"Come, let me test you two. How do you think the statues over there detect whether a visitor has access permission?"
Rhys originally intended to destroy the sensor mechanism of the two jackal-headed statues outright, but after a brief moment of thought, he decided to turn it into a test for Daphne and Astoria.
After hearing Rhys's question, the two immediately focused their magic on their eyes and began observing the flow of mana in the statues.
"The eyes!"
"The floor!"
They shouted at the same time, but pointed to different parts.
"There's such an obvious flow of magic around the eyes—how can you not see it?" Daphne questioned.
"But there's magic on the floor too! Look—" Astoria pointed to the floor between the two jackal-headed statues, and sure enough, there was a faint magical current flowing across it.
"If you're saying that, then the doors have magic flowing through them too. But this is the floor and the doors—what do they have to do with the statues?"
The two began to argue.
"Is it possible," Rhys interjected, "that the floor, the doors, and the jackal-headed statues' eyes are all part of the same detection mechanism?"
Hmm?
Daphne and Astoria immediately took another careful look, and just as Rhys had said, the magic flowing between the jackal-headed statues' eyes, the floor, and the stone doors was indeed interconnected.
In other words, all three components played a role in access detection: the statues scanned the area from the floor to the ceiling, the floor detected those who stepped on it, and the doors sensed whether the person trying to push them had the proper authorization.
Triple protection—if any one of the components malfunctioned, it would trigger the statues to awaken.
"Then what should we do—?"
"If we destroy all three magic formations at the same time, we can effectively blind the statues," Rhys offered the solution. Then he posed a second question: "The designer could easily have set it up so that if any one of these signals was interrupted, the statues would awaken and attack—so why didn't they?"
Rhys's question made both Daphne and Astoria fall into thought.
"Because this used to be a palace, with people coming and going every day. If one of the magic formations happened to fail, the awakened statues would have caused a huge commotion, right?" Astoria concluded after a moment of contemplation.
"Beautiful deduction!" Rhys gave her a thumbs-up. "Now we can destroy the formations."
The three of them drew their wands. Three spells fired out simultaneously, blasting apart the jackal-headed statues' eyes, the stone tiles on the floor, and the panels of the doors.
After destroying the three sensing mechanisms, Rhys led Daphne and Astoria to the stone doors.
The two jackal-headed stone statues stood silently on either side of the doorway, showing no signs of movement.
Rhys had a feeling—Helga Hufflepuff was very close. Perhaps opening this door would reveal the answer.
He placed his hand on the door and gave it a gentle push. The door slid inward on its own.
The space behind the door was vast, with dozens of columns supporting the ceiling.
Each pillar was carved with reliefs—perhaps depicting the great achievements of the palace's master, or maybe telling ancient Egyptian mythologies.
But strangely, aside from these pillars, the hall was completely empty, covered only with a thick layer of sand and dust.
"A dead end," Daphne said, standing behind Rhys. She looked around at the structure of the hall and realized this was the end of the passage they had entered through.
When the palace was still in use, this place might have been filled with countless treasures or papyrus scrolls, but now there was nothing left—only sand covering the floor.
It was likely that someone had already gotten here thousands of years ago.
Rhys felt a hint of unwillingness. He crouched down, scooped up a handful of sand, and let it slip slowly through his fingers.
After finally finding a clue, it unexpectedly ended here—a thousand years ago, Helga had come to this place, fought a great battle with the palace guards, then gracefully left. The lingering magical fluctuations she left behind had even managed to mislead her old friend a millennium later.
"Sigh..." Rhys let out a long breath.
But something still felt off to him.
He couldn't quite put his finger on what exactly was wrong.
Frowning in thought, Rhys mulled it over for a while, and a question suddenly flashed through his mind: if the aftermath of the battle could still be observed even a thousand years later, then why was this grand hall still so intact?
Why hadn't even the carvings on the pillars been destroyed?
The moment he realized this, he sprang to his feet, startling Daphne and Astoria. But before either of them could ask what was wrong, a shadow appeared in the corner of the hall—the blind spot of their vision.
The figure raised its hand, and a blinding light shot from it, aimed straight at Rhys.
However, because of where everyone was standing, Daphne ended up in the direct path of the spell instead.
It happened so suddenly that neither Daphne nor Astoria could react in time—nor could Rhys. From the moment the figure appeared to Daphne being targeted, not even half a second had passed. Rhys only managed to instinctively cast a defensive spell, but such a hastily cast shield had little power.
The intense light shattered Rhys's defensive spell instantly and rushed toward Daphne. The magic was powerful enough to tear her apart in an instant, so much so that she couldn't even open her eyes. But at that critical moment, the necklace hanging around Daphne's neck shattered, and a thick barrier of light appeared in front of her, swallowing the incoming light completely.
The next moment, an identical beam of light reflected back from in front of Daphne, blasting a one-foot-wide hole straight into the hall's stone wall.
From the ambush on Daphne to the spell rebounding, the entire sequence took less than a second.
Daphne didn't even understand why her necklace had suddenly shattered—if not for that necklace, she wouldn't even have known how she died.
"Watch out!" Rhys shouted, quickly turning around. With a wave of his hand, he pulled both Daphne and Astoria behind him.
At the same time, he unleashed his magic without hesitation, spreading it rapidly in all directions as he began constructing his domain at top speed.
Astoria was the first to react and hurriedly cast a defensive spell. Daphne, as if waking from a dream, instinctively reached for the spell embedded in her necklace—only to find nothing there.
That's when she realized her necklace had just shattered into pieces because of an attack.
"You two, get out—right now, immediately!" Rhys said sternly, his tone leaving no room for argument.
Daphne opened her mouth to say something, but Astoria tugged on her sleeve, cutting her off.
The three of them slowly moved toward the entrance. Rhys's nerves were stretched to the limit, ready at any moment for another attack. The shadow had vanished the moment the spell rebounded, but Rhys didn't believe for a second that it had been destroyed.
He knew that thing was still hiding somewhere in the palace, waiting for the next chance to strike.
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