People dressed in all sorts of garments gathered together and began building a city. Their faces were alight with the same fanaticism as the three leaders.
The mural showed towering spires, enormous temples, and metallic constructs floating in the air.
A glorious civilization rose from the ground at an astonishing speed during that erased era.
Yet beneath the prosperity, shadows began to take root.
In one corner of the mural, traces of war started to emerge.
Armies wielding different weapons clashed with one another. Cities burned, and corpses piled up like mountains.
“They were fighting among themselves?” Long Ao stared at the scenes, puzzled.
“No. Look at their enemies.” An Changqing pointed to a particular section of the mural.
Fighting against the human soldiers was a group of monsters in all kinds of strange forms. Some resembled evil spirits, while others looked like ferocious beasts. Unlucky black qi coiled around their bodies.
“What are those?” Long Ao’s eyes widened.
If this wasn’t abstract art, then these were entirely new life-forms—creatures none of them had ever seen before.
Santai came to a stop. She didn’t look at the mural. Instead, she turned sideways until she was nearly walking shoulder to shoulder with Chen Guan, who was following behind her.
Lowering her voice, she leaned close enough for her breath to brush his ear. The volume was precisely controlled so that only the two of them could hear.
“Kid, have you been here before?”
Chen Guan’s eyelid twitched.
Without turning his head, he kept his gaze fixed on the mural. “No. This is my first time.”
Santai shot him a glance and didn’t press further.
But the slight curve of her lips and the look in her eyes clearly said that she didn’t believe a single word.
A gaze came from ahead. Chen Guan knew who it belonged to without even looking.
He immediately shifted half a step to the side, putting some distance between himself and Santai. Then he resumed pretending to study the details on the wall.
[It’s a battlefield! It’s a battlefield!]
[LMAO, An Changqing’s radar is going off. Brother Coffin, explain yourself!]
[Santai: I’m just teasing Little Xuanwu. An Changqing: You two are acting suspicious. Long Ao: What the hell is this painting?]
[LOL, none of you are actually looking at the mural. Only Long Ao has been left out of the fun.]
An Changqing withdrew his gaze, apparently deciding that he had merely been overthinking things.
The group continued downward.
At the end of the stairs, they found a second stone door.
This door was much smaller than the one above, but its frame was densely covered in even more intricate runes.
The runes seemed almost alive. They slowly shifted in the firelight, giving off a fluctuation that made their skin tingle faintly.
Santai leaned against the doorframe.
Her gaze swept over the flowing marks on the stone door, as if she were inspecting some trinket in a shop window.
She turned her head and jerked her chin toward the three people behind her.
“The restriction on this door is much more sophisticated than the one outside. You won’t be able to smash it open with brute force.”
Her eyes landed on Long Ao’s clenched fists.
“You, the guy who uses his fists—you’re screwed this time.”
An Changqing stepped forward two paces with his sword in hand and carefully examined the tangled patterns.
After studying them for quite a while, he sighed.
“I’ve never seen this rune structure before. The energy forms a closed loop internally, and I can’t find any point of entry. The mechanism isn’t damaged—it’s still functioning.”
“Impressive. Even the energy loop didn’t escape the top student’s notice.”
Santai gave a solemn little clap. “So, can you figure out how to undo it?”
An Changqing shook his head and honestly admitted that he couldn’t.
“I knew it. In the end, you still have to rely on Big Sis here.”
Santai dusted the grit from her hands and straightened.
She walked up to the door. Without even bothering to examine it, she simply extended an index finger and began tracing random shapes in the air.
No light spilled from her fingertip. She drew entirely in empty space.
The dormant light patterns on the stone door reacted to the stimulus and began flashing violently, as if they had gone mad.
From the shadows, Chen Guan drew in and concealed his aura.
Within his mental-force perception network, Santai’s fingertip was moving along an extremely tricky path.
She avoided every defensive hub and deliberately targeted the weakest energy nodes, severing them one by one. Her technique was practiced—she had probably done this many times before.
After a dozen seconds or so, Santai withdrew her hand with an air of complete indifference.
The light across the entire stone door went out at once, fading into a lifeless stone carving.
With a soft click, the heavy door sprang inward, opening a narrow gap.
“Done.” Santai turned around. “I told you—knowledge is power.”
An Changqing’s grip tightened around his sword hilt.
This woman’s strength was unfathomably deep. Her mastery of ancient runes was terrifyingly advanced as well.
With skills like these, she would be an exceptional talent anywhere. Yet An Changqing had never heard of anyone by her name.
