I can see experience bars after being transported to another world.

There is a separate room on one side of the rotunda.

It wasn't large, probably about ten paces square. The ceiling was very low, creating a stark contrast with the 30-meter dome of the rotunda, making it seem more like a secret room crammed into the walls.

The walls are lined with copper pipes that extend from the floor to the ceiling, converging at the corners in a dense network like blood vessels.

The inscriptions were dimly engraved on the surface of the pipes, not yet activated, with only the faintest copper glow flowing on the pipe walls.

A human-shaped coffin stood in the center of the room.

It is slightly taller than a normal person, with an iron-colored shell and a surface covered with rivets.

The overall shape resembles a standing person—the outlines of the head, shoulders, torso, and legs are very clear, and there is a palm-shaped groove on each side of the shoulder, with metal teeth faintly visible inside the groove.

Calvin walked to the front of the coffin and reached out to open the cover over the eyes.

The baffle is only the size of a palm and is fixed with copper hinges.

Through the narrow observation window exposed by the partition, a face could be seen.

A girl, her face so pale it was almost transparent, her lips bloodless. Her eyes were tightly closed, her facial expression almost blank.

Looking further down, countless silvery needles emerged from the inner wall of the coffin and pierced her body—shoulders, ribs, forearms. Each needle was as thin as a hair, but the spot where it pierced the skin glowed faintly, like stars scattered on pale skin.

The students on the external support frame at least had some breathing ability, but this girl's chest wasn't rising or falling.

If it weren't for the persistent glow emanating from the points where the needles touched, Calvin would have already sentenced her to death.

He stared at that face for two seconds.

His brows furrowed slightly, and a hint of something unreadable flashed in his eyes, but he quickly concealed it and closed the partition.

Turning to look at Selena Winter behind him, she was standing in the doorway, leaning against the wall, her arms crossed over her chest, already waiting.

"Are you ready?" Calvin asked.

Selena nodded. "Mm."

Calvin took out a scripture from inside his robe. The cover was made of hard, dark bronze leather. He opened it and found that all the pages were blank, without a single word.

"Hopefully, this group of students can persevere for a while."

Calvin said this while his gaze fell on the blank page of the scripture.

Selena walked over from the doorway and stood on the other side of the coffin. "The Night Watch is here this time; their sanity should hold for a while."

"Let's begin."

The scripture rose from Calvin's hands and hovered directly above the coffin. The pages turned automatically without wind, at an extremely fast speed, flipping through blank pages one by one, as if waiting to be filled in.

Calvin and Selena raised their hands simultaneously, placing their right palms into the grooves on either side of the coffin's shoulders.

The moment of contact, countless metal spikes popped out from the inner edge of the groove, piercing through the palm.

The needle tip that pierced through the back of the hand gleamed with the same silver light as the inside of the coffin.

The two remained expressionless.

The blood flowed down the inner wall of the groove and was absorbed by the inscription on the pipe.

The inscriptions on the ground lit up from the feet of the coffin. At first, there was only one circle, and then it spread outwards in circles like ripples. The light passed through the walls along the pipes and merged into the main array of the round hall.

Inscriptions emerged from the walls of the coffin chamber and spread across the floor of the rotunda like a tide.

The inscribed path beneath the Night Watchman's feet was lit, and the blessing circle surrounding the church entered its loading phase.

Above the dome, the River of Light began to flow backward.

A river of dreamlike colors cascaded down from the sky, flowing into the central branching passageway of the rotunda. The entire rotunda was filled with colorful light, and everyone's shadows were distorted and elongated on the ground.

At the very moment the Tower of Learning was activated, at a certain high point, far from the Tower of Learning, but where the skyline could be clearly seen.

A figure slightly raised his head, looking at the light flowing back from the Tower of Learning.

"Lu Yuan, I hope you can survive this mission and prove your worth."

Then his figure disappeared into the darkness, as if he had never been there.

At the top of the main tower of the Tower of Learning, the wind was strong, and the hem of Camille's robe fluttered in the wind.

He watched the river of light surge faster in the distance, his hands bracing against the stone railing.

"I hope it will succeed."

From the dark depths behind the main tower, seemingly from a very, very far place, came a reverberant sound.

"Yes."

Carme did not turn around.

After the students disappeared into the depths of the river, the entire space of consciousness fell silent.

A pale void, a waterfall-like river, Lu Yuan and ten Night Watchmen stood at the barrier, like eleven nails driven into the void.

Time becomes blurred in this environment.

Then light began to emerge from the depths of the river.

At first, there were very few, just a handful, like the faintest stars in the night sky. They emerged from the depths of the river, drawn by some force towards the inner circle.

Then there were more and more.

Countless points of light emerged from the depths, like a swarm of fireflies, moving between the river and the barrier.

This is the harvest of the fishing: fragmented knowledge, filtered and condensed by the students' brains, and sent back along the inscription channel.

Most of the fragments flew past Lu Yuan in a flash, but occasionally a fragment got too close to him and brushed past him through the gaps in the barrier. The residual information carried on the surface of the fragment would be passively captured by the seeker of knowledge.

The first remnant is an incomplete piece of Imperial language.

The grammatical structure is very old, like it was written hundreds of years ago.

