A Mountain Was Missing from the Primordial Northern Continent Today
The Primordial Northern Continent.
The sky was dark and overcast, shrouded year-round in an unyielding gray-black mist.
Across the land, mountains and rivers lay shattered, and gullies crisscrossed the earth. Wisps of Fierce Sha Qi rose from underground, intertwining with the Chaos Qi that lingered between heaven and earth, making the already desolate land seem even more deathly still.
Vegetation was a rare sight here.
Even the Spirit Plants that occasionally grew were mostly sinister in appearance, with pitch-black branches and leaves and dense Sha Qi within their roots and stems.
Few of the living beings that survived in the Northern Land were harmless either.
On a black mountain range that stretched for an unknown number of tens of thousands of li, a dense mass of ferocious beasts had gathered.
Even the smallest of them were dozens of zhang in size, while the larger ones reached hundreds or even thousands of zhang. Most of their fearsome bodies were covered in sharp horns, bone spikes, and scales, and their scarlet eyes brimmed with chaos and brutality.
One ferocious beast, shaped like a giant lizard, lay against the mountainside with its limbs clamped tightly onto the black rock. It opened its bloody maw and took a bite.
Crack!
A crisp snapping sound rang out.
The giant lizard froze.
It slowly raised its head, and a ghastly white fang several feet long fell from its mouth, struck the black rock beneath it, and bounced twice.
The giant lizard stared at its broken fang for a moment, growing agitation rising in its scarlet eyes.
It clearly could not understand.
A bite like that would have reduced ordinary rock to rubble, and even refined iron buried underground would have snapped easily between its jaws.
How could the thing in front of it be so hard?
"Roar!"
A low growl rumbled from its throat.
The giant lizard soon put its broken tooth out of mind. Raising its neck high, it aimed at the same spot and bit down hard again.
Crack!
Another broken tooth fell out.
Blood trickled from the corner of the giant lizard's mouth. It looked down, then used a claw to nudge the tooth into a crack in the rock.
Several nearby ferocious beasts were drawn by the sound and craned their heads to look. A winged beast clad in gray bone armor came closest, looking first at the giant lizard's mouth, then at the place it had bitten.
There was not so much as a white mark there.
It folded its wings and quietly edged back a few steps.
The giant lizard, however, dug its foreclaws in more tightly. Gravel pattered down through the gaps between its claws as it tilted its head, chose another spot, and pressed its remaining fangs against it.
Before it could bite down properly, a muffled thud suddenly came from beneath its belly.
Boom...
The shock sent the giant lizard's lower jaw bouncing upward, its teeth clacking together.
It stayed where it was, both foreclaws still gripping the same spot.
The sound had come from below, through the thick "mountain rock," and its echoes lingered for a long time.
The bodies of several hundred ferocious beasts standing nearby trembled slightly.
The giant lizard stopped moving too.
A moment later, it found that everything around it had gone quiet again, and the pitifully small amount of doubt it had felt quickly vanished.
The next moment.
Boom...
The muffled sound came again.
This time, it was clearer.
The entire "mountain range" seemed to rise and fall slightly with it.
Large quantities of gravel rolled down from above. The nearby ferocious beasts finally began to stir, and some with stronger instincts had already turned and fled.
Then came the third tremor.
Rumble!
The earth for hundreds of thousands of li around shook at once!
Among the northern mountains and rivers, peak after peak trembled violently. Countless rocks tumbled from cliffs, and vast banks of black, fiendish mist were drawn by some invisible force, surging madly in every direction.
The giant lizard stumbled, its enormous body tumbling straight down the "mountainside."
The other ferocious beasts fell into complete chaos as well.
"Roar!"
"Awooo—!"
"Woo!"
A cacophony of roars rang through heaven and earth.
Tens of thousands of ferocious beasts fled in all directions. Some beat their wings and soared into the sky, some burrowed underground, and others ran madly on all fours through the rugged mountains.
But soon, they saw something even more terrifying.
In the distance.
A towering black "mountain peak" that reached into the clouds was slowly rising.
Ten thousand zhang.
A hundred thousand zhang.
