Chapter 1105 - 895: Safehouse

The snake’s body was still coiled deep within the crack, its muscles briefly twitching after death before stiffening completely.

Duke withdrew his right hand, and the four-colored light blade silently dissipated at his fingertips.

He slid down along the stone wall, landing beside a pile of rubble at the base of the high wall, squatting down to flip the snake’s head over.

This giant snake was quite large, its head the size of a barrel, and its dark yellow vertical pupils had completely lost their luster.

He used his fingers to pry open the snake’s mouth, inspecting the skeletal structure of the upper and lower jaws and the shape of the venomous fangs, then took out a short dissection knife from the Space Ring, slicing along the gap behind the snake’s head scales.

The scales were extremely hard, producing an ear-piercing friction sound similar to scraping on a metal surface as he peeled them off piece by piece, revealing the dark gray muscle tissue below.

Fine Shadow Energy was entwined within the muscle fibers, slowly permeating along the fibers’ direction, and he sliced some muscle samples to preserve.

While processing the snake’s head, he found an unexpected discovery, extracting two pigeon-egg-sized venom sacs deep in the upper jaw, with very thin walls, storing high concentrations of Dark Attribute Poison, appearing like two slowly beating black hearts in the Spiritual Power perception.

This poison was extremely rare, suitable for research or as Alchemy Materials.

He meticulously examined the rest of the snake carcass, confirming there were no more parts worth preserving, stood up, and once again vanished into the depths of the stone corridor as a gentle breeze.

In Wind Elementalization form, Duke drifted along the stone corridor, passing through one fork after another, roughly mapping the passage orientation of this area, stopping at a fork to re-solidify.

He leaned against the inside of the stone wall, the cool, gray-white stone slab, and spread his perception outward, confirming there was no immediate threat nearby, then took a few gulps from a water flask containing the Spring of Life from the Space Ring, slightly alleviating the mental fatigue from maintaining Elementalization for an extended period.

Duke returned the flask to the Space Ring, lifted his head, and surveyed the surroundings, his gaze sweeping over the dense ancient runes on the stone wall next to him.

Since entering the third layer, he had passed dozens of stone corridors and several fork junctions, gradually piecing together a rough map of the maze area in his mind.

During this process, he noticed a detail: some of the ancient runes on the stone walls would simultaneously light up briefly, flashing section by section along the corridor’s direction, like signal lights guiding towards a specific direction.

Initially, he thought it was random fluctuations, but after repeated observations, he noticed the lighting sequence of those runes followed a fixed pattern, repeating at intervals, each repetition pointing towards the same fork.

He decided to investigate in that direction.

After passing through several forks, a dead end suddenly appeared before him.

The end of the corridor was a gray-white stone wall of the same material as the side walls, but the wall surface had no cracks or runes, only a faint, translucent energy light film covering it.

The surface of the light film was flowing with a dense rune array, each rune rotating at an extremely slow speed.

Duke reached the light film, placing his hand on its surface.

A gentle push came from his palm, like pressing on a thick layer of rubber, solid but not impenetrable.

He infiltrated the light film with his Spiritual Power, analyzing the rune array layer by layer, quickly determining the trigger conditions.

The light film sealed a very simple Rules threshold, which only required injecting Rule Power into specific rune nodes on the light film surface in sequence to open it.

This also counted as a small decryption game.

Duke quickly understood the pattern, accurately injecting Rule Power into the corresponding nodes.

All nodes lit up simultaneously, the light film silently dissipating from the center to the edges, revealing an arched recess embedded deep in the stone wall.

Within the recess hovered a palm-sized, gray-white stone key, with ancient runes matching those on the stone wall engraved on its surface, one end tied with a thin Energy Light Silk, its other end connected to the glowing rune within the recess.

He reached out to grasp the key, and the rune light silk automatically broke, infusing a concise stream of information into his Spiritual Sea.

The effective time of this key was twelve hours, starting from activation.

The key was bound to him personally, non-transferable, but could add a guest’s Spiritual Power imprint.

The addition method was simple, just injecting the guest’s Spiritual Power imprint into the rune core on the key’s surface.

Duke turned the key to its back, discovering a brief guide attached below.

There are safety houses scattered throughout the maze, accessible to those holding the key.

The entrance to the safety house isn’t a traditional door; key holders can directly pass through any maze wall to enter a safety house, with the wall’s appearance unchanged, invisible, and imperceptible to others from the outside.

The interior of the safety house is an independent micro-space, with entry and exit controlled at the whims of the key holder, effective only for twelve hours from the moment of key activation.

After reading this guide, a thought flashed in his mind; no wonder he couldn’t integrate into the walls and floor using Earth Elemental Form before.

Each stone slab and wall within this maze was embedded with a densely packed network of Rules, with safety houses hiding in the network’s core nodes, the entire wall was thoroughly locked by Rule Power, naturally inaccessible by any means.