"...Beneath the copper, the will of the sealer..." The latter half was blurred, and nothing could be seen clearly.

The second remnant was a formula, neither an alchemy formula nor an inscription structure. Lu Yuan looked at it for a while but couldn't understand it before the fragment flew away.

The third fragment is a scene.

The image shows a person writing on parchment with one hand. Halfway through, the ink suddenly turns into blood. The person writing does not stop. Then, a muffled chanting sound is heard in the image, as if it is a ritual. The image then shatters.

Lu Yuan remained silent for a few seconds.

The ocean of knowledge contains not only knowledge itself, but also the traces left by those who once explored it.

The treasures hidden here far exceed our imagination.

[Taboo Studies - Seeker of Knowledge: +0.3...43.3/100]

Lu Yuan suppressed his curiosity.

Passively receiving remnants and actively reaching out to "read" fragments are two different things. The latter exposes one's connection to the sea of ​​knowledge and consumes one's rationality.

Thus, Lu Yuan composed himself and continued to maintain the barrier.

But as time went by, the number of fragments continued to increase.

At first it was a swarm of fireflies, but now it's more like a rain of light, with fragments gushing out from the depths of the river, increasing in density and speed.

The pressure on the barrier was gradually increasing. Lu Yuan felt the bronze surface under his palm getting hot. His rationality was being continuously drained through the formation, and the consumption rate of the shared pool changed from "slow" to "stable".

[Sanity: -2...58/140]

The acceleration of debris was within expectations; the more students collected at depth, the denser the returning debris became, indicating that the fishing was proceeding normally.

But Lu Yuan still glanced at both sides.

"Watch out for debris; avoid direct contact with your body. Dodge it if possible."

The sound was not loud, but it reached the ears of the nearest watchmen on both sides.

The fragments did not travel evenly. Most flew towards the inner circle along the inscription channel, but some fragments, especially large and dense ones, deviated from the channel and flew around the consciousness space like stray bullets.

The square-faced night watchman's marker was conveniently located on the side of the passage where the debris was most concentrated.

A large, extremely dense fragment, several times larger and brighter than the others, deflected slightly as it passed through the barrier, grazing the shoulder of the square-faced Night Watchman.

It was just a graze, the contact time was less than half a second.

But half a second was enough; the fragments of information they carried were forcibly poured into his mental space, as if someone had crammed the contents of a book into his brain.

The square-faced night watchman froze.

Then he began to mutter to himself.

The voice was very soft, and the speech was very fast. It was not the language of the Empire, nor any language that Lu Yuan had ever heard before. It was a completely unfamiliar syllable, with alternating guttural and aspirated sounds, like some kind of ancient incantation.

The watchman next to him instinctively turned his head to look at him, startled by the syllables.

"He's been contaminated?"

"Don't listen! Don't pay attention!" another watchman hissed.

Lu Yuan had already assessed the situation.

The knowledge fragments are eroding the square-faced night watchman's consciousness. If it is not cut off, his consciousness will be dragged into the knowledge fragments, but not into the sea of ​​knowledge, but into the time and space where that knowledge once existed.

He will be completely lost in other people's memories.

Lu Yuan did not leave his marked point, but decisively activated his sanity ring.

Through the shared rationality loop, Lu Yuan found the node of the square-faced night watchman and temporarily isolated him. During this time, Lu Yuan used his rationality to bear the impact of two people alone.

At the same time, it stimulates the perception of those seeking knowledge.

Lu Yuan probed the mental boundaries of the square-faced night watchman, using the seeker's natural sensitivity to knowledge structures to find those forcibly written fragments of information and peel them away one by one.

It's like using tweezers to pick out shards of glass that are embedded in flesh, piece by piece.

During the process, Lu Yuan himself inevitably came into contact with the contents of those fragments—

Images that didn't belong to me flashed through my mind.

A person stands amidst endless colors, looking down at his hands, one, two... He is counting his fingers, quietly counting, stopping when he reaches the tenth.

Then he extended the eleventh one.

A finger that shouldn't exist, growing out of the palm.

He smiled.

The smile seemed to indicate that he had finally understood something.

The image is shattered.

[Sanity: -6...52/140]

The square-faced night watchman stopped muttering, his body trembled violently, and he gasped for breath as if he had been pulled out of the water. He was covered in cold sweat, and his uniform was already half-soaked.

A few seconds later he came to his senses and turned to look at Lu Yuan.

"Thank you." His voice was hoarse.

Lu Yuan nodded. "Be prepared to dodge knowledge fragments at any time; next time it might not be so quick."

The square-faced night watchman nodded vigorously.

The fragmentation flow did not stop.

After the Square-Faced Night Watchman incident, Lu Yuan became more vigilant, constantly monitoring the trajectory of the fragments, but the fragments kept increasing and he couldn't completely hide from them.

At the same time, the pulsation of the symbiotic connection is intensifying.

They were even somewhat excited.

The insect of knowledge has awakened.

It had previously curled up into a dot deep within its left eye, but now things were different. With the full activation of the Round Hall Inscription, the source energy of the Sea of ​​Knowledge branch filled the entire space, completely overshadowing the filth of the Derivative Worm.

It smelled the scent of home.