A million zhang...
A boundless black shadow blotted out the sky, forcibly pushing vast banks of clouds aside.
As the enormous black peak continued to rise, its outline gradually came into view.
It was a head.
That single head alone was so enormous that it made the surrounding mountains and rivers look utterly insignificant!
The herd of ferocious beasts that had been running for their lives suddenly fell silent for an instant.
A bone-winged ferocious beast that had already flown high into the sky froze, its scarlet pupils contracting sharply. Its enormous wings even forgot to keep beating.
Its body plunged straight down.
Only after falling several hundred zhang did it abruptly come to its senses. Its wings beat frantically, whipping up fierce gales as it once more fled for its life into the distance.
The giant lizard clinging to the black "mountainside" had frozen completely.
Because it had finally seen clearly.
The place it had been gnawing on all that time was merely a small patch of skin on the back of this colossal creature.
It did not even amount to a single complete scale!
The next moment.
Two eyes, each like a great sun, slowly opened between the darkened heaven and earth.
Boom!
Even the light between heaven and earth seemed to brighten a little at that moment.
Those eyes were simply too large.
Deep within their golden pupils, faint points of silvery starlight glimmered, and an ancient, boundless presence slowly spread along their gaze.
"Hmm..."
The moment Lu Yuan regained consciousness, he felt uncomfortable all over.
Especially on his back.
A dense, tingling itch made him instinctively give his body a shake.
His movement was light.
At least, as far as Lu Yuan himself could tell, he really had only shaken himself lightly.
But to the Northern Land's ferocious beasts around him, the entire world changed.
Rumble!
The black mountain range stretching for tens of thousands of li rose and fell all at once. Vast stretches of rock burst apart, and countless boulders flew high into the air.
The ferocious beasts still clinging to Lu Yuan's back fared even worse.
Tens of thousands of them had no time to react before a terrifying force flung them away.
Some of the closer beasts tumbled through the air an unknown number of times before smashing into the earth thousands of li away with a bang, plowing long trenches through the wasteland.
Lu Yuan had only just come to his senses, and he was stunned for a moment when he saw this.
"What was that?"
His voice was not loud.
Yet as the deep sound spread, it sent ripples visible to the naked eye through the surrounding void.
Farther away, the bodies of some ferocious beasts that had just picked themselves up from the ground stiffened again.
They stared in terror at the enormous head hanging high in the sky, muffled whimpers emerging from their throats. Then they continued fleeing without looking back.
Lu Yuan's mind was still somewhat hazy.
Soon, fragments of memory welled up from deep within his mind.
Blue Star.
Staying up late.
Going to sleep.
And then...
His memories stopped abruptly there.
What followed were the scattered inheritances this enormous body had been born with.
The Primordial World.
The northern continent.
Innate Divine Beast.
Grand Void Sky Whale.
As Lu Yuan digested this information, his eyes, each vast enough to rival a star, gradually widened.
"The Primordial World?"
His deep voice sent the nearby sea of clouds rolling incessantly.
A storm of towering waves had already risen in Lu Yuan's heart.
As someone who had read quite a few novels about the Primordial World, he was naturally familiar with the name.
This place had plenty of powerful experts and plenty of treasures.
It had no shortage of dangers, either.
One careless moment, and he might run into one of the great Divine Ability users who stood at the pinnacle of the Primordial World and die without even knowing how.
But...
Lu Yuan slowly shifted his gaze to the divine mountains in the distance, none of which were as tall as his dorsal fin, then looked down at the ferocious beasts fleeing madly across the ground.
He felt that things seemed a little different from what he had imagined.
"Just how big am I now?"
As soon as the thought arose, a simple piece of information surfaced from the depths of his consciousness.
[Infinite Growth activated.]
[Race: Grand Void Sky Whale.]
[Life level: Innate Divine Beast · juvenile stage.]
[Body length: 86,000 li.]
[Growth progress: 0.01%.]
After reading it, Lu Yuan fell silent for quite a while.
Eighty-six thousand li.
That number was a little absurd.
Although Lu Yuan had already sensed from his surroundings that his body was enormous, when he actually saw the words "86,000 li," he still could not help feeling a little strange.
