The Divine Martial Stars C913 – Unbelievable

These really were acolytes of Arcusstone.

A huge pall of incomprehension hung over Li Mu.

His suspicions could very well be true.

But who was this unknown power that had just quietly stepped into Arcusstone's shoes without the rest of the world realizing it?! That the most powerful organization had been taken over by someone else would have raised alarm, yet no one knew. The very notion of something like this being true could make even the stoutest heart quake with fright.

Even Li Mu himself could not pull off a trick of such magnitude.

This wasn't something anyone could possibly accomplish alone.

Li Mu and Shen Jia wandered around. By the end of their search, it was certain that the first level contained a hundred jail cells, all of which were filled with dead Arcusstone acolytes of varying positions and cultivation ranks. All that was left were their bones and personal effects that could be used to sparingly identify them.

That would mean at least six hundred highly-ranked Arcusstone acolytes were incarcerated down here at this level and left to rot here. Li Mu could detect no bodily wounds on the remains, meaning that these Arcusstone members all died of starvation.

Li Mu rubbed his temples.

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He had come here to look for Shen Xiaoyue. Not to embark on some adventure hunt and neither was he here to unravel the truth behind one of the Northern Steppes' greatest mysteries. As much as he felt intrigued and shocked by what really happened to Arcusstone, he wasn't exactly interested to dig deeper.

But he had to.

If Arcusstone has been taken over by some unknown force, then that would mean that Shen Xiaoyue must now be in the hands of someone else.

But that wouldn't mean that the Canoness Superior of the Convent had lied to him.

No one knew what happened here, even the Convent. As far as they were concerned, it was Arcusstone who was behind Shen Xiaoyue's abduction and that was all they knew.

That would mean that Shen Xiaoyue must be held up somewhere inside this stronghold.

But where?

“Teacher, look! Something there looks alive!”

Shen Jia was calling him from the second level.

Li Mu vanished and reappeared beside him in a flash.

“Inside here. I think I can see something moving,” said Shen Jia, pointing at Door Three-Dash-Seventy-Eight, looking rather apprehensive.

Li Mu used the key medallion and tried to unlock the door. But it wouldn't work. He tossed aside the key and seized the lock with both his hands. With all his might, he ripped the fine iron-fashioned lock into two crumpled pieces and dropped them unceremoniously to the ground.

Li Mu gave his student a look to signal caution, then he slowly opened the iron-plated door.

A stench both abnormal and foul hit them in the face. A reddish wisp of fume billowed into the air only to morph into the hideous face of a demon that charged straight at them. Li Mu blew a gust of air, exhaling a mouthful of Mana. It nullified and dissipated the reddish wisp and its demon-face likeness.

At the other side of the door, Li Mu and Shen Jia found a two-meter-long passage.

It led to another chamber, a thirty-meter-square room.

Half the room was occupied by a pool of blood bubbling morbidly with sanguine effervescence. That deep-red wisp which was some sort of foul aura must have originated from here.

At the ceiling of this chamber was a pulley connecting a pair of chains. One of its ends submerged into the pool while the other was attached to a winch just by the edge of the pool.

Shen Jia strode to the side of the pool and began turning the winch.

The heavily worn and corroded chains squealed as they moved.

Jingle!

The other end of the chains slowly rose up with more bloodied links rising out of the pool of blood.

The hemic liquid churned and something emerged from within its depths.

It was a large earthenware vat about a meter tall and half as wide. at the top was a metallic lid from whence Shen Jia heard sounds coming from inside.

Li Mu's curiosity was reaching a crescendo.

The more he ventured deeper into this stronghold, the more bizarre and ghoulish were the things he witnessed.

For one, he was positive that Shen Jia was right: something really was moving inside the vat.

In fact, not only there were movements, but Li Mu also sensed traces of life inside, albeit terribly weak and faint.

Li Mu's hand came up and he fired a shot of Mana. The blast severed the chains that bound the vat and before it could fall back into the liquid, Li Mu magically seized it and drew it back to him. The vat hit the ground with a loud clangorous toll that resembled a bell's, skidding with angry sparks flaring. It was not earthenware as Li Mu had thought, but rather a kind of metal jar both strong and sturdy.

A closer observation yielded the discovery of numerous tiny holes for the blood-red liquid from the pool to seep into the vat. Right now, the liquid was percolating out of the holes in rich minute rivulets that streamed down the side of the vat.

Shen Jia approached it and removed the lid.

Then he yelped. With fright. As if he had just clapped his eyes on something frightfully terrible.

Li Mu's face sank as well.

For what was inside the vat, was a human.

Or more specifically, what formerly was one. It was a limbless torso.

A limbless torso whose arms and legs were lopped off, his ears and mouth rendered deaf and mute, and his eyes gouged out. Then he — or rather, by now, it — was nothing more than a vegetable inside a vat.

Li Mu could feel himself suffocating at the sudden fear and disgust that gripped him like a fist clenching his throat.

