Seeking Truth with a Sword-Chapter 600 - 542 Dragon Fall

Main God! Provide me with the A-rank horror branch exchange list!

Standing in the spacious hall of Dongjun Tower, Li Ang had an inexplicable urge to voice this thought. But considering the Puppet Servant standing beside him, he decided against it.

"Please, follow me."

The puppet, named Ati, slowly turned around, took an oil lamp from the storage room, and walked towards the depths of the floor.

Li Ang quickly caught up and asked, "Are we going to the practice field to try them out one by one now?"

The Mountain Master had promised him he could choose a Mutated Object from Dongjun Tower as his new weapon. However, Dongjun Tower secretly housed so many Alien items that selecting one individually might take forever.

"No."

Ati shook his head. "There is a faster way to find a blade that suits you."

He followed a slope leading underground and arrived before a stone spiral staircase. The entire staircase resembled an inverted lighthouse, extending to an unknown depth below.

The right-hand wall was lined with sealed doors. These doors were made of different materials: some wood, some iron, some stone, some fabric. Some were covered in dust, while others looked brand new. The only similarity was that all doors had numbers above them and were fitted with locks. One couldn’t help but wonder what secrets lay hidden behind these stone doors. 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

Ati took out a Fire Stick, lit the oil lamp, held up the flame, and led Li Ang into the cold, dark spiral staircase.

TAP, TAP, TAP. Their footsteps echoed in the empty stairwell.

Li Ang snapped his fingers, trying to release a Micro Light Talisman. Although he succeeded, the surrounding darkness instantly devoured the light emitted from his fingertips. It seemed the staircase itself permitted no light other than the oil lamp’s.

Li Ang had no choice but to abandon the attempt. He followed Ati, silently counting the steps they descended: forty steps, one hundred steps, one hundred fifty steps...

Based on the height of the steps, Li Ang calculated their depth and was shocked to realize they were already a thousand meters underground. The light from Ati’s oil lamp grew increasingly dim. In its flickering yellow glow, his stiff, puppet-like face appeared ghostly.

Sensing Li Ang’s hesitation, Ati said without turning back, "This is the Prohibition of Dongjun Tower’s basement. Here, the path is not determined by physical distance; instead, the perceived space is dictated by the oil lamp’s brightness."

"The dimmer the lamp, the deeper we descend?"

It was the first time Li Ang had heard of such a Prohibition, and he was quite intrigued. "What would happen if the oil lamp were snuffed out?"

"Once, an Academic Palace Disciple tried that. He was lost here forever, never to be found. No one knew where he went or what he encountered. The Academic Palace had to send a brick from the wall to his family to serve as his Tomb of Clothing."

Ati spoke calmly, "So, please do not do that."

Meanwhile, the lamp’s light had dimmed to less than a third of its brightness on the surface.

Ati stopped, took a key from a cart, and inserted it into the lock of a wooden door marked with the number 1,024.

CLICK.

The wooden door opened, and a refreshing breeze washed over them.

Behind the door lay an expansive room, filled with bookcases like those in a library. Pendulum clocks hung on the walls. The shelves of each bookcase held not books, but white, silkworm-like creatures with golden threads on their backs—Bookworm Immortals.

Numerous Puppet Servants, moving with characteristic stiffness, pushed carts among the bookcases. They would occasionally stop to use cleaning tools from their carts to groom the Bookworm Immortals or to feed them torn book pages.

So many...

Li Ang gazed at the seemingly endless rows of bookcases, listening to the pervasive rustling of devoured pages. He was astounded by the Academic Palace’s sheer scale—even the Jialan Sect, wealthiest among the Former Sui Sects, could not have amassed such a multitude of Bookworm Immortals.

"This is the Academic Palace’s Cangjie Room."

Ati rotated a knob, extinguishing the lamp. He placed it on a table by the entrance and stepped into the room.

Li Ang glanced at the wooden door as it closed automatically behind him. He quickly followed Ati, who continued his introduction: "Cangjie created writing. As a result, the heavens rained millet, and ghosts cried in the night, thus laying the foundation of civilization for the Human Clan. The Academic Palace, in honor of this ancient sage, established the Cangjie Room to gather all the books in the world. It encompasses every field of knowledge: cultivation methods, astronomy, geography, Military Studies, and agriculture—nothing is excluded. This ensures that classic texts are preserved and the civilization of the Human Clan is protected from decline."

Li Ang looked around, curiously observing the Puppet Servants’ actions. He noted that the books they were being fed were indeed... diverse: not only traditional books but also newspapers, magazines, maps, drawings, court documents, and even some personal letters! How they acquired all these materials was a mystery.

"Why is one of Chai Chai’s books here?"

On one of the carts, Li Ang spotted a romance novel Chai Chai had previously published in the Lanling Newspaper. His expression turned peculiar.

(This novel told the story of a boy and a girl, childhood sweethearts, who were tragically separated. During a chance encounter on the street, the heroine recognized the hero. However, to avenge his parents—who had been framed and killed by political enemies at court—he had to conceal his identity and deliberately distance himself from her. Thus began their epic, agonizing love story.

The plot itself was quite normal, even standard fare.

The only oddity lay in the protagonists’ names.

The male lead was named Chai Yaoyu, and the female lead was named Li Rima...

Li Ang shook his head, snapping out of his thoughts.)

After a Bookworm Immortal consumed an entire scroll, it would excrete a page-sized sheet of silk. This silk, inscribed with microscopic text, recorded the entire book’s contents. Preserving these durable, decay-resistant silk sheets allowed for the conservation of vast quantities of books.

Furthermore, Bookworm Immortals possessed photographic memories and had extraordinarily long lifespans. When needed, they could recall any recorded content at will.