Santai whistled from behind them.
“Looks like even a top student like you is good for something. What about the one in the middle?”
Following the firelight, everyone looked over.
Chen Guan’s gaze swept across the scene as well. The figure in the middle was a bald man dressed in no finery, only a plain robe draped over his body.
His hands were clasped together, his expression gentle, and his fingers formed a strange mudra.
“A monk.”
Long Ao blurted out.
“A Buddhist ascetic,” An Changqing said, narrowing his eyes as he studied the figure. “That particular mudra was lost from Buddhist scriptures long ago.”
Without waiting for a reminder, Long Ao moved the firelight to the far right.
“A Taoist priest?”
The man wore a broad Taoist robe, its hem fluttering freely. A horsetail whisk rested in the crook of his right arm.
“Standard Taoist priest attire.”
An Changqing nodded.
Santai stepped forward, her boots striking the ground with crisp echoes.
“Now that you’ve identified them, haven’t you noticed the problem?”
She stopped beneath the mural and looked up at the three mortals.
“This is absurd.” An Changqing began speaking faster. “A primitive priest, a Buddhist monk, and a Taoist priest.”
He turned to Santai. “Why are three people from completely different belief systems painted in the same scene?”
Buddhism and Taoism were hardly one and the same, let alone with the addition of an ancient priest who worshiped the forces of nature. The combination was simply ridiculous.
“It’s more than just the fact that they’re painted together.” Santai raised a fingertip and pointed at them from a distance, clearly enjoying the chance to show off. “Look at their postures.”
Following the direction of her finger, Chen Guan saw that although the three men’s clothes and appearances were worlds apart, their movements were astonishingly identical.
All three had raised both arms, palms spread toward the sky.
The angle at which they tilted their heads conveyed a fervor and devotion that seemed to spill beyond the mural itself—a posture of humility so profound that they appeared to have been reduced to dust, begging some mighty existence for mercy.
“What are they praying for?”
Looking at those three feverishly devoted faces, Long Ao felt deeply uncomfortable. An inexplicable sense of dread crawled over him.
“To a god, obviously,” Santai replied as though it were self-evident.
“What a stupid question. If they aren’t praying to a god, are they praying for rain?”
Long Ao shot back.
“Little boy, use your brain. Since they’re praying to a god, where is the god?”
Santai turned around, a dangerous edge entering her smile.
Her question left everyone speechless.
Holding up his torch, An Changqing tried to find the supposed deity at the very top of the domed ceiling. But all he found was a vast expanse of blank space.
Apart from patterns of rolling clouds, there wasn’t even the shadow of a bird.
The god was gone.
The fingers Chen Guan had slipped into his pocket curled tight, squeezing Baobao until the creature let out an unhappy little grunt.
He quickly loosened his grip, but his thoughts were already churning.
In every ruin mural they had encountered before, no matter who the central figures were, the blurred silhouette representing the Lord of Nothingness had always appeared in the most conspicuous position.
But not here.
Chen Guan stared at the blank stretch of clouds as a bold, spine-chilling conjecture surfaced in his mind.
These three figures, representing the foremost members of humanity’s different faiths, were very likely praying to the vanished Lord of Nothingness.
As the supreme deity of that era, only the Lord of Nothingness could have deserved worship from followers of all three traditions.
“Did they forget to paint it?”
Long Ao offered an absurd explanation.
Santai rolled her eyes. “With a project on this scale, even if a painter lost a single hair on the wall, they’d have been dragged away and burned alive. How could they have simply forgotten?”
She walked up to the mural and ran her fingers over the carvings. “This empty space in the middle was left blank on purpose.”
“So priests from different faiths abandoned their own chief gods and came here to worship a single existence?”
An Changqing murmured to himself, then gave a bitter laugh.
“If the religious associations outside saw this, they’d blow up the entire mountain.”
“This proves that the history told outside is nothing but mutilated garbage.”
Santai disdainfully stomped on the modern study of history. “In that era—even one we aren’t qualified to know about—the world wasn’t ruled by the clay and wooden idols worshiped in temples today.”
Long Ao stood with his arms folded before the enormous mural, his expression growing increasingly grave.
He couldn’t quite describe the feeling.
There was no killing intent, nor any premonition of danger.
It was more as if countless eyes were hiding behind the wall, silently watching them from the depths of its mottled colors, from behind those three fervent worshipers.
The longer he stared, the stronger the premonition became.
“Something feels wrong.” Long Ao’s voice tightened. He vigorously rubbed his arms, and gooseflesh instantly rose across his skin.
An Changqing nodded in agreement.
The atmosphere here was too strange. The weight of a thousand years mixed with the lingering traces of near-mad devotion, pressing down on them until it was hard to breathe.
He didn’t linger on the mural. Instead, he turned his gaze toward the other side of the circular chamber.
There, a smaller arched doorway led into even deeper darkness.
“There’s another passage over there.” An Changqing indicated it with his chin.
[Seriously, this mural gives me the creeps.]
[Those three people up front look completely insane. What the hell are they worshiping?]
[Sister Santai has already run off to explore a new area.]
Following the comments, Chen Guan looked over and found that Santai had somehow already reached the arched doorway.
With her back to them, she braced one hand against the doorframe and waved them over with the other.
“Stop dawdling. The good stuff is usually hidden at the very end.”
The smile returned to her lips, as if the solemnity from moments ago had never existed.
Chen Guan silently committed the mural’s details to memory, then followed Santai.
An Changqing and Long Ao exchanged a glance before following as well.
