Unity of the Three Teachings

The Lost Era.

When An Changqing heard those four words, his breath caught.

He had thought the woman before him was merely a high-level brawler who liked stirring up trouble.

He never imagined that she could casually identify such an obscure piece of history.

The Lost Era was called the Lost Era precisely because everything about that period had vanished into the river of time.

It was a blank stretch of history erased completely by the passage of time. Most people’s understanding of it was limited to its name.

“What?” Santai noticed the shock in An Changqing’s eyes. She tilted her head, and the curve of her lips widened. Her delight was plain to see.

“Don’t I look like someone who only knows how to fight?” She pointed at her temple and said with a grin, “There’s more valuable knowledge stored up in this head of mine than in all the piles of worthless old paper in your library.”

An Changqing fell silent.

He reassessed the mysterious powerhouse standing before him.

The woman’s reserves of knowledge were unfathomably deep.

Who exactly was she? And who stood behind her?

An Changqing would never believe that she was merely an ordinary unaffiliated cultivator.

Long Ao snorted from the side, the fireball in his hand wavering slightly.

He knew that Santai came from some ancient organization, so it was only natural that she knew a few secrets from bygone eras. There was nothing surprising about that.

At present, Long Ao did not have a favorable impression of that organization. However, since he had once received a favor from them, he chose not to expose Santai’s true background.

“Knowledge is priceless.” Santai adopted a lecturing tone.

“Especially in an underground ancient tomb where you could lose your life at any moment. Knowing a few extra runes might mean getting to keep your whole corpse.”

As a dropout who had slipped through the net of nine-year compulsory education, Santai naturally wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity to show off her cultural knowledge in front of a group of geniuses.

Santai had always prided herself on being a practical person. It was only because she had never had the chance to study, she told herself. If she had been given the opportunity to attend school, she would have gotten into Huaqing long ago.

The journey continued.

The corridor resembled the silent maw of a monster, swallowing the faint flicker of firelight dancing in Long Ao’s palm. The smooth flagstones beneath their feet echoed only with the monotonous scrape of their footsteps.

Santai continued walking with the relaxed air of someone strolling through a garden. Chen Guan, meanwhile, had fallen to the rear of the group.

About two hundred meters farther in, a faint fluctuation brushed against the web of Chen Guan’s mental perception.

At the same time, a small ball of fur in his pocket began squirming restlessly.

Half of Baobao’s head poked through the fold in the fabric. Its furry ears stood straight up, and its golden slit pupils stared intently into the endless darkness ahead.

The little creature pressed itself tightly against Chen Guan’s palm, trembling faintly. Clearly, Chen Guan was not the only one who had sensed it.

He curled his finger and scratched Baobao twice beneath the chin. The little fellow let out a satisfied purr, then reluctantly tucked its head back into his pocket.

“How much longer is this blasted corridor?” Long Ao had already switched the arm holding the fireball twice, and his voice was filled with barely suppressed impatience.

“You’re already losing your patience? The genius from Huaqing is nothing special after all.” Santai tossed the taunt over her shoulder without turning around, her voice full of gleeful amusement.

No one paid her any attention. Perhaps she found it boring, because Santai unusually fell silent as well.

The group pressed on for several more minutes. The darkness ahead was finally driven back by the firelight.

A colossal stone door, seven or eight meters high, blocked their path. Intricate, grotesque patterns were carved across its surface.

From a distance, it looked like a twisted human face. Up close, it became an incoherent tangle of lines.

Thick webs hung around the seams of the door, while several rusted metal hinges had been badly warped by the erosion of time.

Santai stopped before the stone door, folded her arms, and glanced at the three young students behind her.

“Well, looks like the road ends here.”

She nudged a loose stone at the base of the door with her toe, then leaned casually against the wall beside it. “Opening doors is such rough work. You can’t expect a delicate, fragile young woman like me to do it, can you?”

[No connection between you and a delicate young woman for the time being.]

[There’s currently no evidence linking Santai to the concept of a delicate young woman.]

[The neighbor’s daughter has just come of age—then she goes and lifts mountains with the strength of a god.]

Chen Guan read the banter in the comments and thought to himself, They’re not wrong.

What delicate young woman could pin all three of them down and beat them senseless?

Long Ao was clearly speechless at Santai’s antics, but his body was much more honest than his feelings. He stepped forward.

He transferred the fireball to his left hand and placed his right palm against the dust-covered stone door.

“A door like this? I could tear it apart with one hand.”

Long Ao talked tough, but the vital force in his palm did not hold back in the slightest. It surged down his arm and poured directly into the stone door.

Amid a harsh screech of metal scraping against metal, the stone door, sealed for who knew how many centuries, finally began to open inward.

The hinges snapped under the strain of his tremendous strength and crashed to the ground, kicking up a vast cloud of dust. The powder spread through the air like dense fog.

Thankfully, it wasn’t combustible dust. Otherwise, this would have been a full-blown dust explosion.

The group waved their arms, dispersing the dust before them. When their vision finally cleared, everyone froze in place at the sight before them.

There was no gloomy tomb chamber behind the door. Instead, they found an astonishingly vast circular hall.

The domed ceiling resembled an upside-down sea bowl, its highest point at least twenty meters above the floor.

Countless stones radiating a ghostly green glow were embedded in the dome and the surrounding ring-shaped walls, illuminating the entire space as brightly as day.

An Changqing unconsciously tightened his grip on his sword. Long Ao, too, stared blankly upward.

The truly breathtaking sight was not the glowing stones, but the enormous, vividly colored murals covering the walls. They were impossible to look away from, and one could still vaguely make out the grandeur and splendor they had once possessed.

Chen Guan’s gaze swept past the elaborate decorative lines and went straight to the central area of the murals.

By the old tradition, there should have been a mysterious Faceless Man here.

Unfortunately, Chen Guan searched the place back and forth three times, yet failed to find that familiar Faceless Man.

At the exact center of the enormous dome—in other words, the absolute focal point of the murals—three human figures had been depicted.

All three were facing the sky, their hands raised in prayer.

There was no familiar figure he had expected to see.

Chen Guan had assumed that in an ancient structure of this scale, he would once again encounter the featureless Faceless Man.

Going by the pattern he had observed before, whenever something was connected to ancient secrets, the figure representing Lord of Nothingness would always occupy the most central position.

But this time, it wasn’t there.

Instead, the three humans, each with a completely different appearance, had become the undisputed protagonists of the entire mural.

The first figure on the left wore an elaborate robe, its collar and cuffs covered in crooked celestial totems. He held a bone staff with a curved tip in both hands and wore an exaggerated, towering crown.

“Looks like some kind of ritual shaman.”

Long Ao offered his assessment—the young man from Jiangcheng loved making comments.

“He’s probably a priest from an ancient tribe,” An Changqing corrected him. “Only priests responsible for communicating with the gods would wear star-patterned robes and a Heaven-Communicating Crown during a grand ceremony.”