I made up magic and taught a world-destroying witch?

Chapter 118 Opening the Door: Starting with Restoration

Allen strode to the stone door and reached out to search it. However, there was no handle in the middle of the door, nor could he see anything to push it. There was only a fist-sized object that looked like a lock. However, the keyhole had long been damaged beyond recognition, and there were many messy, fresh scratches on the stone surface.

It looks like someone has been smashing something here for a long time.

The ground was also a mess, littered with rubble, broken metal pieces, and dust and trash that had accumulated over countless years. Allen kicked away a piece of rubble blocking his path and took a step back.

"People inside, get back!" he said, raising his shoulder and slamming it against the stone door. However, this only caused some dust to fall on his head; the stone door didn't even shake.

Allen rubbed his shoulder, took a few steps back, and said dejectedly, "This door is pretty sturdy."

Joseph:

The fact that the stone gate could withstand a full-armored church knight's impact without any reaction goes beyond just being sturdy.

Allen leaned closer to the stone door and raised his voice, asking, "Who's inside? Can you hear me?"

Just when everyone thought the scream was just an illusion, a voice finally came from behind the door again: "Help—help—they—are still down there—"

By the end, his voice had completely degenerated into intermittent gasps.

Allen's expression immediately turned serious: "Step back!"

He gripped the hilt of his sword again and aimed it at the stone door, but Brewster immediately reached out and stopped him.

"Don't act impulsively."

Brewster approached and examined the door and the nearby stone walls. Finally, his expression turned grim as he said, "The internal structure may be jammed. Since this is a downward passage, the stone door and the surrounding walls are likely connected."

If we force our way through, I wonder if we might cause the adjacent stone wall to collapse as well.

Allen looked up at the dust-covered stone ceiling: "What do we do? There are people inside!"

Evelyn walked to the stone gate, looked at it carefully for a while, and then gently shook her head.

"There is no record of this door in the church records."

She raised her hand and wiped away a layer of dust beside the door, revealing only a few blurred reliefs whose contents were no longer discernible. She said, "I don't know if it was originally a sacrificial passage or a mechanism added later when the ruins were sealed, nor do I know how to open it."

Suddenly, another painful groan came from behind the door. Evelyn placed her palm on the stone door, closed her eyes, and whispered a prayer.

A soft white light spread from her fingertips, seeping inward along the surface of the stone door. But the white light stopped as soon as it touched the middle of the stone door, as if it were blocked by something.

Evelyn increased her magic, but the light still couldn't penetrate it. After a while, she had no choice but to withdraw her hand.

"There's a magical barrier inside the stone door," Evelyn said. "Healing Blessings can't get through."

The passageway fell silent.

The fisherman, carrying an empty fish basket, stood at the back. He had originally intended to say that he had seen old locks on fishing boats before, but after seeing the keyhole that had been smashed into a mess, he wisely kept quiet.

This thing was clearly beyond what he usually did when he poked the wooden locks in the warehouse with a wire.

Joseph stared at the keyhole, his attention drawn to the image of the small hammer surrounded by red and gold flames in his mind.

Repairing magic? But the problem is, he doesn't even know what this thing originally looked like.

He had just solemnly told Mia that the first step in restoration is to know what something looks like when it's intact. But the keyhole in front of him had been smashed so badly that it was unrecognizable. He had no idea how many bolts were inside, which direction the mechanism should turn, whether there were any magic runes, or what locked the stone door.

Using restoration techniques directly now seems to make little difference compared to blindly piecing together a box you've never seen before.

What if the lock is completely sealed off after the repair is done wrong? Or even worse, what if the door and the surrounding walls are repaired as a single, solid piece of stone?

At that point, the people behind the door probably won't need to keep calling for help anymore; they can just stay in the ruins and keep the Old Gods company.

"Help—" The voice from behind the door rang out again before falling completely silent.

Allen gripped the hilt of his sword tightly, and Evelyn turned to look at Joseph, her face showing a hint of obvious anxiety for the first time.

Joseph looked at the keyhole and sighed inwardly.

Forget it, since almost everyone inside is gone anyway, let's try to fix this thing as a last resort, regardless of whether it can be repaired or not.

You can't just stand outside the door and listen to someone slowly die just because you don't know the instructions.

Joseph walked to the stone door and raised his hand to press on the completely damaged keyhole.

Brewster's expression changed slightly when he saw his actions.

Was Grantham planning to use magic to repair the door? He had only read about archmages using magic to restore damaged doors in a few old magical records, but those all required a lot of blueprints and various materials. What was he doing?

Joseph gritted his teeth and activated the repair spell slot in his mind. Red and gold light immediately shone from his palm. At first, the light just flowed slowly on the outside. Joseph was even prepared to pretend that he was just testing the waters if the skill failed.

Unexpectedly, the things they thought were trash that fell to the ground were pulled up piece by piece by the red and gold light and flew back to where they had been!

A series of subtle turning sounds came from the jammed structure inside. The magic runes that had almost completely disappeared lit up again under the red and gold light, connecting together in circles along the circular keyhole.

Joseph:

It can actually be repaired? He himself doesn't even know what the complete length of this thing is, or what the repair technique is based on.

"Infer the complete structure from the damage marks—" Brewster said in a low voice.

Grantham's strength has actually reached this level!

A glint of surprise flashed in Evelyn's eyes.

His power is probably far greater than anyone originally thought.

If he could connect with the church—

Joseph didn't think that far ahead, because the restoration spell slots in his mind had been completely restored after the keyhole was fully repaired.

It turned gray. No matter how hard he tried to concentrate, he couldn't light it up again.

However, there was obviously no time to investigate at the moment. After a series of sounds came from inside the stone door, the originally tightly sealed dark gray stone door finally slowly moved back a little bit.

Allen immediately stepped forward, placed his hands on the edge of the door, and forcefully pushed the stone door open.

"The people inside!"

Before he could finish speaking, the smile on his face had completely vanished.

Behind the stone gate was a wider underground passage, and the floor, walls and even the ceiling of the passage were covered with densely packed mealybugs!

Some of the insects had cracked open, revealing wriggling black threads inside. Some looked as if they had been forcibly pieced together by something, with the limbs of two or three insects intertwined, dragging their severely deformed bodies as they crawled forward along the ground.

The moment the stone door opened, all the insects seemed to sense the magic outside at the same time and swarmed towards the stone door!

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