Silent Crown

Chapter 257 The Strange Parliament

"Why did you come to the Royal Musician Division?" Ye Qingxuan regretted it as soon as he asked because the guy’s face was filled with confusion. The shock of "What, this is the Royal Musician Division!" was written all over. He did not know anything! Then what use did he have?

Furrowing his brows, Ye Qingxuan was about to speak, but the broken alarm by his foot suddenly trembled with a strange sound. It traveled far instantly, causing his expression to darken.

"N-not me!" Herbert yelped when he saw Ye Qingxuan’s face change. "I didn’t do it! It’s someone else’s alarm! Someone else!"

The cane on his throat pressed down, almost suffocating him. The hoarse voice said, "You have five seconds to explain."

"This alarm connects to another touch-activated trap. I don’t understand either." Tongue-tied, Herbert screamed but his eyes suddenly brightened. "I know, there must—must be other people who followed us in!"

"No sh*t, I did!" Ye Qingxuan furrowed his brows. But when he heard the faint crashes and shuddering above him, he understood what Herbert meant. Did someone have the same idea as him? Regardless, he did not have much time. Looking down at Herbert who was crying pathetically, he could not help but sigh.

Seeing Ye Qingxuan like that, Herbert froze. Understanding something, he yelped, "Don’t kill me! I can give you the secret implantation technique of the School of Choir to you…and money. I have sixty-thousand gold coins in my account. Sixty-thousand!" He looked at the youth and forced a fawning expression onto his face. "I’ve heard of you before. You’re the Vengeful Spirit, right? You don’t kill people."

"Yes, you’re right. I can let you go." The youth lowered his eyes and slowly moved the cane on his throat away. Herbert was ecstatic, but then he felt a hand on his forehead. "But you’ve done so many immoral things with those dark musicians. Are you really innocent?" The youth’s voice was filled with pity and overlooking coldness. "I can let you go, but will the people who you killed let you go?"

Herbert froze. His relieved eyes changed, the fawning smile and politeness disappeared, replaced by sinister eeriness. He looked up at the youth but his gaze was dragged into the youth’s eyes.

Those eyes…seemed to be filled with hellish pain. Flames licked inside them—that was the resentment of the dead burning with heart-stopping beauty. Then a black river rushed over and swallowed him.

Herbert fell onto his back under the plaintive melody and sank into an endless nightmare. Ye Qingxuan slowly retracted his hand and left. After two steps, he paused and looked back. Having a mental breakdown, Herbert spasmed continuously but his body turned gray bit by bit until he stopped moving in the end.

He had turned to stone.

Ye Qingxuan furrowed his brows at the strange transformation. He did not know his music score had this odd feature. If it was not him then there was only one answer.

The youth looked around in the darkness. Wind blew past, bringing with it a faint laugh. It seemed that there had been someone watching him ever since he entered Avalon’s Shadow, being happy or sad for him, cheering him on. Perhaps this was a hallucination; perhaps it was not. Anything could happen in this f*cked up place. He decided to stop scaring himself now.

-

When he crawled out of the narrow opening, he found himself in the backyard of the Royal Musician Division. It used to be a garden but it was clearly not anymore. There were only shriveled and dried rhizomes stuck haphazardly in the dirt. They looked like an odd art piece made of steel wire under the faint light.

Light—there was light here.

Ye Qingxuan looked up and saw a lantern hanging on the wall in the near distance. The light was weak and the lantern was covered in dust as if it had been burning for a millennia.

Under the dim light, the barren garden had an unsettling atmosphere. Using the marks in the dirt, Ye Qingxuan found signs of people leaving as well as some alarm traps. These dark musicians really were careful. They had left traps after arranging sentries.

Under the seemingly-average traps, the perception threads sensed a chain-reaction of explosive traps. The aether within those was enough to blow half of the garden into the sky.

Just as he was sneaking around the trap area, the ground suddenly shook. A fulmination sounded by the door in the distance. The shaking almost set off the traps; Ye Qingxuan’s face paled in fright! It would be really sad if he died for these stupid reasons.

He quickly ran to the safe zone and closed his eyes in deep thought. He pulled the perception threads into one spot and floated toward the source of the sound. After going past various buildings, the threads began to sense the scene.

