'There's no sign of spirits flashing,' Klein did a brief inspection.
Without stopping, he proceeded forward until he came to the end of the hall where a bifold black stone door was. Stretching out his gloved right hand, he half-clamped his cane and slowly pushed against the door.
A jarring sound of friction began to reverberate through the air as the stone door slowly cracked open. Spirit light suddenly appeared in Klein's eyes, reflecting an intertwined aura of different colours.
His heart tightened as he pushed the door open, before taking a few steps back. The crack in the stone door widened rapidly, and a slimy black creature fell from above.
It was a snake with a triangular head and red floral patterns on its head! It straightened its upper body, shot out its tongue, and looked at Klein with cold brown eyes.
One snake after another fell from above the door as they piled up at the entrance. Klein saw a large hall beyond them. In the middle of the hall, countless snakes of various colours slithered together, forming an exaggerated nest of snakes about ten meters wide. The slimy, disgusting feeling assaulted his senses.
Klein felt his scalp turn numb as he couldn't help but take two steps back. He even wanted to look away without daring to look straight ahead. Although he was a man, he was still afraid of snakes.
Snakes were the animal that he was most afraid of. This stemmed from a psychological trauma in the past. When he was a child—despite being way past his bedtime—he liked to secretly open the door to his room and watch movies with his parents through a crack.
Unfortunately, his parents once watched a snake disaster movie. One scene involved the demolition of a building. The result was the unearthing of a large nest of snakes, and the dense squirming remained deeply imprinted in his mind.
Can the Slumber Charm affect so many snakes? Klein swallowed hard and whispered to the air, making sure the servant could not hear him, "Do you have any solutions?"
Miss Bodyguard in her black Gothic dress quickly appeared by his side, her mouth tightly closed. She didn't say a thing. Klein looked at her and she looked back at Klein, but no one spoke.
However, Klein quickly remembered the servant and hurriedly stood between them, and whispered behind him, "Why are you showing yourself? The servant does not know about Beyonders. He is a normal person!"
Miss Bodyguard frowned and floated a bit higher to look above Klein's head and see behind him, only to see nothing. She then turned to Klein and her frown deepened. For the first time she pointed behind Klein and spoke, her ethereal voice echoing as though it was far away yet incredibly close at the same time.
"There is nobody there."
Klein's body froze as sweat began forming on his back. He gradually turned around and noticed there was indeed nobody there.
'Oh my god! Who was that then? Am I hallucinating? I should ask Mr. Millet once we leave this place. But one thing is for sure… this place is not safe for normal people.'
Miss Bodyguard didn't bother with the mental deficiencies of her client and just turned to the snake. She floated and suddenly, a cold wind blew in the passageway.
*Whoosh*
The wind howled as it blew into the hall. The temperatures dropped rapidly as it approached the temperatures of the outside world.
*Whoosh*
The densely-packed snakes in the middle of the hall suddenly slithered in all directions, searching for a warmer, more suitable spot to survive. Two to three minutes later, a thin layer of frost formed on the surface of the hall and the passageway, and countless snakes had disappeared without much of a trace.
*Whoosh*
This continued as Klein said, chattering, "T-that's quite enough."
The surging cold wind slowed down, but the cold didn't subside. Miss Bodyguard's figure disappeared once again.
Klein lifted his cane-wielding right hand, covered his mouth and nose, and sneezed. Then, he raised the lantern and cautiously walked through the stone door into the wide hall. The style here was identical to the passageway outside.
There were eight circular columns of the same colour erected there. Metal poles hung from the high dome, and at the bottom were candlesticks carved into different creatures.
'An upside-down candlestick,' As a university student of the History department, a person who could barely be called an elite in this field, Klein made a preliminary judgment based on this unique arrangement. 'A structure of the Fourth Epoch?'