Chapter 84: Heaven’s Orbit Matrix

Chapter 84: Chapter 84: Heaven’s Orbit Matrix

The Ashlife Flower...

This flower symbolized the god of death and decay.

A hundred thousand years ago, the Ashlife Flower was completely wiped out from the Sylvanor continent.

Whether this flower was highly toxic or if humans had simply attached omens of bad luck to it, no one could prove. Who would have thought they would be able to witness its form in this barren wasteland world.

"Crack..."

A crisp shattering sound tore through the silent space, sounding like a cracking mirror. Jeremy immediately spun around. Right in the center of the room, a massive and complex magic matrix was slowly spinning, rising from beneath the ground.

The runic lines of the matrix spread wide, covering the entire space of the tower floor. But the flower-shaped gemstone reigning at the center bore a gloomy, ashen color. The tier of this matrix was so profound that it could not be fathomed. The outermost ring radiated a divine golden light, but the innermost ring was thick with an eerie blood-red color.

Jeremy’s sharp gaze darted back and forth between the totem on the wall and the central stone. Sure enough, that gemstone was carved exactly in the shape of the Ashlife Flower. What kind of matrix was that damn totem the key to releasing?

Standing beside him, Phoenix glued his eyes to the mirror-like, sparkling ice crystal lines of the matrix. A violent tremor suddenly flashed through Phoenix’s calm eyes. A rare panic erupted in his usually flat voice: "Close your eyes, quickly!"

But, it was too late.

Just as the warning escaped his lips, all the ice crystals on the matrix shattered simultaneously. They transformed into countless threads as thin as spider silk, crisscrossing to form a cocoon that tightly imprisoned all five of them inside.

A blinding light, like the explosion of a star, erupted, striking straight into their eyes. The speed of the light, measured in milliseconds, far exceeded any physical reflex. Even Phoenix, who had voiced the warning first, could not close his eyes in time.

Jeremy only felt his vision go dark. After a veil of dark red blood mist, bizarre, fragmented images began to massively tear through his soul, embedding themselves straight into his cerebral cortex.

Gloomy darkness... A mass grave piled high with human bones... Tragic, despairing screams echoing from the realm of the dead...

Before he could digest this, the scenery inverted again. The mass grave shifted into a vast expanse of white snow, chillingly silent.

The focus of his vision landed on a figure’s back. A mangled body, its blood dyeing the white snow red, was pierced through the chest by a heavy sword, pinned firmly to the ground. The person’s face was blurry in the blizzard, making it impossible to clearly see their features. But at that moment, Jeremy’s chest clenched. A suffocatingly painful heartbeat rushed straight to his brain.

*...Who is it?*

The image shattered and pieced itself together again.

This time, the scene became bright and cheerful. Leon, Evelyn, Phoenix, Lucius, and even Mentor Griffin were gathering in a sunlit garden.

Evelyn was meticulously arranging flowers, Phoenix and Griffin were leisurely playing chess in a gazebo, while Leon rested his legs, dozing off on the branch of a ginkgo tree.

As for Lucius, he stood leaning his back against a massive wisteria tree. The wind lightly brushed past his coat, the side profile of Lucius’s face exuding a rare tranquility, and his profound, sharp gaze that remained unchanged for a millennium now lingered longingly at a single point outside the frame.

Their appearances in this scene seemed a few years older than their present selves; their youthful naivety had been whittled away by time, becoming sharper and more resolute.

Jeremy frowned, and just as he was about to determine where this garden was located, the final scene crashed in.

A lake surface as smooth as a mirror. Fog swirled on all four sides. Right in the center, the blurry images of two people stood facing each other. Surrounding them were thousands of yellow and red magic runes floating and moving continuously. The two were whispering something, but the space seemed distorted; the sound reaching his ears was reduced to indistinct murmurs.

Driven by instinct, Jeremy wanted to step forward to clearly see the faces of the two people. But the moment he lifted his foot, a mind-piercing pain exploded from the depths of his soul. It was as if tens of thousands of iron hands were tearing apart and crushing his consciousness. All the images shattered instantly, swallowed by darkness without leaving a single piece behind.

His consciousness returned to reality, but the pain in his soul did not diminish in the slightest.

His internal organs felt as if they were being incinerated; the blood in his veins boiled violently, crashing frantically against his blood vessels as if wanting to tear through his flesh. A wet, metallic sensation welled up. Jeremy reached up to touch his face, vaguely realizing that his seven orifices were bleeding. He immediately understood that the fragmented images from earlier were not hallucinations. They were fragments of the true future.

His eye sockets felt as if they were being pierced by needles; the pain, exceeding the limits of human endurance, caused his cranial nerves to nearly shut down. Jeremy’s body, drained of all strength, lost its balance and collapsed onto the cold stone floor.

The impact did not make him groan; he only gritted his teeth to suppress the nausea. Waiting for the wave of pain to temporarily subside, he used both hands to press against the floor and forced himself to sit up.

Despite the sticky fresh blood on his eyelashes, he struggled to open his eyes wide.

Contrary to his expectation of a blood mist, the scene that met his eyes now was purely pitch-black. Dark and silent to the point of despair. A terrible premonition weighed down on the bottom of his heart like a boulder.

Jeremy immediately pulled out a high-tier potion from his spatial ring, bit off the cap, and poured it straight into his mouth. But ten minutes passed, and his vision did not recover at all. The pitch-black veil still obstructed his eyes.

Put elegantly, he had been deprived of his sight. Put bluntly, he was blind.

He frowned and was about to open his mouth to call his teammates’ names when heavy crashing sounds rang out successively.

"Thud!" "Crash!"

Four echoing noises, perfectly matching the number of his companions.

Ten minutes later, through questioning each other, the five of them helplessly confirmed a cruel reality: all of them had fallen into a state of complete blindness.

"Bloop bloop~"

The sound of the orb of light, which they thought had exploded, suddenly rang out again. Furthermore, its demeanor seemed doubly jubilant and smug.

"Damn it, this piece of trash still isn’t dead?" Leon violently scratched his head; hearing its chirps made his temples throb incessantly: "What the hell is going on? What were those images just now? Don’t tell me that was a prophecy of the future?"

Phoenix remained silent for a moment before his voice transmitted through the darkness: "...You could understand it that way. The matrix we just activated is called the Heaven’s Orbit Matrix. Its function is to tear through space and time, allowing those within the matrix to see fragments of the future. However, the secrets of heaven must not be revealed; the more you see, the more terrifying the backlash you must endure. That orb of light... is definitely the matrix spirit protecting the matrix."

Leon clicked his tongue, his mind in turmoil: "In this godforsaken corner, a Nine-Star space-time magic matrix actually exists? It even cultivated a matrix spirit?"

Hearing this, the green veins on Jeremy’s forehead twitched slightly. He knew this matrix. Yusha had mentioned it in her ancient magic lectures. This was a space-time magic matrix that broke boundary rules, having long been listed among the supreme forbidden arts on the Sylvanor continent.

To establish this matrix, the caster must have reached the Nine-Star realm—the Origin Realm. Furthermore, fusing the powers of Space and Prophecy was something almost unimaginable for mortals.

As for the matrix spirit, it was the embodiment of the pure magic power from the one who established the matrix. If the matrix spirit was still alive, it meant that after this magic matrix was created, it had been tightly sealed and never activated; thus, it could withstand the corrosion of time for tens of thousands of years. That bizarre totem on the wall was the forced-activation key left behind by the matrix creator.

At this thought, Jeremy truly didn’t know whether to praise or curse his group’s dog-shit luck.