Given their current situation, they had no choice but to stick with this unfathomable madwoman.
Long Ao brought up the rear. As he passed the mural, he inexplicably glanced back one more time.
The firelight flickered.
At the instant the shifting light and shadows passed across the wall, his pupils suddenly contracted.
The gentle smile that should have rested on the bald monk’s lips twisted.
It became utterly sinister.
Had he imagined it?
A shudder ran through him. He didn’t dare look again and abruptly quickened his pace.
Beyond the arched doorway was a spiral staircase descending into the depths.
The staircase was narrow, barely wide enough for one person to pass. The walls on either side were covered in murals as well, as though they were supplementary scenes extending the grand composition in the main hall above.
Long Ao walked in front, holding up a ball of fire. An Changqing followed closely behind him, Santai walked in the middle, and Chen Guan trailed along at an unhurried pace.
The deeper they went, the stronger the sandalwood scent became.
“The murals here depict something different.” An Changqing’s voice echoed through the narrow passage, sounding somewhat muffled.
Everyone slowed their steps.
The murals at the beginning of the staircase continued the scenes from above. The three leaders representing different faiths still knelt in prayer.
But several meters farther down, the imagery changed.
A hazy beam of light descended from the clouds that had originally been left blank.
The radiance enveloped the three figures below. With wildly exaggerated brushstrokes, the painter portrayed the ecstatic joy on their faces as they bathed in the light, as if their very souls had been liberated.
Their prayers had been answered.
Farther down, the murals began to depict scenes that were both more fragmented and more expansive.
lanned to earn money steadily and take life at a slower pace. But he never expected... his father's remarriage, and the stepmother bringing along a dependent, would completely disrupt his life's plans...
s + Rent Collection Wealth】 At the start, he inherited a rundown house in the urban village from his grandfather. The house had no tenants, but the moment he was diagnosed with a terminal illness, a self-proclaimed empress from the Tianxuan Continent arrived as his first tenant. Ye Chuan soon discovered that with every new tenant moving in, not only did he receive massive daily payments, but he also obtained unique items related to their backgrounds. 【Acquired Bai Qianshuang’s related item: Tiger Strength Pill—dramatically enhances physical power!】 【Acquired Bai Qianshuang’s related item: Deer Blood Pill—significantly boosts vitality!】 …… From that day on, all sorts of bizarre tenants began appearing in the house: the empress from Tianxuan Continent, an apocalyptic sorceress from the Magic Realm, a mysterious scientific girl who fell through a spacetime rift… Every single day, he received strange, powerful items and endless money. Then one day, he suddenly realized—he had become invincible. Enough, enough! Stop giving me more!
e bizarre and supernatural had descended. The previous emperor was a thoroughgoing tyrant; no longer satisfied with human women, he had set his sights on a stunningly beautiful supernatural entity. He met his end in his bedchamber, drained of all his vital essence. As the legitimate eldest son and crown prince, Wang Hao was thus hastily enthroned, becoming the young emperor of the Great Zhou Dynasty. No sooner had he awakened the "Imperial Sign-In Intelligence System" than he was assassinated by a Son of Destiny—a classic villain's opening. The Great Zhou, ravaged by the former emperor's excesses, was in national decline. The great families within its borders harbored their own treacherous schemes, martial sects began to defy the imperial court's decrees, and border armies, their pay and provisions in arrears, grumbled incessantly against the central government. Fortunately, the central capital was still held secure by the half-million Imperial Guards and fifty thousand Imperial Forest Army who obeyed the court's orders, along with the royal family's hidden reserves of power, barely managing to suppress the realm. As the Great Zhou's finances worsened and supernatural activities grew ever more frequent, the court sat atop a volcano. Ambitious plotters everywhere dreamed of overthrowing the dynasty, and even some reclusive ancient powers emerged, attempting to sway the tides of the world. At the first grand court assembly, the civil and military officials nearly came to blows, fighting tooth and nail over the allocation of fifty million taels of silver from the summer tax revenues. The spectacle opened Wang Hao's eyes—the Great Zhou's bureaucracy was not only corrupt but also martially proficient, a cabinet of all-rounders. Some officials even had the audacity to suggest the emperor release funds from the imperial privy purse to address the emergency. Wang Hao suddenly felt weary. Let it all burn.
nd fell into a coma while saving his younger sister from an out-of-control car. He became a vegetable. No one knew that his consciousness had crossed into a world of cultivation. Over the course of sixty years, he began as the lowest kind of mine slave, struggling to survive amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood. By sheer chance, he eventually obtained the complete memories of a fallen Immortal King. Alchemy, medicine, formations, feng shui, physiognomy, artifact forging… Every great inheritance of the cultivation world was now his. But when he opened his eyes again, he discovered that ten full years had passed in the modern world. To pay for his treatment, his father had sold the family’s shop and house, leaving himself covered in lasting injuries and illness. His mother had cared for him day and night, and more than half of her hair had already turned white. His younger sister, who had been only fifteen back then, was now twenty-five. To help repay the family’s debts, she had been forced to lower her head and put on a smiling face in places of glittering lights and endless revelry. Only then did Chen Xuan understand that what he had lost was not merely ten years. He had lost the life his entire family was meant to have. The good news was that he had brought back the memories of an Immortal King’s entire lifetime. The bad news was that his soul had returned alone—his cultivation had not come with him. Spiritual energy was scarce, resources were depleted, and the modern world still had firearms, surveillance, capital, and laws. If he wanted to protect his family, break free from everyone’s control, and become truly invincible beneath the heavens, he would have to start all over again.
