Apotheosis

It was extremely difficult for the Ear Mice to defeat the bloody hands alone. Zen could claim credit for the success, so it was reasonable that he took the hands away.

"Dorothy," Zen called out.

He did not need to explain further, for Dorothy understood what he wanted. She nodded and walked over to the bloody hands, using the space ring to absorb them.

The Ear Mice wisely stayed silent, deciding it would be best not to say anything more.

After Dorothy had taken care of the bloody hands, they turned their focus back to the three hearts at the top of the passageway.

"I wonder how the Hearts of Accomplice should be distributed," said one of the Ear Mice.

"Thad, you don't need the Hearts of Accomplice. If you use it, you'd have to sacrifice yourself," another Ear Mouse squeaked. "How about we keep the three hearts, and after the auction, we give half of the soul pills to you?"

Only the Ear Mice had the cheek to speak so shamelessly.

"Shame on you!" Dorothy said, shaking her head.

Zen was firm. "Dorothy and I will each get one, and the third one belongs to you."

It was a statement of fact, not a proposal. He did not need the approval of the Ear Mice to take as many of the hearts as he wanted.

His cooperation with the Ear Mice had mainly been about breaking down the wall. Beyond that, they were each on their own. What the Ear Mice would be able to obtain from the Grand Sky Temple depended on their own abilities.

Without Zen, the Ear Mice wouldn't have even made it through the 19th passageway, let alone reached these three Hearts of Accomplice.

The Separate Abyss race, for instance, was far stronger than the Ear Mouse race—but they had been trapped in the walls of the passageway, never to be reborn.

The Ear Mice squeaked reluctantly in agreement with Zen's words.

After all, they had no choice but to accept it.

Zen braced himself and leaped into the air, wrapping his arms around one of the hearts.

He gathered his strength and dragged the heart down, slowly but steadily disconnecting it from the blood vessels above it.

There was a beating, pulsing sound as the vessels of the heart strained with Zen's efforts.

Once Zen had succeeded in pulling the heart down, it still kept beating and bleeding. Zen and the others stood in the passageway and observed as the heart began to heal itself rapidly, until eventually the blood

he top of the passageway.

Everyone began speaking at once. "Watch out!"

"Be careful of the centipedes!" "The centipedes are poisonous!"

"Look! The skeletons have opened their mouths!"

Indeed, every single skeleton along the passageway had let their jaws fall open, and many centipedes swarmed out. They crawled along the walls and the ground towards the Souls of Light that had invaded the passageway.

The fate of the bitten disciple had left everyone terrified.

"Follow me," said Elvinia decisively.

She leaped forward, waving her hands and flinging out whips of golden light that lashed mercilessly at the centipedes. The swarming, crawling mass of centipedes turned to ashes. Chaim and the other disciples pressed close to her back, following her as she moved forward.

In the 7th passageway, a human girl carefully walked forward. She was under the protection of her companions.

Because there were only a few of them in the group, and their collective strength was relatively weak, they had chosen the seventh passageway which was said to be the easiest one.

In fact, the vast majority of the other races had also chosen this passageway. Since they had passed through first, they had already cleared out the obstacles along the way. So this group, coming through last, no longer faced any danger.

Every hundred feet or so, one of them would squat in a corner and draw a pattern on the wall using his or her soul force.

"How many patterns have we drawn by now?" one of them asked.

"437. We're only about halfway through," answered the man who drew the pattern.