Chapter 2862: Chapter 2862: The Pattern

It was extremely difficult for the Ear Mice to defeat the bloody hands alone. Zen could claim credit for the success, so it was reasonable that he took the hands away.

“Dorothy,” Zen called out.

He did not need to explain further, for Dorothy understood what he wanted. She nodded and walked over to the bloody hands, using the space ring to absorb them.

The Ear Mice wisely stayed silent, deciding it would be best not to say anything more.

After Dorothy had taken care of the bloody hands, they turned their focus back to the three hearts at the top of the passageway.

“I wonder how the Hearts of Accomplice should be distributed,” said one of the Ear Mice.

“Thad, you don't need the Hearts of Accomplice. If you use it, you'd have to sacrifice yourself,” another Ear Mouse squeaked. “How about we keep the three hearts, and after the auction, we give half of the soul pills to you?”

Only the Ear Mice had the cheek to speak so shamelessly.

“Shame on you!” Dorothy said, shaking her head.

Zen was firm. “Dorothy and I will each get one, and the third one belongs to you.”

It was a statement of fact, not a proposal. He did not need the approval of the Ear Mice to take as many of the hearts as he wanted.

His cooperation with the Ear Mice had mainly been about breaking down the wall. Beyond that, they were each on their own. What the Ear Mice would be able to obtain from the Grand Sky Temple depended on their own abilities.

Without Zen, the Ear Mice wouldn't have even made it through the 19th passageway, let alone reached these three Hearts of Accomplice.

The Separate Abyss race, for instance, was far stronger than the Ear Mouse race—but they had been trapped in the walls of the passageway, never to be reborn.

The Ear Mice squeaked reluctantly in agreement with Zen's words.

After all, they had no choice but to accept it.

Zen braced himself and leaped into the air, wrapping his arms around one of the hearts.

He gathered his strength and dragged the heart down, slowly but steadily disconnecting it from the blood vessels above it.

There was a beating, pulsing sound as the vessels of the heart strained with Zen's efforts.

Once Zen had succeeded in pulling the heart down, it still kept beating and bleeding. Zen and the others stood in the passageway and observed as the heart began to heal itself rapidly, until eventually the blood stopped flowing from the rips where it had been torn free.

Zen gave the heart to Dorothy.

The Ear Mice watched morosely as Dorothy put it into the space ring.

Then Zen pulled down the second and third hearts from above them. He handed Dorothy one more heart, and then gave the last one to the Ear Mice.

All of them were pleased that the harvest had been good in the 19th passageway, even though the Ear Mice would have preferred a bigger share of the loot. However, Zen was not yet contented. Neither the bloody hands nor the Hearts of Accomplice were suitable for his needs.

Certainly the Heart of Accomplice was strong, but one had to sacrifice themselves if they wanted to use it. This kind of ability could only be used as a last resort.

Zen knew that if he integrated with the Heart of Accomplice, it would take up a Truth of Godly Way. He wasn't sure if he wanted to do that. After all, at this point he could only integrate with three Other Shore Tokens.

The Ear Mice had not evaluated the two bloody hands, but Zen estimated them to be merely fourth-grade Other Shore Tokens. That level did not meet his requirements. Ŗ𝙖ŊồΒÊ𝐒

As they left, Zen looked up at the huge face on the ceiling of the passageway.

The enormous face was still screwed up, whining, but they could not tell what it was trying to say. Like the other faces, it became powerless after losing its hands.

Meanwhile, the 11th passageway

was entirely lined with small skeletons, about half the size of an average man. Their bones were dusty and shadowed.

The skeletons were positioned with their backs to the walls. Upon closer inspection, the spines and legs seemed to be embedded into the walls, as if they were a part of the walls and not just leaning against them.

The hollow eye sockets in each skull glowed with faint, flickering lights as several Souls of Light entered the passageway.

“Princess Elvinia, slow down,” Chaim warned.

Elvinia had gone through an ordeal at the hands of the Bearing race at the gate of the Grand Sky Temple. However, instead of deterring her, it only made her even more determined to keep pressing forward.

“I'm fine,” Elvinia replied coldly.

A faint blue light still glimmered at her feet. It was the Soul Binding Thread from the Bearing race.

No one in the Grand Sky Temple would be able to leave the Other Shore, so the Soul Binding Thread was redundant. Elvinia was unconcerned with it, for after some time, it would lose its effect on its own.

Suddenly, there was a series of creaking sounds.

As the disciples of the Oneness Sky Palace walked deeper into the passageway, the jaws of one of the skeletons suddenly fell open. A thin centipede emerged from its open mouth.

“Watch out!” said Chaim, rapidly moving towards Elvinia.

He had seen the centipede and his instincts were alerted.

Elvinia suddenly leaped and waved her right hand in the air. A wave of golden light struck the centipede. Elvinia had launched the whip transformed by the divine flames of the Sun Crow race. In a moment, the centipede turned to ashes on the floor.

“You're too timid,” Elvinia said to Chaim, shaking her head.

She used to think that Chaim was one of the only two worthy opponents in the Oneness Sky Palace, but her opinion of him was changing.

Chaim saw what she was thinking and shrugged, forcing a smile.

He thought rather bitterly that he was only jumpy because Elvinia was always so reckless. The Grand Sky Temple was wholly unfamiliar territory, and it would be wiser to proceed with caution. Any carelessness could lead to death.

There was a clicking sound, and a faint cry sounded from behind Chaim and Elvinia. They turned.

A disciple had been bitten on the leg by a centipede.

His Soul of Light had been glowing with a strong purple aura, but as they stared in horror, his soul darkened and turned to black. He didn't even have time to say anything before his Soul of Light, now a cloud of black smoke, drifted lifelessly to the top of the passageway.

Everyone began speaking at once. “Watch out!”

“Be careful of the centipedes!” “The centipedes are poisonous!”

“Look! The skeletons have opened their mouths!”

Indeed, every single skeleton along the passageway had let their jaws fall open, and many centipedes swarmed out. They crawled along the walls and the ground towards the Souls of Light that had invaded the passageway.

The fate of the bitten disciple had left everyone terrified.

“Follow me,” said Elvinia decisively.

She leaped forward, waving her hands and flinging out whips of golden light that lashed mercilessly at the centipedes. The swarming, crawling mass of centipedes turned to ashes. Chaim and the other disciples pressed close to her back, following her as she moved forward.

In the 7th passageway, a human girl carefully walked forward. She was under the protection of her companions.

Because there were only a few of them in the group, and their collective strength was relatively weak, they had chosen the seventh passageway which was said to be the easiest one.

In fact, the vast majority of the other races had also chosen this passageway. Since they had passed through first, they had already cleared out the obstacles along the way. So this group, coming through last, no longer faced any danger.

Every hundred feet or so, one of them would squat in a corner and draw a pattern on the wall using his or her soul force.

“How many patterns have we drawn by now?” one of them asked.

“437. We're only about halfway through,” answered the man who drew the pattern.