usenovelonline Chapter 245: The Observation Room
Chapter 245: The Observation Room
Right after that.
The thousands of starry eyes that had just opened began to slowly close.
Starting from the bottom and working their way up, like streetlights winking out at night.
One.
Two.
Three...
Until the eyes in the final sector shut completely.
The entire space returned to that dead, pure black state.
Leaving only the faint, almost negligible light leaking from the open door behind them.
And... the faint sounds that Green-Hair could only catch thanks to his Rank-3 Demon Hunter hearing.
The sound of tentacles slowly tightening, winding, and securing their prize.
Rustle. Creep.
Like countless venomous snakes coordinating their coils.
“Let’s go,” the other guard urged again, a barely perceptible tension in his voice.
Green-Hair took one last look at the area that had been swallowed by the dark.
Then he turned and followed his colleague’s footsteps, marching quickly back down the corridor they’d come from.
..................
The main body of the Sentence of the Void was a gargantuan creature.
Naturally, a creature of that scale couldn’t be housed in the main building of the Disciplinary Court.
So, its actual location was deep underground, beneath the Court’s primary structure.
A massive space excavated and reinforced specifically to contain it.
As a living thing, its physical size obviously couldn’t be infinite.
That towering, terrifyingly massive frame that seemed to pierce the entire underground space was actually a spatial illusion it conjured through biological instinct within its specialized environment—a trick to intimidate and snare prey.
Its starting point—essentially its root system—was firmly under the Disciplinary Court’s control.
The Court had built a ring-shaped observation room around this anchor point.
From here, one could overlook the Sentence of the Void’s general condition, monitor its operational state, and... observe the changes in the inmates devoured by the “Void.”
At this moment.
In one of the observation rooms.
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There were no windows.
Only a single, massive, slightly convex curved transparent wall.
The material was special—light passed through only one way. From the inside, the outside was perfectly visible, but from the outside, it just looked like a smooth, black wall.
The room wasn’t large, maybe ten square meters.
Besides the giant observation wall, there were only a few simple metal chairs, a metal desk of the same make, and some precision instruments, knobs, and rows of indicator lights sitting on the tabletop.
The air carried the faint, metallic tang of machinery.
Two people were standing there right now.
They watched in silence as the events unfolded in the pitch-black abyss below.
One of them was watching the two temp guards retrace their steps until their silhouettes vanished into the dark corridor.
The other was a woman wearing light knight’s armor.
Her gaze was fixed dead-center on the spot where the young girl had disappeared—Pandora was theoretically still there, just completely consumed by the dark.
“My Lady... will she really be alright?”
Aurora’s voice broke the silence, sounding a bit abrupt in the empty room.
Her voice was soft, carrying a tremor she couldn’t quite hide.
“Who knows?”
Julian pulled his gaze away, pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, and spoke in his usual mild tone, carrying that calming, steady quality.
“This is a gamble. A high-stakes, head-to-head bet. It’s just... the one who set up the table was her.”
He paused, looking at Aurora.
“So, shouldn’t we extend her a little bit of faith?”
Even so, Aurora kept staring holes into the dark.
Even though she couldn’t see anything anymore—just an all-consuming void.
Deep worry pooled in her eyes.
“Alright, stop staring, Aurora.”
Julian’s voice rang out again, carrying a note of helpless amusement.
“You can’t see anything down there now anyway, can you?”
He paused, his tone smoothing out.
“Besides, do you really still view her as your... liege? I recall her saying that the two of you didn’t need to maintain that kind of relationship. That it was more of a... situational obligation?”
When the guards’ silhouettes had fully vanished, and the distant door slowly swung shut—taking with it the last trace of light from the narrow walkway below—Julian completely withdrew his gaze.
He looked at Aurora, his expression gentle, no pressure in it, just a simple question.
“Of course, I don’t mean anything by it,” he added.
“It’s entirely up to you.”
Aurora didn’t reply.
She just stared, long and hard, into that darkness.
As if she could pierce through the special transparent wall, pierce through that endless night, and see the figure that had been swallowed whole.
A look of resignation crossed Julian’s gentle, smiling face.
He shook his head. He understood.
Silence was his junior’s answer.
But then again...
A thought suddenly crossed Julian’s mind.
After spending what hadn’t been a short amount of time together, this girl Pandora seemed to possess a certain... charisma. The kind that made people instinctively want to trust her, even follow her.
Maybe...
She really could survive the Sentence of the Void.
Though, he highly doubted it.
After all, he knew...
The Sentence of the Void wasn’t like the Disciplinary Court’s other tools.
It didn’t just target Corpse-Plague Acolytes.
Extraordinaries from other paths, including Wizards with formidable mental power and iron wills, were just as helpless against it.
You couldn’t just brute-force the Sentence of the Void with raw mental strength or sheer willpower.
It devoured “existence” itself.
The connection between consciousness and reality.
Could that girl—Pandora—really... survive?
The thought circled in Julian’s mind.
“Alright.”
Aurora’s voice suddenly cut in, severing Julian’s train of thought.
Her voice no longer trembled. Instead, it carried a strange, rigid certainty.
“I believe I will definitely see My Lady a year from now.”
“And she will be... completely intact.”
She turned to look at Julian.
In those eyes that always seemed so steadfast and stubborn, an almost fanatical light was flickering.
“Let’s go.”
“The potions My Lady left me won’t take effect just sitting in a vial.”
Julian snapped out of his thoughts.
He looked at Aurora, putting on that trademark gentle, convincing smile of his.
He nodded.
“No problem.”
“My squad members are always happy to have you.”
“The Dead City might be unfriendly to the vast majority of apprentices, but for people like us, it’s the exception.”
“Apprentices of The Corpse Hall are meant to grow in battle.”
“Mm,” Aurora nodded back, her voice low and firm.
“I understand.”