The most shameless alchemist in history

Although Lance was someone he trusted, he thought it was best not to make a fuss about what happened in the Ash Tower. After all, the matter was over and there was no need to dwell on it. As for the girl in the Ash Tower, she was taken away by the academy's higher-ups, accompanied by Nono.

Nono assured him that no one would make things difficult for her; it was just that the academy's higher-ups needed to know some details. Although Du Lei had some doubts, he, as an ordinary student, had no say in matters concerning the girl and could only let them make the arrangements.

"I have a feeling that you, Du Lei, know the inside story but are unwilling to say it. You must have your reasons for doing things, Du Lei. I'm not curious and won't ask any more questions. But this Maple Leaf Academy is indeed not as peaceful as it seems. We've only officially started school and we've already encountered something like this."

Although Lance didn't like to think about problems, it didn't mean he was an idiot. He nodded and didn't intend to pursue the matter further.

"Maybe we were just lucky," Du Lei said with a hint of helplessness. Just then, his expression suddenly changed.

"Durey, what's wrong? Are you feeling unwell?" Lance asked immediately upon seeing his appearance.

"It's nothing, I'm going to the library and I'll be back later. Are you going to the training ground tonight too?" Du Lei shook his head.

“Going to the library again, Du Lei, I really don’t understand you. What’s so interesting about sitting in the library reading those books? Just seeing those dense words makes my eyes dizzy.” Lance scratched his head; books were his worst enemy.

"Books are a bridge to understanding the world. I used to be unable to find books even when I wanted to read them, but now Maple Leaf Academy's library has so many books. It's like a natural treasure trove. I can't waste it. Everyone has different hobbies. I love reading, and you love training. Aren't we the same?"

Dure has unique insights into reading, a habit he has cultivated over many years.

"I understand, I understand. You don't need to keep telling me all this. It's making my head spin. Okay, I'm going to the training ground to stretch my muscles now. See you later." Lance stretched, clenching his fists, his knuckles cracking.

"Okay, see you later." Dure and Lance walked out of the cafeteria and parted ways there, with the library and training ground in different directions.

"Finally gone far away, huh? So what are you going to do now? It suddenly got hot, is there something you want to tell me?" Du Lei walked to a secluded spot and took out the fist-sized egg from his pocket. It had suddenly heated up while he was talking to Lance.

It was precisely because he noticed its unusual behavior that Dure suggested breaking up with Lance and going to the library and training ground separately.

"You want me to go somewhere to feed them? You sent me to Ash Tower before, which almost killed me, and you didn't help me at all. You made me run around for nothing. Why are you doing this again now?" Du Lei recalled the scene at noon.

At that time, he had a falling out with Nono and planned to leave directly. However, it was this egg that reacted and guided him into the Ash Tower. However, he encountered a series of dangers after entering the Ash Tower. He did not see anything special about the egg and gained nothing except for hearing a story.

"I'm starting to doubt if you're kidding me. I'm not that free either, you know," Du Lei said, getting a little angry. He simply stuffed the egg back into the inner pocket of his shirt, not wanting to deal with it anymore. However, it soon started emitting intense heat again.

"Hey, what exactly are you trying to say? You know this is really misleading, okay? Okay, okay, then tell me, where do you want me to go? This way or that way, or this way or this way?" Du Lei was really at a loss and could only take it out again.

He kept changing directions, questioning the egg, trying to figure out what its purpose was. According to the old rule, if the direction was right, it would emit heat. After trying several directions without success, when he turned to a certain direction, it quickly raised the temperature, making Dure's clothes almost steam.

"This is the direction of the Ash Tower. Hey, the Ash Tower has already collapsed. You don't want me to go back here so late at night, do you?" Dure stared blankly at the east side, which was the direction of the Ash Tower. The tower that once stood there had collapsed and turned into ruins today.

"Please don't come, please don't come! Damn it, you really want me to go back. I know there used to be a star stone there, but wasn't it taken away? Kashu is so powerful, he couldn't find it. Why do you want me to go back?" Dure prayed incessantly.

He hoped the egg would give him a negative answer; he didn't want to go back to the Ash Tower. However, the egg was emitting high temperatures. He couldn't understand why the egg was so obsessed with the Ash Tower. He had clearly been there once during the day, and there was no reaction when he was in the Ash Tower.

Now that the Ash Tower is gone, it's finally reacting, which infuriates Dure; he feels completely played for a fool.

"I'm warning you, there's a limit to playing around. It's late at night, who has the energy to go for a stroll with you? I'm in a hurry to get to the library to study. I've already wasted a lot of time today, so you'd better stay put. There's absolutely no way I'm going to Ash Tower again."

Du Lei spoke with absolute certainty, and strode towards the library.

