Embers of Embers

Chapter 279 The Key to Sublimation
Lorenzo is a person who rarely recalls the past. For him, the first half of his life was not a good one. It was covered in darkness and blood, and the few reassuring light spots had long since dimmed.
Therefore, recalling is of no use, and there is no need to recall.
Walking in the corridor of memory, Lorenzo was sometimes happy and sometimes sad, the dust scattered in the dim light, shining like stars.
Sometimes he lives too devotedly, devoting himself wholeheartedly to hunting monsters, immersing himself in a state of selflessness, until even these beautiful things that he once briefly had were forgotten, but now he has a different feeling when he thinks about it. Feel.
"It's so long...do I have so many memories?"
Lorenzo suddenly stopped and looked at the long corridor extending to the end of his sight. He was also a little confused.
Hercule explained that memory is an abstract concept without concrete form, and the same is true for the memory palace derived from it. It is not bound by common sense and is like a bizarre hallucination.
The corridor began to twist. Lorenzo was wary, but he still stood firmly in place. Then the ground began to collapse, but it was not the kind of irregular fragmentation. It seemed that it had been cut by extremely sharp sword blades. They were neatly cut. It cracked and turned into pieces of simple and carved rocks.
There was a door of memory erected on each huge rock, and then they began to fall one by one, rotating and extending in a spiral shape, until the huge stairs spread down into the darkest abyss, which cannot be peered into.
Lorenzo stood on the edge of the rock, looking down into the deep darkness without any light. He looked above his head, which was the route he came from. The door leading to the outside of the palace was open, and the lights inside the door were bright.
This is no longer a man-made space, but a palace forged by the psychedelic will. It is like an abyss, with countless rocks holding up the gate, suspended in the abyss.
After a brief hesitation, Lorenzo chose to continue downward. Perhaps this was his subconscious hint. All those forgotten things were casually left behind and fell to the bottom of the abyss. He continued to move forward, as his As he passed by, one door after another opened, and memories swallowed him up like a tide.
"We are about to implant the secret blood...047."
042 was lying on the soft grass, squinting and looking up at the blue sky. The gentle breeze blew over his body, as if invisible hands were hugging him.
"what happened?"
047 is sitting under the shade of a tree, reading a book. There is never a shortage of books around this guy.
"Are not you afraid?"
042 asked with some curiosity. The sunlight was dazzling, and he could only squint slightly, unable to open his eyes.
"They said that implanting secret blood will kill people. We will all die. There is a high probability that we will die."
042 sat up and looked at 047 under the shade of a tree. Someone ran past him. They were a group of the same children as 042.
Normally they have little freedom, but as the secret blood implantation progresses, the priests' supervision of them has become much looser. Some children thought that the rigid priests had finally enlightened themselves, but 042 felt that this was more like before death. mercy.
"No one knows who will survive. Maybe you will die and I will survive, or the other way around... It's like a strange bet. Close your eyes and bet on whether you can wake up."
042 stood up, walked to 047's side, and sat together under the shade of the tree.
"Are you afraid of death?" 047 closed the book and looked at 042.
"No one is not afraid...aren't you afraid?"
042 looked at 047 with suspicion, but the suspicion quickly dissipated. In fact, judging from 047's character, he might not be afraid of death.
"How should I say it?" 047 wanted to comfort this guy, but someone else said.
"Don't be so pessimistic. Maybe you will survive? And we don't know what the specific situation is. Maybe the priest is just scaring us?"
Suddenly there was a sound, 016 came over from behind the tree, not only her, but also another familiar guy.
"However, if it's a bet, I suggest you don't do anything to harm your luck recently."
011 also walked out after that. He looked at 042 with a wicked smile, and 042 instantly became alert, but thinking of what 011 said, he couldn't help but ask.
"Bad luck?"
"Yeah, luck has a certain amount, use a little bit less until it's gone."
"What kind of nonsense is this?"
"Don't believe it, I rely on it to survive until now." 011 said.
042 was a little bored, "Then you must be dead, you have gambled so much before."
