The Lustful Villain: Every Milfs and Gilfs are Mine!-Chapter 188. It Either Opens or It Doesn’t. (It Opened.)

Chapter 188: 188. It Either Opens or It Doesn’t. (It Opened.)

They could see that the chest was big, about a meter and a half long and almost a meter tall. It was made of the same dark volcanic stone as the walls of the chamber, but the surface had been smoothed out in a way that wasn’t natural.

The Elder Script was written in the finest lines Rex had seen anywhere in the dungeon.

They could see that a golem was positioned in front of the chest. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

It wasn’t like the guardian constructs. The constructs were made of compressed earth and mineral substrate, and their movement stemmed from their heavy and grinding nature.

Rex could immediately tell that this was created for a different purpose.

It was human in proportion—not merely approximately human or vaguely humanoid, but crafted with precision, as if a careful artisan had modeled it after a specific individual.

The hands were detailed down to the individual finger joints. The face was unmistakably a face; although the features were stoned and the eyes glowed with the same amber light as the guardian constructs, they were arranged and shaped to mirror the specific characteristics of a particular person’s visage.

It was both a monument and a guardian.

It was seven feet tall and didn’t move when they walked in, but when Rex stepped into the room, the amber glow in its eyes got brighter.

"Well," Talyra said from the entrance to the room, "that is a lot bigger than the ones upstairs."

"Yeah..." Aisella said, "It’s a whole different class."

She was already reading the finest inscription on the chest’s surface, moving closer with the care of someone who knew they had to be careful when walking on the floor between them and the chest.

"This is the inscription that keeps things safe..."

"The chest was sealed not only physically but also energetically."

"The golem isn’t here to stop people from getting in," she said.

The certainty in her voice came from having read what was written, not from a structural inference. "It’s here to make sure that what comes in is correct."

Talyra asked, "What does that mean?"

Aisella stood up and looked at the golem.

"It means we can open the chest," she said. "But the opening is a formal event, and the golem was built to respond to the formality of it."

She looked at Rex. "It’s going to judge whoever opens it."

The golem’s eyes were on Rex.

They had been waiting since he crossed the threshold.

Rex looked at it in return and thought about what the seal had opened for and what the eight hundred years of waiting meant in terms of what this evaluation was designed to find.

The golem moved first.

It didn’t move in the planned, organized way that the guardian constructs did. Instead, it moved in a way that showed that it was built with purpose behind every move, and the first move it made wasn’t an attack.

It was a test.

The golem moved to one side, and when Rex followed its movement and changed his footing, it then moved to the other side to observe the change. Rex knew within the first three seconds that this golem was not running a guardian program.

It was actively figuring out what it was dealing with.

Then it struck.

The strike came from the right side, with the arm fully extended and the mass concentrated in the forearm. This was the best way to use a construct’s structural properties in a horizontal striking motion.

Rex caught it in a telekinetic field from two meters away and held it.

The golem’s strike had a lot more power behind it than any of the guardian constructs. Rex could tell the difference in the quality of the resistance and the amount of field pressure needed to keep the motion still.

He held it.

The golem didn’t pull the arm back right away and try something else. For six full seconds, it held the forward pressure, pushing the ceiling of the resistance instead of just probing it.

Rex matched it for all six seconds, looking like someone who was paying full attention and not worried about anything.

Then he pushed back.

The field he used in response was not violent and was not meant to hurt the golem. It was meant to show size and give the golem the best possible reading of what it was looking at.

The golem’s arm went back to its side.

It stood still for a moment, which was long enough for Talyra, who was behind Rex, to shift her weight.

Then it moved again, this time in three dimensions at once. It struck from different angles in quick succession, which was not the programmed response pattern of a guardian construct but something much closer to real combat intelligence.

High strike, redirected. A low sweep lifted Rex’s footing using telekinesis. The cross-body strike aimed at the golem’s center mass was intercepted and then redirected back to the golem’s own chest with reduced force.

This was done on purpose because the goal was not to hurt the golem. The golem was smart enough that it was worth a shot to try to communicate intentions through actions.

The golem came to a stop.

Neither Aisella nor Talyra said anything. Rex had learned to accurately read the specific quality of silence from two people who were watching something that had exceeded their expectations, and what he was observing from both of them at that moment was complete, unguarded attention.

The golem lowered both arms to its sides.

Then it stepped aside.

The golem stepped out of the direct line between Rex and the chest, positioning itself deliberately to avoid blocking Rex’s view, and then it stood still with the same stillness it had initially displayed.

Talyra let out a long breath. "Did it just... pass you?"

"Yes," Rex said.

He walked to the chest.

Talyra said to Aisella in a low voice, "He went up against that thing with his bare hands, and it just stood aside."

He heard Aisella say, in a voice that was just as quiet, "His hands weren’t doing anything."

"I know!" Talyra said. "That’s what I mean."

[TALYRA SKYDANCER: DESIRE LEVEL — 79/100 → 88/100]

’Yeah... she’s easy to impress.’

The chest’s inscription was much denser up close. Rex looked at it without attempting to read it, because reading it was Aisella’s domain, and she was already moving to stand beside him.

"Aisella... can you?" Rex asked.

"With pleasure." Aisella gets close to him.

She read in silence for thirty seconds, and then she looked at the chest’s closure mechanism, which was not a lock in the conventional sense but was a specific hand placement on the inscription’s final character.

"The closure releases an intent," she said. "The inscription says the chest knows who the god left it for."

She paused for a second.

"That means it will either open for you or it won’t, and we’ll know right away."

"Alright... let’s try it, shall we?"

Rex placed his hand on the final character. And the closure mechanism felt the same warmth as the seal above: deep, even, and not coming from anywhere else.

The mechanism moved under his hand with the same smoothness as the sealed door, and the chest opened. The lid opened up on a hinge that had been waiting for eight hundred years.

The inside was made of the same minerals as the walls of the chamber. It was shaped and finished like a space that was meant to hold something for a long time.

The padding material had not broken down because it was not organic; it was made of minerals that served the same purpose without needing biological stability.

A skeleton was in the middle.

It looked like a human skeleton, but it was made entirely of stone. Dark volcanic rock had been shaped over eight hundred years into the exact shape of what had once been living bone.

The process was not decay but change. The body of the Earthen Apostle changed over hundreds of years into the same material they had worked with all their lives.

The Apostle’s hands were crossed over his chest, and the gauntlets he wore were the most noticeable thing on his chest.

’A gauntlet...?’