209 Underground Tower

After nightfall, a crescent moon hung in the sky, and all was quiet. Bubbling sounds rose from the swamp, and the air was filled with the smell of dust, caused by the collapse of the Ash Tower during the day. In the distance, scattered lights flickered on the ruins.

Students were patrolling the ruins of the Ash Tower with torches, but the patrol was not very strict because Nono had reported to the academy long ago that the Star Stone hidden in the Ash Tower had long since disappeared, and the girl sealed in the tower was being protected by the academy.

The remaining pile of ruins has no value. The reason for patrolling is only to prevent monsters from invading and to avoid this place becoming a gateway for monster attacks on the academy. It is a precautionary measure, since under normal circumstances no one would come to such a gloomy place.

But on this night, someone still came. A dark figure carefully bypassed the patrol team and approached the ruins. He was familiar with the surrounding terrain. Although this was his first day around Ash Tower, it was not his first time. He had been here during the day.

"It's too gloomy and cold here, so I didn't want to come to a place like this at all. What do you want me to do here?" The boy, Du Lei, opened his palm, looking at the unremarkable egg with great annoyance, just as he said, he didn't want to come at all.

But unable to withstand the egg's continuous high temperature, he had no choice but to compromise and sneak out to the ruins of the Ash Tower in the middle of the night.

"Hot, hot, hot! Hey, I was just venting, don't take it too seriously. Can't I even speak? Okay, okay, tell me where to go, is it this way or this way? I know, it's this way, right?" At this moment, the egg emitted a high temperature again, extremely intense.

The egg burned Dure, who cried out in pain. With no other choice, he could only follow the egg's guidance toward the ruins. The moonlight was dim and pale, and everything looked white. Fog began to spread at night, making visibility very low, and the distant firelight became increasingly sparse.

"I really don't understand. Is there something you don't tell me during the day and insist on making me come to find you at night? Or is it because there are other people around during the day and you don't want them to find out, so you make me come to you alone at night to communicate with you? It's really troublesome, I have to guess everything."

Du Lei moved forward cautiously. The evening breeze was chilly, making him shiver. In the vast ruins, he had no idea where to go or what to look for with the naked eye. He could only rely on the guidance of this egg.

"I can't figure it out by guessing like this, but I'm warning you, don't mess with me this time. Don't make me dig through spider droppings for ages like I did in the spider's nest, and you still don't explain it. Plus, I didn't find any use for the gloves I found at the end."

Dure felt extremely unlucky and downcast whenever he recalled his previous encounter in the spider's nest beneath the Misty Forest.

"I need to make this clear to you. We have a mutually beneficial relationship. You won't mess with me, and I won't treat you unfairly. You don't want to be thrown into some dark place or smashed up, right? So, where do you want me to go? Hmm, is this the place?" Du Lei complained.

Despite his complaints, he didn't hesitate in his search. He quickly bypassed the large, fallen boulders and arrived inside the Ash Tower. The Ash Tower had already been broken in half in history and looked very dilapidated, and today it had collapsed again on a large scale.

This reduced the Ash Tower, which was originally over 100 meters tall, to less than 20 meters. The surrounding area was filled with fallen boulders and long-dead trees that had been smashed to pieces. The charred landscape was shocking and looked especially desolate under the moonlight.

Dure pushed aside the stone and entered the remaining base of the Ash Tower. It took him a lot of effort to confirm that the egg had indeed brought him to this location. He bent down and searched carefully, trying to find some clues. At this time, he also discovered that there were words on many stones.

"I was in a rush during the day and didn't look carefully. I didn't even notice how many characters and murals there were. But these characters are all ancient characters, which I can't decipher. Besides, I don't think it would be of much use even if I did decipher them."

Dure was amazed by the ancient script, but he quickly shook his head as another thought came to mind.

“Maple Leaf Academy has existed for over a hundred years, and the academy has never lacked people who are proficient in the study of ancient scripts. If there were any secrets here, they would have been deciphered long ago. I am not the special one, so the focus is not on these scripts.”

Du Lei continued to examine the evidence, but with very few clues, he could only search aimlessly.

"Hey, you led me here, and now you're not responding at all? This place is so big, how am I supposed to find it? I have no idea where you're taking me or what I'm looking for. And now you're not responding at all. You just said you wouldn't mess with me, and now you're tricking me again?"

Dure had hoped the egg would give him more clues, but the egg seemed to be asleep and unresponsive.

"Damn it, I shouldn't have believed your nonsense. It would have been so much better to go to the library to read in the middle of the night. Why did I have to come here and get chilled by the wind? I must be crazy. Wait, what's going on over there?" Just as Du Lei was regretting his decision to come here.