In the years of his dominance over the Star River, much carnage and devilry he had witnessed before. But none of them could ever come close to what he was looking at. He did not know how long this limbless torso had been submerged inside the pool of blood. His face was a sickening mass of flesh and blood as if his feature had been brutally chiseled off his face. Even only signs of life on it seemed like it could extinguish with just one simple breeze.

“This must be formerly a powerful champion, presumably somewhere beyond Class IX. That is the only reason that he still draws breath. But if he still retains any sanity, then I'm sure that he would that he was an ordinary person so that he could just die and end his suffering.”

Li Mu sighed to himself quietly.

“Whoever came up with this wickedness really is a monster.”

But why? Was this just for the sake of the sport, or for some other insidious purpose?

Li Mu tried communicating with this limbless torso, but he failed.

Whoever this was, his mind and senses had long collapsed. Even an animal has more sentience and intelligence than him.

Around his neck was a collar. Whatever it was made of, it managed to survive the corrosive properties of the blood-like liquid. Glowing with a silvery luster, there was a lock in the middle with the inscription “Qing Ping”. Was that his name?

Li Mu and Shen Jia could find nothing else of value here.

After a moment's thought, Li Mu fired a blast into the torso, killing him instantly to release him from his torment.

But if Li Mu and Shen Jia thought that was the most terrifying thing they'd see today, they were sorely mistaken.

They left the chamber and searched the rest of all seventy-nine chambers of that level. To their horror and disgust, every chamber contained pools of blood too. Some had gone dried up whilst some were still full. Inside the vats were mostly bones or rotten corpses. In most of the vats, the lifeless torsos inside were still alive. But similar to the first one they found, every one of them had gone mad. There was no way to communicate with them at all. That prompted Li Mu to kill them all as an act of mercy.

But what appalled Li Mu the most was the fact that there were more than eighty limbless torsos in the eighty or so rooms on the third level. All of them were champions above Class IX and such a pitiful fate for each and every one of them. Whose handiwork could this have been that he or she wielded such power that he could incarcerate, cripple, mutilate, and imprison such a huge number of champions at the same time?

Not even Arcusstone could ever boast such might. The order did not even have this many Class IX warriors even in its most glorious days never mind possess the power to imprison so many of them at once. So whoever was behind this really was a most dangerous and threatening enemy.

Li Mu could feel his scalp growing numb.

“This is not plain torture for sport. There must be a purpose at work here. They built such a dungeon here and mutilated so many poor champions? What for? And what about that blood-like slime in those pools? What are they for, really?”

Li Mu's anger and rage slowly simmered up into a boil.

None of this was acceptable. Even if these champions were the worst criminals, such a fate was undeserved.

“Are we in the Underworld, Teacher?!”

Shen Jia squeaked fearfully. The quiver in his voice told Li Mu as much.

Shen Jia might possess the composure and fortitude that few could boast off. But that did not change the fact that he was still a twelve-year-old boy who had barely seen anything like this.

“Perish that thought, Shen Jia. Use the Divine Tranquility technique. Use it to control your Mana and channel it to your mind.”

Shen Jia did as he was told and felt better at last.

But beyond any doubt what he had seen today would forever remain etched in his mind. It would continue to haunt him unless he could keep his mind intact, or he could find himself corrupted.

Li Mu and Shen Jia went up the stairs to reach the second level.

Unlike the third level, this level has only eleven rooms.

Li Mu searched the rooms just like how he did with the previous floor and unlocked the first room. The inside was at least five to six times of the rooms on the third level and the pool was bigger. Three pulleys hung from the ceilings, making it six chains whose ends were too soaked into the liquid.

Shen Jia carefully and warily spun the winch.

All six pulleys rolled in unison and the chains rose up together.

Only this time, it wasn't a vat that rose out of the bloody pool.

It was a cube-shaped metal cage with all sides of almost three meters.

Blood dripped off the metal bars of the cage and trickled back into the pool.

Inside the cage was a man suspended in the middle of the cage like a slab of meat, held by several chains at the bones of his limbs — shoulder blade, wrist bone, leg bone, foot bone, thigh bone, and calf bone. The chains were all firm and taut, keeping him trapped without any other contact with the other parts of the cage.

With a frame taller and more muscular than ordinary men, the incapacitated man still drew breath, but his powers were no more than a Class V's.

Li Mu tried to communicate with him telepathically as well.

But it was no use. This man was nothing more than a vegetable too, like the limbless torsos below. His eyes were blinded and his tongue was cut off, his ears were mangled and all other means of physical senses have been maimed. Even his mind had been broken, with the lifeless sheen in his eyes that showed the absence of sanity.

“This man must be a Class X champion when he still lived.”

Li Mu thought aloud as he observed his physique and aura.

The eighty Class IX champions who had been reduced into limbless torsos were hard enough to comprehend and here was a Class X champion who had been brutally tortured like a toy in the hands of a demented child.

There were eleven cells on this floor.

A strange premonition conceived in Li Mu's mind. What if there were more Class X champions imprisoned in the other rooms of this level? For centuries, how many Class X have the Northern Steppes ever seen?

Only now did Li Mu realize the gravity of what he had just stumbled into — one that could possibly rock the whole world of Molderad.

Chapter end