011 is a gambler among this group of children, and of course he is not a serious gambler. He likes to bet with everyone on dinner and the priests’ rewards, which are of little value but very precious to this group of children, and strangely It's this guy who never loses, he wins every time he bets.
"There is a difference between gambling and gambling. 042. Neither I nor you call it gambling. It can only be said to be a one-sided fraud that does not use luck at all."
011 waved his hand, "Who told you that you are too stupid?"
042 immediately wanted to get up and beat this guy up, but 011's movements were so vigorous that 042 couldn't catch this slippery guy at all.
Then flames spread across the grass, and the bodies piled up into hills.
"You still lost the bet...011."
Lorenzo couldn't help but say, past those memories and continued downward, one rock after another, neither fast nor slow.
To be honest, these memories of the past have long been blurred. If it were not for this memory palace, Lorenzo might not be able to recall those long-dead people and those long-forgotten things so clearly.
But suddenly there was a door that attracted his attention. Unlike the other doors, it did not open automatically due to Lorenzo's arrival. It was tightly closed. The wooden door seemed to have been burned by the fire, and the surface was carbonized and cracked.
Lorenzo stopped in front of the door, hesitated for a moment, and pushed hard, as if he was trying to push away a rock as heavy as a mountain, until there was a slight gap, and behind that gap revealed the intention of death, and gray dust overflowed. , as if they were the ashes of the dead after burning.
Suddenly he knew what this door was. Everyone had painful memories, and those painful memories were judged by the subconscious as bad. Recalling them would bring a burden to oneself, so they were deliberately forgotten until they fell. Dusty.
Obviously this is a past that has been deliberately forgotten, but just when Lorenzo realized this, the door opened.
Lorenzo had no time to make any preparations, and then a stinging pain covered his whole body, and then countless arms stretched out from behind the door. They were pale in color and stained with fishy blood, and murmurs of suffering echoed among them, Drag Lorenzo into the world behind the door.
Amid the pain of tearing, unknown liquid poured into Lorenzo's mouth and nose. He coughed painfully and struggled hard, but the countless arms tightly imprisoned him like a cage, and the cold never stopped. The wound penetrated into the body, and the melodious whale call came from the ears.
……
"What... what's going on?"
Hercule panicked. He looked at Lorenzo in front of him and didn't know what to do for a moment.
Everything went well at first. As the smoke of mandrake covered him, Lorenzo fell into a deep sleep. His consciousness was between wakefulness and coma, peeking into the palace of memory.
In fact, this is quite like hypnosis. After closing his eyes, Lorenzo seemed to have successfully entered the memory palace. This guy showed a gentle smile from time to time, sometimes happy, sometimes sad. These expressions were a little fuzzy in the dark, but Hulk I can still see it clearly.
He was holding on to the time, and the first time he entered should not be too long, and just when he was about to wake Lorenzo, a sudden change occurred. Lorenzo closed his eyes tightly and whined in a low voice, as if he was suffering a cruel punishment.
This was not what would happen when exploring the Memory Palace, and Hercule's mind went blank.
Lorenzo fell to the ground, his body curled up into a ball, twitching in pain. You could clearly see the bulging blue blood vessels. He hit the ground hard with his hands, and his sharp nails left a shallow white mark on it. .
"Lo...Lorenzo!"
Hercule tried to wake him up, but Lorenzo was like an irrational beast at the moment and couldn't hear him at all. He scratched himself hard, and in the blink of an eye, his upper body was bloody, as if there were Something was inside him and he wanted to expel it like crazy.
"Damn! Damn!"
Hercule cursed several times, and it was obvious that he could no longer wake up Lorenzo. He leaned against the door in fear, thinking about what to do next.
Lorenzo is a very scary guy. It can be seen from the fact that he killed so many people with a spoon that this guy is extremely dangerous, and now Hercule is locked up with a crazy version of Lorenzo.
Judging from Lorenzo's self-mutilation behavior at this moment, he really has no reason to speak. Hercule had no time to describe his thoughts at this moment and could only say one sentence loudly.
"Feel sorry!"