He suddenly noticed something. Not far ahead, a soft beam of light was shining down. It was moonlight. He looked up at the sky and saw the crescent moon casting a pale light on the ground like a blanket of silver frost. The light reflected on the ground also resembled a crescent moon.

"Could it be here?" Du Lei realized that the location of the moonlight was too clever. He immediately went forward to check the ground, moved the messy pebbles on the ground with his hands, swept away the dust nearby, and checked if there was anything on the ground.

"Is this a pull ring? I was right. No wonder we found nothing in the Ash Tower during the day. We were all fooled by the tower's appearance. The tower is layered on top of each other, which made us mistakenly believe that something was definitely hidden at the top."

Dure quickly dug a pull ring out of the ground, which made him ecstatic, and all his previous doubts disappeared at once.

“But something is still hidden beneath the tower. This is where you led me here, isn’t it? Let me see what’s hidden here.” Dure looked around, making sure the patrolmen were far enough away that no one had noticed him, and then pulled the ring.

210 Another door

The appearance of the pull tab proved that Du Lei's trip was definitely not in vain. He carefully looked around and made sure that no one else was watching him before pulling the tab. The "clang" sound was quite jarring in the dark night, which startled him, and he was afraid of attracting other people's attention.

However, after observing the situation for a while without finding anything unusual, he struck a match, lit a candle, and used the candle to illuminate the scene below the pull ring. What appeared before him was a downward staircase. Without hesitation, he immediately went down the staircase.

The stairs weren't high, only three or four meters. At the bottom was a passageway, less than two meters high. But for a boy who was only about 1.6 meters tall, passing through it was a piece of cake. The passageway was straight with few twists or forks.

Because it was perpetually dark, the passageway had a strong, damp, and musty smell. Du Lei held his breath, not daring to be careless in the slightest. He walked along the passageway for about ten minutes, moving very slowly and calculating the distance he had traveled as he went.

He noticed that the passage sloped downwards, and when he silently counted to 642 steps, a door appeared in front of him, or rather, an iron fence. The fence connected the bottom and top of the passage, completely blocking the way, and there was a lock hanging on the fence gate.

Du Lei happened to have seen records related to locks in a book and recognized that this lock was an old style from more than 300 years ago. Due to its age, both the iron bars and the lock were rusty, and there was a smell of rust in the air. The walls on both sides were a bit damp.

“This iron fence must have been built around the same time as the Ash Tower. In other words, this basement was built when the Ash Tower was first constructed. It’s really well hidden. If we calculate the distance, this place should be directly below the Ash Tower.” Dure raised a candle.

After observing it by the light of the fire, he roughly determined the age of the iron fence and its relationship with the Ash Tower.

“The lock is completely rusted shut. That’s all we need to do. Now that it’s open, let’s see what’s behind the door.” Du Lei wasn’t going to back down just because of a rusted iron gate. He pulled out a dagger from his pocket and pried at the lock.

Before long, he pried open the lock, and the rusty iron chain attached to it fell to the ground with a clang. With a creak, the iron gate opened, and Du Lei successfully broke through the barrier. He continued to advance cautiously.

The "we" he referred to was naturally him and the egg in his arms. If it weren't for the egg's guidance, he wouldn't have been able to find such a secluded place, and even if he had known such a place existed, he probably wouldn't have come here to explore.

"Another door? Who built this place? They love to be so mysterious. And there's some kind of pattern painted on the door, but it's so old, the colors have faded so badly, it's completely illegible. Hmm, this time there's no lock, it opened so easily?"

A few minutes after Dure passed through the iron gate, another door stood in front of him. This door was made of wood, but it had long since rotted away over time, and a corner could be easily broken off with a gentle twist. Dure could vaguely see that the surface of the door was painted with a large number of patterns.

But it was also unrecognizable under the erosion of time. He tried to pull the door, thinking it would be an obstacle, but unexpectedly, the door opened with a gentle pull, which surprised Dure. He picked up the candle and went back inside.

"This is a room. I think I've found the place, but why does this place look like a laboratory?" Du Lei entered the room and observed it by the light of the candle. He found that there was a small room behind the door with four or five bookshelves inside.

The bookshelves were filled with thick ancient books. Although Du Lei was very interested in books, he knew that things had priorities and now was not the time to read. There were several workbenches outside the bookshelves, with glass bottles and reagent bottles of different sizes on them.

The bottle also contained some colorful powdery substances or liquids, which were important evidence for Dure's conclusion that it was a "laboratory". On the other side of the room, there was a bed, indicating that someone had lived there for a long time, but there was no one or any skeletons on the bed.

“Interesting. Someone actually lived underground in the Ash Tower for quite a long time. Who could it be? Hmm, there’s another passage here, and the walls have become…” Dure looked around, trying to find something of value.

