Walker Of The Worlds

Chapter 3965: Multiple Routes Out

Everything began falling into place.

Everything he had seen so far were all remnants of the Mad Demon’s experiments. Among the creatures some species had survived, some had adapted, some had mutated and others had probably been deliberately created.

The Mad Demon Depths were less like a naturally formed ecosystem, and more like an enormous abandoned laboratory that had slowly become an ecosystem over time.

Lin Mu continued reading and then he found something that immediately caught his attention.

"Escape routes." His eyes brightened.

The notes contained far more information than he had expected. There were numerous exits from the Mad Demon Depths. Some were physical passages while others were hidden routes through the mountains.

Several of them were accessible through old maintenance tunnels that the Mad Demon had originally used to move between different sections of the laboratory. Zhenyu had intended to use one of those routes to escape.

The old sect elders had apparently known about some of these passages as well and they had been used to secretly send guards into the prison. That explained why the guards could appear and disappear without the prisoners understanding where they had gone.

The prisoners had assumed the guards simply vanished. In reality, they were using concealed routes that the prisoners had never discovered.

Lin Mu continued as he found something even more interesting: Spatial exits.

"Huh?" His eyes widened.

The Mad Demon had constructed several spatial gateways that could connect the Mad Demon Depths to different locations throughout the Heavenly Stream Guardian World.

"Wait, there’s so many nodes?" Lin Mu leaned closer.

The jade token displayed several ancient coordinates and each represented a spatial node. Some were located near ancient cities that had probably changed by now while others were close to important divisions.

Several also appeared to lead toward remote regions. The problem was that the world had changed considerably since the nodes were created. The Heavenly Stream Guardian World had shifted through the broader expanse of space and the void.

Continental plates had changed and shifted while spatial coordinates had drifted as well. As such some nodes were completely useless now. Though there were others that could be made to work but would require recalibration.

Zhenyu had managed to identify several that still functioned during his time. Lin Mu then studied the coordinates as he had no guarantee that they remained functional up until now. There was only one way to find out.

"Let’s see."

He held the jade token and began interacting with the spatial formations. The token responded immediately as one ancient node lit up and then several more. Lin Mu watched carefully as the dormant formation began to awaken.

Spatial fluctuations spread throughout the white space and the compressed dimension trembled. One by one, ancient coordinates were flickered into existence once more.

Lin Mu’s eyes widened. "Still working?"

A minute later, the first portal opened and it was followed by another. Within a short period, eleven spatial portals had appeared throughout the hidden space and each one had a different spatial signature.

Some were weak and some were unstable. There were even two that were extremely faint. Lin Mu had to use his ring to reinforce them or they would simply shut down on their own within seconds.

Lin Mu stared at the eleven gateways and his previous disappointment regarding the cultivation technique disappeared completely. After all, he had now discovered eleven potential routes into different parts of the Heavenly Stream Guardian World.

He did not even need to return through the way he had entered.

A smile slowly spread across Lin Mu’s face. "Coming here was totally worth it."

He looked at the portals for another moment and then his expression became thoughtful.

Eleven routes meant eleven possible destinations which could allow him to do a lot more. Lin Mu felt as though he had finally gained control over the direction of his investigation without being under scrutiny from others.

Now he not only had a way out, he had a way to return whenever he wished.

Lin Mu looked down at the jade token in his hand. "This old elder really left me quite the inheritance."

Xukong gave a quiet chuckle. "Indeed. And you haven’t even finished searching his records."

Lin Mu’s smile widened as that was true. There were still countless pages of information inside the token. Lin Mu spent the next several days inside the hidden spatial chamber, doing little besides reading.

For someone else, the sheer amount of information contained within Junior Elder Zhenyu’s jade token would have been overwhelming. Lin Mu had initially thought that the elder’s earlier ramblings were the majority of what had been stored inside the token, yet he soon realized those stories had merely been a tiny fraction of the man’s records.

Zhenyu had written down almost everything.

Every strange phenomenon he encountered had been recorded. Every change in the formations had been noted. Every prisoner community he encountered had been described in varying levels of detail.

There were even rough maps showing sections of the Mad Demon Depths that Lin Mu had yet to visit, though many of those maps had become unreliable after the formations changed over the countless years.

Lin Mu patiently went through all of it.

His memory made the task considerably easier. He did not need to repeatedly return to the same passages to memorize them. Once he understood something, it remained within his mind. He could practically flip through the entire jade token mentally and bring up specific pieces of information whenever he needed them.

Still, he did not rush and there was a reason he had chosen to spend several days here.

The Mad Demon Depths were ancient, and so was the information contained within Zhenyu’s records. If Lin Mu wanted to understand the place properly, he needed to absorb everything that might become useful later. A seemingly insignificant observation could easily become important when combined with another clue.

His main objective, however, remained the same: The Virtuous Calamity Daoist’s vault.

Lin Mu searched through every record that had even a remote connection to the man, but the task was a difficult one.