Long Ao stepped forward and pushed open the heavy door.
Beyond it was a circular inner chamber, less than half the size of the previous hall.
The four walls were completely bare. Every inch of available space had been used for the densely packed carvings covering the floor.
The characters shared the same origin as the restrictions outside. Their strokes were intricate and oppressive.
“What do these ugly scribbles say?”
Long Ao raised the fireball in his hand and examined the floor covered in writing.
“You’re in luck.” Santai strode into the chamber.
Her boots clicked against the ancient characters.
“This place is worth far more than those lousy paintings outside.”
She walked straight to the center of the hall and crouched down.
Her fingertip slid along the grooves of the cold stone carvings as she began uttering a string of strange, awkward syllables.
The method of pronunciation belonged to no known language of the present age.
An Changqing and Long Ao listened in utter confusion.
Chen Guan remained silent by the doorway.
A language barrier was no obstacle to mental-force perception.
The awkward syllables caused tiny ripples in the air. Every sound seemed to tug faintly at the operation of some invisible rule.
[Holy crap, Santai is fluent in a foreign language too?]
[What language is that? Cthulhu-speak?]
[The knowledge-type players are crying. While everyone else is still looking at pictures and trying to guess what they mean, she’s already doing reading comprehension.]
[Now that’s what I call a true top student. An Changqing is just a specialist with a glaring weakness next to her. Too bad Su isn’t here—I really want to know which of them is more knowledgeable.]
It was several minutes before Santai finally stood up.
Most of the usual carelessness had vanished from her face, replaced by an uncommon solemnity mixed with a trace of astonishment.
“What does it say?”
An Changqing broke the silence and humbly asked for her guidance.
Santai exhaled slowly.
Her gaze swept over the three of them, lingering on Long Ao for an extra second.
“This isn’t a proper historical record.” She moistened her dry lips. “It’s a contract. More precisely, it’s a prayer.”
Santai pointed at the stone carvings covering the floor.
“It mentions a civilization that had reached the end of its road. Three leaders of different faiths stepped forward.”
Her gaze returned to the inscriptions.
“They believed that conventional methods could no longer save the world. If they wanted to preserve a spark of life amid the apocalypse, they would have to pay an extremely heavy price.”
“So they gathered here and prayed to a great existence honored as the Lord.”
Santai paused.
“They offered the most precious foundations of their era as a sacrifice in exchange for enough power to turn the tide of fate and carry out their plan to save the world.”
The only sound remaining in the empty chamber was the crackling of the ball of fire in Long Ao’s palm.
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!
ive and Ruthless] Before his transmigration, Ye Xuan was playing a game called "Severing Emotions to Attain the Dao." The game's core wasn't about leveling up by fighting monsters, but about conquering various "bad women" with wicked personalities and cold, fickle natures. There was only one method to conquer them: stay unwaveringly by their side, then die at a critical moment, driving them to madness after losing the protagonist. The higher their level of regret, the higher the player's score. To dominate the server, Ye Xuan conquered all the bad women. In the early stages, he showered them with boundless tenderness, only to choose to sacrifice himself for them later, making them weep bitterly and drown in regret. Among them were: Xia Lengyue, the unfaithful immortal wife who chased after powerful men and discarded her husband like trash. Ye Qingcheng, the Demonic Venerable of the Joyous Union Sect, who appeared pure and innocent but was, in reality, promiscuous. Wu Lingxiao, the Empress of the Great Xia Dynasty, who lusted after men and loved maintaining a harem. Bai Qiangu of the Endless Demonic Sect: a bloodthirsty mass murderer. However, when the protagonist transmigrated into the game world, he made a horrifying discovery. Eight hundred years had already passed. The bad women he had conquered had now each become deities and revered ancestors. Faced with the endless stream of toxic women coming for him, Ye Xuan could only rely on his god-tier acting skills to carve a path of survival through this world of treacherous women.
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.
m back to his original world. In the end, he realized he had overthought things. [Hey, why is Shen Manni, the female lead, acting strange? Shouldn't she be fawning over the male lead at this point?] [Zhou Qiaoqiao, are you sick? Weren't you supposed to break off your engagement today?] [Damn it! An Youyi, please do your job as an undercover agent and sell my information to the protagonist, you idiot!] ... At this moment, Xu Mo himself didn't know that these female leads had already heard his inner thoughts. Then they decided not to play by the rules. Xu Mo: Please respect my profession as the big villain!
