Chapter 150: The Breakthrough Corridor

The passageway was discovered by a meticulous assassin searching the main building.
In the Western continent, every assassin doubled as a thief. They excelled at uncovering all kinds of mechanisms, hidden weapons, and ambushes, and they possessed the skills to dismantle traps and other devices. A powerful assassin would never let traps and ambushes halt their path of assassination.
While Lin Qi and the others were thoroughly pillaging the annex, this assassin had first circled the exterior of the main building twice, then inspected the interior architecture. He immediately deduced that, given the thickness of the main building's walls and its footprint, a space several meters wide within the grand hall had inexplicably vanished.
He immediately conducted a thorough investigation of the first-floor hall and ultimately discovered an intricate pull ring inside the fireplace. With a gentle tug on this concealed ring, a downward-leading tunnel silently opened up beneath the stairs leading to the second floor of the main building.
Lin Qi and his group were now standing in this tunnel. Outside, assassins and family retainers armed with heavy crossbows stood guard. Long Cheng carried a shield at the very front, and the group proceeded downward along a spacious, winding staircase. After descending to a depth of about thirty meters, they finally arrived before a wide and clean corridor.
The entire corridor was paved with Luminescent Holy Stones, a precious stone designated by the Church as the foremost among many sacred stones. High-grade Luminescent Holy Stones were as crystal-clear and translucent as crystal, containing extremely powerful and pure holy light energy. They were the most prized resource of the Morning Star Pantheon, an immensely powerful faction within the Church.
Naturally, the stones paved here could not be those supreme-grade gems used to craft the energy cores of magic wands; rather, they were medium-grade Luminescent Holy Stones filled with impurities, looking much like translucent frosted glass. Although they were of medium grade, these stones still harbored a massive amount of holy light energy. Even without torches or lamps, the corridor was brilliantly illuminated, glowing as brightly as day.
The corridor was about three meters in both height and width, and only a hundred meters in length. Standing at the entrance of the corridor, one could see a bronze-colored metal door at the far end. The corridor was impeccably clean, free of even the slightest speck of dust. This was a characteristic of the holy light energy; in places illuminated by sacred light, all other elemental attributes and physical entities were repelled.
On the four walls of the corridor were intricate and complex magic array patterns. These arrays faintly emitted an unsettling aura, especially when viewed from afar, as they resembled hundreds of human eyes the size of water vats, exuding a deeply unnerving presence.
"Who wants to go test the path?" Long Cheng asked, looking back.
"The capable should shoulder more responsibilities!" Lin Qi smiled as he gently pushed Long Cheng forward. He laughed, "You still need to pry information out of me, don't you?"

Long Cheng's expression turned unsightly. He glanced at the assassins and family retainers behind Lin Qi; not a single one of them stirred. Since Lin Qi had designated Long Cheng to scout the path, Lin Qi's subordinates would never act rashly. If they went ahead to scout instead, wouldn't it mean looking down upon Long Cheng, a supreme expert?
With his mouth twisted in frustration, Long Cheng shook his head, pulled a copper coin from his sleeve, and casually tossed it into the corridor.
*Clang.* With a single sound, the moment the copper coin touched the ground, the magic array closest to it suddenly flared with intense light, just like a massive eye snapping open. From the core of the array—the pupil of the giant eye—a hair-thin flash of white light zipped across. With a soft sizzle, the copper coin was instantly vaporized into gas, leaving behind not even a shred of residue.
Lin Qi drew a sharp breath and muttered under his breath, "Vicious enough! How do they expect to get through themselves?"
Long Cheng also shook his head, cursing in a low voice, "These ruthless wild monkeys... Hmph, this is a divine art trap of you Westerners. I only have a slight understanding of our Eastern spiritual arts; although the two are largely similar, their subtle variations are immense. I wouldn't dare take the risk."
A silence fell over the corridor, and everyone stared with flickering gazes at the hundred-meter-long pathway.
After a moment, an assassin said in a deep voice, "Young Master, this kind of divine art trap can only be safely traversed by those who possess divine arts. In other words, individuals who naturally possess divine power can walk through safely without needing any precautions. If it's us, we must destroy the trap before we can pass."
Lin Qi spread his hands and gave a wry smile. "The problem is, who knows how to dismantle this kind of trap?"
The shortest assassin stepped forward and said with a sinister tone, "Simultaneously destroying the cores of all the magic arrays should give us a seventy percent chance of ruining the magical traps in this corridor. But there are hundreds of identical arrays here; it's impossible for us to destroy them all at the same time!"
Before his voice even faded, Long Cheng had already drawn a handful of copper coins and flung them casually. He shouted in a deep voice, "Flower Rain Scattering Across the Sky, Soul-Snatching, Go!"
Hundreds of copper coins fluttered forward like light, swaying petals caught in a fierce gale. In the blink of an eye, the cores of every single magic array were struck simultaneously by a copper coin. A continuous series of *crack-crack-crack* sounds echoed as those arrays fractured all at once, and countless fine cracks webbed across the Luminescent Holy Stones paving the corridor.

Massive, dense billows of white light flames surged out from those fissures. Lin Qi and the others, enveloped by the flames, felt as though their entire bodies were burning; the slightly weaker ones even developed blisters on their skin. With another cold snort from Long Cheng, a streak of purple light rolled out from between his brows, sweeping forward like a curtain of light. A wave of bone-chilling frost surged across the surroundings, and the white light flames were utterly extinguished by his purple qi.
Long Cheng's complexion turned slightly pale, and he said in a deep voice, "The trap here is considered broken. Let's continue inside and take a look."
Lin Qi looked at Long Cheng in shock. When he first met Long Cheng at sea, he had noticed primordial energy leaking from between Long Cheng's brows, at which point Lin Qi had suspected him to be one of those legendary freaks who dual-cultivated both physical prowess and magic. Seeing him today, he truly was a monster who practiced both battle qi and spellcasting simultaneously, and both had reached the middle stage of the Heavenly Tier!
No wonder he had dared to make that kind of wager with others. Lin Qi could not help but shake his head repeatedly.
Sighing inwardly, seeing that Long Cheng had already reached the end of the corridor, Lin Qi hastily instructed a few men to hold the entrance and hurried to catch up with the others behind Long Cheng.
The bronze-colored metal door, three meters high and three meters wide, was heavy and archaic. In its exact center was a massive Holy Cross emblem.
The Holy Cross emblem—a primitive Holy Cross emblem devoid of any ornate decoration—had a circle carved at each of its top, bottom, left, and right tips, with another small circle right at its core. Below the emblem was a vast array of movable metal characters.
Gazing at these movable metal characters, Lin Qi fell into deep contemplation. Clearly, placing these metal characters into those five circles was the key to unlocking this door. This was some sort of intricate magical trap, but who could possibly know which characters belonged in those five circles?
When it came to the lore and doctrines of the Church, Lin Qi was truly utterly clueless!