The perception broke the moment it was created. The water vapor threads had evaporated due to the terrifying power at the scene.

Ye Qingxuan’s forehead throbbed as if a hammer had hit it. He opened his eyes; his body was covered in cold sweat. For a moment, he could not see anything. He could only feel the darkness that hovered like mist.

The darkness was burning. If he had not cut off the connection simultaneously, the burning would probably have rushed into his mind along the perception thread. Then things would be fun.

If he had died because of this, it would probably be number one in "The Hundred Thousand Ways to Die in Avalon’s Shadow." Of course, the prerequisite was that someone was bored enough to write a book like that.

It was clear that the Parliament’s brash move had attracted something terrifying and big. It was now ramming against the enchantment around the Royal Musician Division. The enchantment, long abandoned, would not be able to survive for long. Ye Qingxuan and the dark musicians of the Parliament did not have much time. So what did these guys want?

Fleeting moonlight appeared around Ye Qingxuan once again, causing his body to become thin and difficult to detect. He followed the marks quickly. He was getting excited at the thought of putting a leg in this dramatic event, stirring things up, and feeding those guys some sh*t!

-

Dim moonlight swept under the eerie building. The illusion Lola put on Ye Qingxuan’s body was clearly very high level, and contained music theory from the disturbance level. The distortion level was the peak of the resonance level. Going from ‘resonance’ between the musician and the world, to limited ‘disturbance’ of reality, to ‘distortion’ of the laws of physics—this level was power was the peak for a musician. If one went further, it would be the path to becoming a scepter and saint.

Especially since Lola was focusing on thought realization and could switch between reality and illusions by choice, she would enter the territory of ‘nothingness’ and ‘not nothingness’ if she continued to rise. Though this path was difficult, its power was incredible.

Moonlight covered his body and dragged him into another world where there were no obstacles. While it was exhausting, he continuously passed through various barriers and enchantments. Most of the enchantments set by the Royal Musician Division were nonexistent before the moonlight.

The more he traveled the more chills he felt. He became more and more cautious. He was now at the heart of the Royal Musician Division building and should be in the side hall. Though this ancient building no longer had any life to it, the lanterns were still lit.

After burning for who knew how many years, the lanterns still had a trace of kerosene. It was clearly out of the ordinary, but black zones were had always been out of the ordinary. This fact was strange but not unacceptable.

This entire time, Ye Qingxuan had not met anyone else, but he had seen many strange things, such as statues.

Whether he was in the backyard, the garden, the halls within the building, or even the servants’ resting room, he could see these realistic statues. They smiled and stood in different places, maintaining their action at that moment. It was as if they had been transformed into stone at that moment. There was a strange smile on their faces rather than terror. Their eyes could still move.

From the distance, they could see through Ye Qingxuan’s disguise. The stone eyes rolled over; nothing was in their empty eyes except for his face. They watched him come and watched him leave.

They had not done anything but Ye Qingxuan shuddered. What was with these weird things?! The entire way here, he saw signs of forceful cracking of the codes and traps. Broken statues lay in the center of the road. Fine red sand flowed from the cracks, floating in the air as if they were dancing in the dim light.

Ye Qingxuan covered his nose and bypassed them. He quickly caught up by using his understanding of architecture of familiarity of the Royal Musician Division and got ahead of the dark musicians—this was all thanks to Ye Lanzhou.

Ye Lanzhou had not stayed in the Royal Musician Division for long but he had taken his song everywhere. Ye Qingxuan still remembered how to go from the conference room to the bathroom. However, the more he remembered its original appearance, the more unsettled he felt.

The statues along the way were all dressed like servants or nobles. No one wore the robe of the Royal Musician Division. Where did all the musicians go?

During his rushed walking, his steps suddenly stopped. He looked up and saw that the clock on the wall had stopped moving. It was forever paused at that moment.

It was 8:10 at night. Eight ten… Ye Qingxuan quietly memorized this time. He compared the direction of the parliament’s dark musicians and finally locked onto the final destination—the banquet hall on the third floor.

"You’ve come this far just to have a picnic at dinner time?" he could not help but mutter as he looked toward the stairs. "Too much time on your hands?"

Boom! An explosion sounded from the direction of the front hall. Smoke rose; the smell of rusting metal sand traveled with the cold wind. The enchantment had finally shattered.