Exorcist's Self-Cultivation

Chapter 349: 346, Preparation work

“Am I opening it the wrong way?”@@novelbin@@

In the psychological counseling clinic, Du Wei sat on the sofa, carefully observing the two golden vases on the coffee table, inlaid with sapphires all over.

They looked a bit like flower vases.

The reason they seemed off was that Du Wei had checked for quite a while and couldn’t find any letters on the vases, nor any medium for the curse.

His future father-in-law, Lawrence, had sent word that the antiques were exactly as they had been when auctioned, with no discrepancies whatsoever.

Therefore, the problem was quite awkward.

Du Wei couldn’t find any useful information.

Yet, he could feel that these two vases had some kind of strange quality, similar to a mask and the oil painting hanging over the head of his bed—another door.

At first, Du Wei thought the vases themselves were mediums of the curse, but considering that merely touching them would wrap one in a curse, and that the mediums of a curse carry the trait of having letters, he still ruled out this possibility.

“Maybe I should try a different method,”

Du Wei muttered to himself as he walked into the kitchen.

In no time, he returned to the living room with a chisel and a hammer.

He planned to dismantle all the sapphires from the two golden vases, thinking that secrets might be discovered on the stones.

After all, based on previous experiences, the sapphires were very likely to be the cursed objects imprisoned.

Once pried out, their true nature would be exposed.

And as the first one to make contact with the cursed objects, Du Wei would accordingly be subjected to a deeper effect of the curse.

But having come this far, whether the curse deepened was not of much significance to him.

No matter how dangerous the situation, at most, it led to death.

Once the nun had devoured the nightmare and came into reality as a Demon Spirit, Du Wei was pretty much on a one-way street to death.

It was worth the gamble.

These two golden vases were very precious antiques, and the craftsmen who made them couldn’t possibly dream that someone would intend to destroy their painstaking work.

Soon, the clinking and clanking sounds started.

Du Wei’s technique was crude, even though he was being careful, but the sapphires still got damaged when pried off.

Of course… he didn’t mind.

To Du Wei’s surprise, when he had removed all the sapphires from the first vase, he didn’t find any issues with them.

That strange sensation was on the body of the vase.

“So sapphires were just for decoration?”

Du Wei frowned and pried the sapphires off the other golden vase, revealing a pocked and uneven surface on both.

The gold was not as precious as the sapphires.

That reminded him of a saying—”Buying the casket and returning the pearl.”

“But I still haven’t obtained the information I want.”

Du Wei said this as he took the two vases in his hands, studying them while his headache worsened.

Even by now, the vases remained the same as before, not revealing the slightest bit of anomaly.

Very much like that oil painting.

“Could it be that the imprisoning medium has already disappeared?”

Even Du Wei felt helpless; he could indeed formulate a thorough plan with sufficient information, but he was at a loss with inadequate information.

“I might as well look at the Stele photos Uncle Lawrence sent me and those research materials.”

Du Wei thought for a moment, then suppressed the urge to continue fussing over the two bottles and instead took out his laptop to log into his own email account.

There, in his inbox, was an email from Lawrence.

He casually opened a compressed file.

Nearly a hundred high-definition images immediately came into view.

The images were precisely of the Stele that Lawrence had mentioned before.

It was roughly three meters high and one meter wide, made of hard material, and engraved with many strange and unusual symbols.

It gave off an exceedingly mysterious vibe.

“It somewhat resembles the symbols of some religious traditions.”

Du Wei couldn’t help but think of the Veda Sect, a cult with a very long history. He had seen many ritual symbols within the sect, yet their style was not the same as the symbols on the Stele.

The Stele felt even more ancient.

He studied the images for about half an hour, looking over all the photos of the Stele, but he couldn’t understand them at all.

The content was just too obscure and complex.

Sometimes a circular symbol seemed to represent the sun, but when it appeared elsewhere, its meaning seemed different.

And among the documents Lawrence had sent him, there was information that scholars had deciphered, which, when compared with the images, seemed to suggest the opposite meaning.

Take, for example, the content about the true names of demons.

Lawrence had told Du Wei that if he knew a demon’s true name, and loudly recited it, he could drive the demon out of the human world.

But when Du Wei matched the text with the deciphered information, the conclusion he reached was that demons did not exist.

“I just can’t make sense of it.”

After going through all the document files, Du Wei felt only dizziness and an indescribable irritation.

An entire afternoon was wasted like this.

Yet he hadn’t obtained any useful information.

The effort and the reward were completely disproportionate.

But just at that moment, Du Wei inadvertently set his eyes upon the two golden bottles.

“Wait… I seem to recall a passage regarding gold in the files.”

His eyes lit up, and he immediately placed his hands on the touchpad, searching through the earlier files.

In just a short while, he opened a document.

Scrolling down to the last part of the document, there was a concise description — [Long ago, people believed that gold was the source of all desires and that demons lurked within those desires.]

Upon reading this, Du Wei’s gaze grew strange as he murmured, “What can be confirmed now is that the bottles themselves are the problem, and what I want to ascertain is their true name, whether it is as I imagined.”

He had previously concluded that the source of the curse, The Nun’s true name, might be ‘valak,’ but the last letter was actually blurred, and his conclusion was based on deduction.

In the dream, the nun had volunteered the entire spelling of ‘valak.’

Du Wei couldn’t believe the nun, so he had always felt that the notion of the true name was not very reliable, and thus he did not immediately employ that method.

Now, the preparations were almost complete.

The only thing missing was to verify whether the last letter was ‘K.’

Thinking this, Du Wei took out his phone and ordered a Melting Furnace online.

He planned to melt down the two golden bottles completely. If he was lucky, he might discover something hidden in the gold; if he wasn’t, then that would be a different matter.

For the former, he would consider using the true name to drive out the curse; for the latter, he would opt for a backup plan, using a dream within a dream to trap the nun in his own dreams.

“There aren’t too many options left.”

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