Chapter 76 Let Me Say a Bit More
It wasn't a cold laugh, nor a mocking one, but rather a gentle smile carrying approval and a sense of "you've finally asked the right question."
He said:
"Because you don't know something."
"The White Tower... is actually twin towers. Everything on the left and right sides of the hall is exactly the same. Because..."
He paused, then dropped a truth that left us all stunned:
"There are two wizard towers."
One tower meant nothing to him. What he wanted was everything.
"What I'm pursuing isn't just to drag out my pathetic existence."
Philip's soul seemed to sigh, and in that sigh was a weariness that transcended life and death, and... ambition.
"What I seek is... 'to die once and be resurrected twice.'"
"If this ritual succeeds, then I will 'die by my own hand' and 'be resurrected by my own hand.' From then on, I'll be stuck in the gap between life and death, in a state that's neither living nor dead... Only this way can I touch the 'truth.' I want to create a third option for all wizards facing death—not becoming mindless monsters, nor sinking into eternal dreams of our own making, waiting to die."
His voice echoed through the stone hall, but the content made our scalps tingle:
"This isn't some simple inheritance ritual at all. This is a crazy ritual where I, having already reached the peak of wizard power, am trying to break free from the world's rules. Yes..."
He spoke that shocking goal slowly and clearly:
"I want to escape the Underworld."
The hall fell instantly silent.
Escape the Underworld.
For us "mortals" still struggling on the edge of life and death, fighting tooth and nail over magical secrets and inheritances, these words were too distant—as distant as fairy tales, like myths and legends, carrying an unreal sense of absurdity.
While others might still be processing this massive amount of information, I suddenly caught a word that made my heart stop.
The Underworld?
Almost instinctively, I blurted out:
"The Underworld... what is that place?"
Philip looked at me, his eyes seeming to hold more tolerance (or perhaps pity?) for a "beginner." He explained gently:
"The Underworld is the final resting place for wizards' souls. For you now, it's too early to understand it."
"You can think of it as... a world one level lower than the reality we're in right now."
One level... lower?
My brain was racing. Dreams? Reality? The Underworld? Three layers of worlds? Was His ritual supposed to move between these? What earth-shattering thing was this old guy planning? Using so many lives, such complex schemes, all to escape from that so-called "Underworld"? Or... to get in?
Too much information, too many things to unpack. I didn't know where to start. I just felt a chill down my spine. Turns out, from the very beginning, none of us were playing a simple inheritance battle or detective game.
We were just insignificant yet essential... variables in his grand and crazy "becoming a god" experiment.
Human hearts were variable.
Life and death were tools.
And his goal was "truth" that stood above all rules.
What a freaking... lunatic.
An elegant, learned, far-planning... genius lunatic who had everyone dancing in the palm of his hand.
"My death prophecy was actually correct... Yes, I had already foreseen my destined death."
Great, so you foresaw it, which means all our reasoning, arguing, and suspecting each other was for what? A warm-up for your pre-planned funeral? At that moment, I wanted to grab him by the collar of his expensive-looking wizard robe and ask: Are you messing with us?! You already foresaw it yourself, so why go through all this? Nothing better to do than torture your juniors for fun?
But he ignored the colorful expressions on my face. Those deep eyes that could suck you in locked directly onto me—no, onto "Carl," the mysterious figure with peculiar reasoning in his eyes.
"What about you, Carl? Any brilliant deductions left?" He tilted his head slightly, his eyes full of playfulness and curiosity. "I always feel you still have something left unsaid."
My internal alarms went off instantly! This big shot, you're not playing by the rules! Didn't you write the script? How can you change it on the fly! And that look in his eyes... it wasn't like testing me, more like a cat's final sizing-up before catching a mouse, full of "I've already seen through you" certainty.
What else could I do? I could only let out a deep sigh.
"Naturally." I heard myself answer him in an equally calm voice, but with a tone of throwing caution to the wind.
Of course! Of course, I had more to say! Because I'd been cheating this whole damn time!
This Philip, and those seemingly profound wizards around—Armando, Selene, and so on—they were following the "puzzles have their own logic" rule in this damned dream that Philip probably wove in his final moments, working hard to find the real culprit.
But not me!
I came from reality twenty-two years later! I knew the outcome! While they were performing a brain-burning mystery series, I was holding the final episode script with the killer's name clearly marked!
From the moment I stepped into this dream scene and knew who the "victim" was, I already knew who among the survivors would make it! So all that previous reasoning, all that pretentious analysis, was actually just packaging the answers I already knew in a "reasonable" way to fool everyone here! This feeling was like taking a math test with the answer key, still having to pretend to think hard and calculate step by step, then "surprisingly" arriving at the correct answer—exhausting! So exhausting! Mentally exhausting!
But well... since he asked, and this dream was starting to become a bit unstable, I keenly noticed that when I indicated I knew more information, this mental world developed subtle cracks, so maybe I should... say a bit more?
"It's quite simple, isn't it?" I organized my thoughts a bit, slowing my tone even more, like a thinker stating an obvious conclusion. "You're a powerful wizard, and have been famous for a long time. We can't resist your power at all—just like Eugene, whom you killed."
At this point, Armando's brow was already furrowed. Ha, sure enough, this professor had a sharp mind even back then, probably suspected it all along.
I continued, my voice particularly clear in the spacious and somewhat crumbling dream hall:
"Who could easily kill a wizard without contact or chanting, even preventing him from saying a single last word? Actually, the answer was clear from the very beginning—only wizard Philip himself could do it. Only he could kill Eugene so easily."
See, such a simple yet cruel truth.
He himself was both the victim and the killer.
He foresaw his own death and personally made the prophecy come true.
What was this? Killing myself? And it's a prophecy-guided suicide? I really couldn't understand wizards' thought processes—this was way too dramatic!
After hearing this, Philip just sighed again, that sigh filled with complex emotions, like regret and also like relief. "Indeed, this answer is too simple."