image had only one important marker, which was a ray of light in the central south of the Ansu Continent.

This market had only appeared less than a month ago. Following its appearance, many of the initially closed areas of Asurmen suddenly opened, and the Pope believed that it had to be God’s guidance.

“The Ansu Continent… the ancient Cassouin Grand Temple…” The old pope muttered to himself. “This temple, disappeared from the World of Order a thousand years ago, still exists. Goddess, what do you want me to know?”

The hologram, of course, could not answer the pope’s question. It just floated quietly in the air, and signal interference made it even blurrier.

Auguste VII switched off the hologram and activated other systems.

He brought up a few interfaces that the mortal could control and understand. One of the interfaces showed the image of the entire sacred crystal mountain. This image was reasonably clear, showing one-third of the holy mountain hidden in the earth, and an incredibly complex structure inside. There were more eye-catching orange markers, the text of which Auguste VII could still understand.

Unknown error. Unable to read the image data.

He zoomed in on the image and locked on the crack at the top of the sacred peak. The breach was a terrible penetrating wound with a foreign object stuck in the thickest part of the crack.

A few months ago, a mysterious extraterrestrial object broke through the sky and tore a crack in the sacred mountain of Asurmen. From that day on, the state of the sacred crystal mountain began to decline. Not long ago, even the Light of Order had faded from the sacred peak.

Asurmen had been self-repairing since the impact. Two-thirds of the crack had healed, but the thickest part with the foreign object was still unable to self-restore. And the speed of self-repairing was much slower than the rate of decline of the sacred mountain.

The orange markers at the top of the sacred peak on the hologram denoted warning, while the marker on the crack was red, beside which was a line of text: Warning: #@¥#%@¥ severe damage. Power output is decreasing. Self-repair function restricted. Manual intervention is required immediately.

The old pope looked at the hologram and asked without looking at the gatekeeper, “Is there a way to get there?”

The gatekeeper stood behind him without saying a word.

The old pope knew it meant ‘negative.’

If there were anything that was executable, the gatekeeper would have carried out immediately. If the gatekeeper did not respond, it meant that nothing could be done. The gatekeeper was such a robotic guard, unable to reason or even communicate.

The old pope’s brows knit together, but he could not say anything to the silent gatekeeper. He knew that it was beyond the limit of mortal ability.

The ‘outer-space’ object hit the summit of Asurmen, the highest crystal cluster called the Throne of God, was a forbidden land for the mortals. Powerful divine energy shrouded the crystal mountain of Asurmen all the year round. Starting from the foot of the hill, for every 100 meters rise in altitudes, the sacred energy around the mountain wall would double. The energy at the mountainside, at the height of that of the platform on the top of the Basilica Icon, was the limit that mortals could bear. It was for this reason that only the pope or bishops could come to the platform. So it was not just a symbol of status, but also because the strength the mortals were unable to withstand the pressure of Asurmen.

Even Auguste VII, if he climbed to the Throne of God, could only stay for ten minutes, after which the power of the god would burn him into ashes.

So even though everyone knew that the outer-space object, the culprit that caused Asurmen to die slowly, was near to the Throne of God, no one could remove it.

It was impossible to climb to the top of the sacred peak from the outside. Auguste VII once hoped to go up there from inside the holy mountain.

But the gatekeeper never opened the passage to the pope. The mysterious guardian was as if a magic-powered robot adhered to a set of principle mechanically. But compared to this principle, the gatekeeper seemed to be care less about the debilitating reality of Asurmen.

After a while in the Astral Chamber, the pope left.

Instead of leaving Asurmen, Auguste VII let the gatekeeper take him to other open chambers. Some of these chambers have been opened for thousands of years or even tens of thousands of years, while others had just suddenly awakened and appeared from dormancy.

Among the recently-opened chambers, one had attracted the attention of Auguste VII, who had visited this place more than once in the past two weeks.

Structurally, this newly-emerging chamber should be located halfway up the sacred mountain of Asurmen, right in the way of the central axis of the peak. No one realized the existence of this cell until the crystal barrier that blocked the chamber suddenly vanished.

The gatekeeper brought the pope into this so-called Will Hub. Just as before, when stepping into it, Auguste VII immediately felt a soft and low voice sounding in his head.

But the voice was too weak and intermittent. Auguste VII could not understand it.

The pope looked up at the irregular-shaped large crystal in the center of the pyramidal chamber. The crystal was three meters high, and a halo was lingering around it. The crystal seemed to have sealed something inside it.

Auguste VII was indeed no stranger to this scene. He had been studying the crystal for half a month. But even pope as knowledgeable as Auguste VII could not figure out what was inside the crystal.

It was a group of lights, much like the stars in space, inside the crystal.