Hercule said that and escaped from the secret room. He did not dare to stay there for even a moment. With his small body, Lorenzo could really tear him alive.
He then closed the door of the secret room, probably afraid that Lorenzo would rush out, so he moved the wardrobe again, and firmly blocked the door, then took out a shotgun from another room, watching all this with palpitations.
Hercule was not an experienced knight like those in the purge agency. He was so panicked that all he was doing now was just psychological comfort. He didn’t think these things could stop Lorenzo, who was out of control, but he still gave Lorenzo some assurance. confidence.
"You can't be so crazy..."
In the secret room, Lorenzo sobbed. He opened his eyes, but his pupils were lifeless and bloodshot. He had not yet escaped from that memory.
In the memory, he was lying in a cold place, with pure white light falling, but the tears in his eyes were blurred and turned into large spots of light.
Pain spread from every part of his body. He tried to struggle, but all he could do was raise his head slightly, and then he saw his body riddled with holes.
Although the picture was blurry, Lorenzo could tell that the white steel nails were nailing him to the spot. There were countless infusion tubes connecting him, the blood was being circulated externally, and the entire chest was cut open. The solid His bones also shattered, revealing his beating heart.
This seemed to be a funeral, but more like an execution. There were countless black shadows surrounding him. They stretched out their hands and cut back and forth on his body while whispering.
"Increase the anesthesia, he won't wake up yet."
"Start transfusing secret blood..."
"Prepare the silver bolt and install it starting from the chest."
The clanging iron sound continued, followed by bone-crushing pain, and in the end only dull numbness remained.
Lorenzo once thought that he did not remember the process of implanting the secret blood. In fact, he did. He woke up briefly during the operation, and those vague memories have been hidden in the deepest part of his memory, and they were hidden by him. Deliberately forget it.
But in this dim moment, another familiar voice sounded. The owner of the voice was so old, like a shriveled corpse.
"Inject it as well."
The old man walked out of the darkness, and he turned into a member of the black shadow under the pure white light.
"But... he might die. The implantation of the secret blood has already made him very difficult." Someone said.
But the old man didn't understand what he meant, just kept silent, his cloudy eyes reflected the distorted body, the whole body was completely cut open, like a cruel vivisection, and his internal organs could be seen clearly, And those pale bones under the light.
"This is the key, the key to sublimation."
The old man said this as if he was chanting an ancient mantra. He completely ignored the dissuasion of the people around him and inserted an injection into the infusion tube, letting it pour into his body together with the scarlet liquid.
"No, no, no! He will die! We... no, you have no materials to prepare for the next ceremony!" the man said, "We have lost control of the church... This is the last thing we can use The blood of the Holy Grail!"
"But if he can't bear this, we won't have time to wait for the next ceremony, right?"
The old man asked back, he had lived for too long, and the God of Death had been wandering around him for so long, ready to swing the death sickle at any time to take away this lingering soul.
"Hold on kid, you will be my continuation."
The rough palm pressed against the boy's face. It was obviously such a cruel act, but there was no pain at all on the boy's face. He seemed to be sleeping soundly, with an innocent expression on his face.
"Continue... we extracted powerful blood from the demon's body, but in order to make the human body bear this, we continued to degrade the powerful blood... In the final analysis, the secret blood is just the sacred defective product."
"He...will die."
The man looked at all this with some sadness. The people nearby were ready, and some even pulled out their nail swords. Maybe the boy would never wake up again, and a crazy demon would replace him.
But the old man didn't care about this. He lowered his head, and Lorenzo could barely see his face clearly in his blurry vision.
He sang hymns softly, and the old songs were melodious, soothing those tortured souls like a lullaby.
"It's you?"
Lorenzo recalled the old man's name.
As the secret blood flows through the body, the dying body miraculously resists the crazy erosion. No sutures are needed. The terrifying vitality is given to the body. The flesh and blood squirm and heal together, and the silver-white His bones were thus wrapped in flesh and blood.
"Yes...that's it, kid."
Many years ago, in a dark corner, Lorenzo Medici gently stroked the child's cheek and hummed an ancient and solemn tune.
(End of this chapter)