But then he discovered that there was another passageway at the back of the room. This passageway was very narrow, only allowing one person to pass at a time, but it was also very high, reaching at least three meters. Moreover, the walls on both sides were neatly repaired with bricks.

This was quite different from the previous rough draft. Du Lei hesitated for a moment before walking to the passageway and then tested his position.

"We were able to get through, but now that we've come this far, I'm finding more and more suspicious things. Hey, what should we do next? Should we stop here and turn back, or continue on? You know what I'm capable of. If we encounter any unexpected situations, I won't be able to handle them."

Dure instinctively sensed that the end of the passage was definitely not simple. Someone had gone to great lengths to build this underground passage, and it was definitely not just for passing the time or for sightseeing. He began to ask for advice, and the object of his inquiry was undoubtedly the egg in his arms, since there was no one else here.

"Here you go again. I knew asking you was pointless. Anyway, I'm the one who got hurt, not you, right? Okay, okay, I know. Just keep going. Luckily, I'm still a kid. If it were a fat person, I don't think they would have been able to squeeze through." Du Lei clearly felt a burning sensation.

This was Egg's response to him. He immediately squeezed his body into the narrow passage. In fact, it wasn't difficult for someone of his size to pass through, but it would be extremely difficult for someone like Copper Mountain.

"I have to warn you beforehand, we're all in the same boat. We share the same fate, and if something happens to me, you won't be any better off. I'm following your instructions, so if anything goes wrong, you have to take responsibility, understand?" Du Lei was still a little uneasy.

The candle in his hand was already half burned, and the surroundings were eerily quiet, with only the sound of his footsteps audible.

He wasn't sure where he was headed; it could be destruction, or it could be the underworld.

211 Howling like ghosts

Du Lei knew very well that he had no way back. The reason he kept asking questions was just to give himself a psychological suggestion. The narrow passage was not long. He walked through it in just over three minutes. Suddenly, the candle in his hand went out.

It wasn't because the candle had burned out; there was still more than half of it left. He blew it out himself. Light had always been a problem underground, and he had been barely making his way by candlelight until now. Even after blowing out the candle, he could still see clearly around him.

This is because there is light underground, and the source of the light is a large number of fire pits distributed in a circular pattern nearby. Each of these fire pits is nearly as tall as a person and nearly a meter in diameter. Just one of these fire pits is bigger than Dure himself. One of these fire pits is enough to be astonishing.

However, in the huge underground palace that appeared after passing through the narrow passage, there were dozens of these braziers. They were neatly distributed along the circular edge of the underground palace. At first, Du Lei was completely unaware of this, but after he finished walking through the narrow passage...

The underground palace, which was originally pitch black, was suddenly lit with braziers. One after another, these braziers were lit, as if there was a line of fire. In the short span of a breath, the entire underground palace was illuminated with a large area of ​​eerie green. Normal flames are red, but the fire in the braziers was green.

With the help of the somewhat eerie green light, Durei could see that this was an underground palace. The palace was divided into rings and had no other exits. In other words, this was the final place he had reached after pulling the ring and entering the underground of the Ash Tower. The long passage led here.

"After all that effort, is this all you've built? There's practically nothing here. Hey, what are you trying to do by leading me here?" Du Lei looked around. Apart from a few dozen braziers emitting eerie green flames, there was nothing else in the underground palace.

The spacious center of the underground palace was completely empty except for the densely packed symbols on the ground, which puzzled Du Lei.

"Okay, okay, I understand. I'll go look ahead. Communicating with you is too much trouble." After feeling the burning heat coming from his arms, Du Lei continued forward, heading towards the center of the circular underground palace, trying to carefully search for anything there.

"Besides the eerie atmosphere, I haven't found anything. Hmm, what are these patterns on the ground?" Du Lei searched for a long time without success. At this moment, he squatted down and carefully examined the dense characters on the ground. These were ancient characters, and he didn't understand their meaning.

Besides the text, there were also a lot of pictures. Du Lei smeared them with his hand, trying to see them clearly and figure out what they were about.

"I don't understand at all. Can you even understand what these are? Forget it, even if you understand, you can't explain them to me, right? That's a bit awkward. I have no idea what to do next. Um, who is he?" Du Lei was suddenly caught in a dilemma.

He didn't know whether to advance or retreat. Even if he did advance, he had no clue where to go. But at that moment, he noticed that the eerie green flames in the nearby brazier were suddenly swaying, as if swept away by a strong wind, while the surrounding area was clearly calm.

"You think I didn't notice you sneaking around? Hurry up and come out! What's going on?" Du Lei immediately reached for the scabbard strapped to his calf, ready to fight. He assumed that someone was hiding nearby and trying to attack him.