Under Andaherr's guidance, they came under a big obelisk, which Wayne had mentioned earlier, the resting place of Ancattero ancestors.
The obelisk stood right in the middle of an empty square. It was three or four hundred meters tall, had a solemn and grand three-level structure. Each level was slimmer than the one below. Suspended at the top of the obelisk was a huge metal installation. There were no other buildings except the neatly arranged golden columns in the square. The columns, which were surrounded by light, had unknown uses.
It was the family resting place of the Tannaeans. Hao Ren had thought that the resting place was an eerie place, after all, it was a cemetery. As it turned out, the opposite was true. It felt warm, filled with light, and meticulously landscaped, which showed how important the Tannaeans treated their funeral.
Unlike the other otherworldlings, the Tannaeans had a relatively short life span. Though they still lived longer than humans, it was short compared to the demon hunters or vampires. It was the reason why they had a mausoleum of such scale and a very solemn funeral rite. The demon hunters, on the other hand, was not that particular when it came to how they buried their dead. Most of them died in battles in their later years, and their bodies were mostly mutilated, so their funeral was much more straightforward. Meanwhile, vampires were the race that was most obsessed with their graves and coffins, spending considerable effort than humans did in studying various kinds of sarcophagus and mausoleum only to use them for sleeping.
"They are hiding underground," Andaherr said. She led them to the obelisk. "You're not going to find the entrance without a guide," she said.
Hasse looked at Andaherr in surprise. "They're giving away the location of their secret sanctuary to a demon hunter?"
Andaherr looked gloomy. "The situation was unique a month ago. We couldn't care less about the differences between demon hunters and otherworldlings. We needed to survive so that we could tell others what had happened," she said.
"You meet the Ancattero family to discuss innate hostility?" Hasse asked. "What you guys did behind the back of the council of elders was incredible. I knew that Elder Amatura had bizarre thinking, but I didn't expect him would bring so many demon hunters with him."
"Nothing would ever be done had we told the council of elders," Andaherr replied calmly. She was one of the strong supporters of Amatura's theory, from which it was not difficult to know that the demon hunters, who appeared conservative and united in the eyes of the outside world, had many different schools of thought. Many of them were deviant. "Amatura was not impulsive. He had studied a lot of information and conducted thousands of tests on the blood of the demon hunters and otherworldlings. We didn't expect that the problem was so deep-rooted."
"So you lot paid a huge price for that," Hasse replied quietly.
Andaherr kept silent. She came before the base of the golden obelisk. As soon as she placed her hand on the base, alien text and symbols began to appear on the surface of the base, which looked like a touch panel that the Tannaeans made. Andaherr entered a series of instructions, which the Ancattero family had given to her, on the touch panel.
The base slowly clunked open in the middle, revealing a staircase that led to the underground.
"What is the communion all about?" Hao Ren could not hold back his sense of curiosity while going down the staircase. "Is it related to the research of Amatura?"
"The communion is all about purification, a ritual using the blood of demon hunters and the otherworldlings to get rid of the innate hostility. According to the findings of Elder Amatura, the innate hostility between the various races is non-physical and hidden in the blood," Andaherr replied. "He thought that this thing was an implant from a third party, an unstable time bomb buried in our blood, so he was determined to remove this unstable factor. His research had not made much progress in the past millennium, but recently it finally saw some progress."
"Is it because of the sudden weakening of the innate hostility in recent months?" Vivian asked, casually.
Andaherr nodded slightly. "Yes, exactly. The weakening of the innate hostility finally provided us with enough data for Elder Amatura to complete his research and come out with the bloodline purification ritual. He decided first to let some of his men and members of the Ancattero family undergo this ritual. Many of the demon hunters were experiencing severe weakening of innate hostility, and the Ancattero family was the milder one among the different races, this created the right condition that allowed us to come together without worrying getting hostile again. We wanted the sirens as they were even gentler than the Ancattero family and the demon hunters had no hostile feelings towards them. However, they were too elusive; we couldn't find them."
It sounded to Hao Ren that this was the downside of a lack of communication. Had the demon hunters contacted him earlier, the situation would be very different. The two sirens in his house had been redundant for a while with Ayesha running a restaurant and Nangong Wuyue doing nothing but immersing herself with colorful tattoos.
"Did the Shades of Chaos appear after you finished the ritual?" Hasse asked.
Andaherr paused for a moment and then nodded. "The ritual was going on smoothly initially, with the demon hunters and members of the Ancattero family getting free from the influence of the innate hostility. The situation, however, began to get out of hand. The innate hostility quickly disappeared from those who weren't near the ritual. Elder Amatura and Patriarch Vogus were no exception. At first, I thought that this was the powerful effect of the ritual, but soon Elder Amatura realized that it was not the effect of the blood-purification ritual, but of something else—we probably had triggered something. Elder Marduk tried to end the ritual abruptly, but it was too late; the Shades of Chaos had appeared under the feet of everyone and caught us by surprise."
At the end of the staircase was a lift. Andaherr led everyone onto the elevator before she pressed a button and the elevator descended. Then she continued to tell what happened a month ago. "The first ones who lost their minds were Abaddon and Chloanne, who had stabbed Elder Marduk. The situation began to spiral from there. The demon hunters and the Ancattero family began to kill each other. At last, Elder Amatura barely kept himself conscious and led Patriarch Vogus and me to run. We were the only ones who had not been possessed by the Shades of Chaos."
The lift came to a halt at the bottom. Hao Ren saw a thick metal gate in front of him, and walls on both sides of the metal gate were inlaid with large panes of glass windows. Behind the glass windows were some gray shadows, which appeared neatly arranged.
"During the evacuation, the Shades of Chaos was coming from all directions and escaping to the outside. People were killing each other in the streets. The situation was getting out of hand. Patriarch Vogus had done his best to gather those who were still unaffected and brought them to the sanctuary. In the sanctuary, we began to think about how we could prevent from being possessed by the Shades of Chaos."
Hao Ren came before the huge glass windows. He tried to look into the window and felt a chilly air permeating the glass to the outside. On the other side of the window, there were rows of transparent containers. White mist was floating inside between the containers. Judging from the ice flakes on the containers, Hao Ren deduced that the temperate inside must be extremely low.
"The Shades of Chaos would not attack those who have no rational mind," Andaherr said as she pointed at the gate. "The power of the Mind Shackle has its limit, so we used this room. Vogus said that it was a hibernation facility. I hope I'd operated it correctly at the time."
Hao Ren looked up at the alloy gate and saw a line of text on the lintel:
Hibernation Freezer No. 4.