Chapter 317: The Second Layer of the Golden Ancient Tree

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 Jumping continuously up the glass pipeline, the group quickly reached the very base of the Golden Ancient Tree's roots. On the inner side of the roots, there was a door cast in heavy silver.

 If it were a normal elevator, the door would open automatically upon arrival.

 But now, they had to force it open.

 Tang San inserted a Blue Silver Emperor leaf into the narrow gap and pulled with all his strength. Slowly, the heavy silver elevator doors slid open, allowing Gu Yuena, Dugu Yan, and Yu Tianheng to slip inside one by one.

 Bang!

 After Tang San passed through and released his hold, the doors rapidly closed behind him, as if springs were installed on both sides of the door and the walls of the Golden Ancient Tree.

 "This is the inside of the Golden Ancient Tree? I can feel an extremely dense and pure energy here, and I don't even need to refine it," Yu Tianheng said. He could sense his martial soul rejoicing, continuously absorbing the pure energy. "Training here will yield twice the results with half the effort. I even feel I could break through to Titled Douluo before I'm thirty!"

 Dugu Yan felt the same way, her whole body seemingly immersed in an ocean of life energy, bringing unparalleled enjoyment to both body and mind.

 Gu Yuena was the most excited of all. The life energy here could further enhance her incarnation, and once she returned to her true form, her understanding of life would advance significantly.

 However, she concealed her excitement well, feigning a puzzled expression. If not for Tang San noticing her unusually bright purple eyes, he might have believed she was indifferent.

 "Let's move up."

 They stood on a narrow spiral staircase. With each step, a door appeared on the inner wall of the Golden Ancient Tree.

 Tang San knew these were doors to the training spaces at the roots of the tree, a total of 108, each embedded with space soul guide runes, forming a structure similar to an array.

 From an overhead perspective, each training room seemed to occupy only 100 cubic meters, but thanks to the soul guide's spatial design, the interior could accommodate nearly a thousand people training together, each with about ten meters of personal space.

 The staircase they were climbing was the main root of the Golden Ancient Tree. Other roots also had corresponding training spaces or storage rooms, though those were smaller.

 After thirty minutes, they finally saw an exit ahead. The staircase within the main root became more spacious, with more doors appearing along the sides.

 The door at the entrance ahead was a single push door, made directly from the Golden Ancient Tree.

 With a push, the wooden door opened silently, and they reached the first layer.

 Stepping out, Tang San looked at the familiar hall, took a deep breath, and murmured to himself, "This is my second time here. I feel a bit nostalgic."

 Without waiting for Yu Tianheng, Dugu Yan, and the others to satisfy their curiosity, he led them to a storage room on the left. "There are soul guides in here. Help me pack them up. I plan to take these back for research. Of course, if you find anything you like, feel free to keep it."

 Yu Tianheng, looking at the shelves full of soul guides, exclaimed, "So many? Our storage soul guides can't hold all of these, can they?"

 "There are storage soul guides here too. Use them. If there's still not enough space, just take what you can," Tang San replied, not minding how many or what types of soul guides they took back. Most of them would end up being dismantled and studied by him, Guang Ling, and Lou Gao anyway.

 As long as they could decipher the soul guide runes, it wouldn't matter how many soul guides they had. The resources to mass-produce them were abundant on Douluo Continent; the only limitation had been the crude methods of utilizing those resources.

Afterward, Tang San prepared to check out the second floor.

Gu Yuena followed him.

At the entrance to the second floor, there was a metal doorway, resembling a scanning device. However, since Tang San was an "illegal intruder" and didn't have the wristband "permit" issued by the external mech guards, the metal doorway could detect him and raise an alarm but couldn't expel him. The mech guards outside seemed programmed not to enter the Golden Ancient Tree. Otherwise, when soul masters entered to retrieve items, a humanoid robot would follow them instead of issuing a wristband as both identification and a temporary threat device.

Why was it set up this way?

Tang San speculated it was because the mechs had enough destructive power to damage the Golden Ancient Tree, while most human soul masters, even if they self-destructed, would hardly harm the tree.

Even if someone could avoid the wristband's life-threatening capabilities by cutting off their hand, the worst outcome would be taking more of the Golden Ancient Tree's treasures.

Once they left the tree, they would inevitably be detected by the mech guards and then—

Instant death!

Passing through the metal doorway, its breath-like light patterns began to flicker, alerting the mech guards outside. However, they couldn't enter the tree, causing no trouble for Tang San and his companions.

After climbing another spiral, Tang San reached the second-floor entrance. Sensing his presence, the intricately carved door of the Golden Ancient Tree automatically opened.

This wasn't due to some smart sensing technology. Others needed a pass and key to enter the second floor, but the door carved from the tree's trunk opened for Tang San as if he were at home. The metallic soul guide devices left by the now-extinct Golden Civilization felt like forced intrusions.

The second floor was a library. Shelves of books were arranged in neat rows, with the outermost bookshelves carved and polished directly from the tree trunk, and more than twenty sliding ladders.

At the center was a flawless, twenty-meter-diameter tree core of the Golden Ancient Tree, surrounded by wooden railings and four doors: evidently, the Golden Ancient Tree's version of an elevator!

"What a magnificent library!" Gu Yuena exclaimed, having seen libraries in Spirit City and the Pope's Hall, but none as grand as this.

"It is indeed impressive." However, Tang San was more interested in the environment, filled with life energy that kept one calm, greatly enhancing learning capabilities.

Casually taking a book from the shelf, he found it was a comic titled "Mech Warrior," about a mech builder born in poverty who assembled a god-level mech from second-hand parts and won a mech tournament.

As Tang San wondered why such a book was here, he turned to the last page. The back cover read: "Balance work and rest to achieve greater heights. Mental and spiritual fulfillment is far more important than physical strength."

"The Golden Civilization valued not just material and energy but also had substantial research on human psychology," Tang San said, placing the comic back and taking another book from the categorized directory shelf nearby...