"Should I try it?"
He felt for the tail behind him.
Then he cautiously moved it a little.
Boom—!
An earth-shaking crash suddenly rang out at the edge of the world.
Lu Yuan turned to look.
In the direction his tail had swept, a mountain range stretching for tens of thousands of li had been split straight down the middle. Great numbers of peaks collapsed with a roar, sending billowing clouds of dust into the sky.
Some ferocious beasts that had been hiding there burst out of the ruins in terror, not daring to look back.
Lu Yuan watched for a long moment.
"So I really am that big..."
After accepting that he had become a colossal beast eighty-six thousand li long, Lu Yuan began to examine this body in earnest.
Strong.
Very strong.
His flesh contained incomparably vast power. Every drop of blood in his body surged like a great river, and his bones were like mountain ridges holding up heaven and earth.
That sense of power was difficult to describe in words.
Lu Yuan even felt that, if he wanted to, he could charge forward right now and flatten all the distant divine mountains in his path.
But the novelty did not last long.
A clearer sensation quickly took over all his thoughts.
Hunger.
Lu Yuan suddenly felt very hungry.
This hunger was not an ordinary emptiness in his stomach. It was more as though every piece of flesh and every inch of bone in this enormous body were conveying the same need to him.
He needed energy.
A vast amount of energy.
Lu Yuan raised his head and gently breathed out through his enormous nostrils, stirring up two violent winds that stretched thousands of miles ahead of him.
Just then, he suddenly caught a very distinctive scent.
The gray-black mist in the sky that shrouded the Northern Land all year round.
Fierce Sha Qi.
To ordinary living beings of the Primordial World, it was full of corruption and erosion. If they absorbed too much, their Dao hearts would be clouded in mild cases; in severe cases, their true spirits would fall into chaos, and they would ultimately become monsters that knew nothing but slaughter.
But to Lu Yuan, it smelled especially enticing now.
The hunger in his belly grew more pronounced.
He looked up at the black mist filling the sky and hesitated for a few breaths.
"It smells pretty good..."
Lu Yuan opened his mouth.
He planned to taste a little first.
The next instant.
Rumble!
Heaven and earth within a million miles suddenly trembled!
The endless Fierce Sha Qi that had been floating peacefully in the sky seemed to have suddenly found an outlet, madly converging on Lu Yuan's position.
At first, only the black mist nearby was drawn in.
A few breaths later, all the Fierce Sha Qi within a million miles was in motion.
Streams of black Qi stretched across the sky.
Countless streams quickly converged into a black vortex of unimaginable size, whirling toward Lu Yuan's gaping maw.
Boom!
The black clouds rolled backward.
The wind howled.
For the first time, a small patch of clear sky appeared in the northern heavens, which had been shrouded in Sha Qi for countless years.
The fierce beasts fleeing in a frenzy all stopped.
They turned their heads and looked at the enormous figure on the horizon devouring the endless Sha Qi. Unconcealable terror appeared on each of their savage faces.
A fierce beast of greater intelligence trembled uncontrollably. Its four limbs slowly bent until its entire body lay prostrate on the ground.
More fierce beasts followed suit, prostrating themselves.
They simply could not understand what was happening before them.
Fierce Sha Qi was the very foundation of their survival and growth.
Yet that colossal being, who had only just awakened, had opened his mouth once, and the Fierce Sha Qi throughout the whole expanse of heaven and earth poured into his belly like water.
Lu Yuan himself did not feel much about it.
After the vast amount of Fierce Sha Qi entered his belly, a special power quickly broke it down, transformed it, and then integrated it into his flesh and blood.
His once-empty body finally felt a touch of satisfaction.
Lu Yuan's eyes gradually lit up.
"So I really can eat it."
He increased the suction slightly.
High in the sky, the black vortex instantly expanded several times over.
Deeper in the Northern Land.
Inside a black canyon completely blanketed in dense Sha Qi.
A pair of scarlet eyes, each dozens of zhang across, slowly opened.
The fierce beast, which had slumbered for a long time, raised its head. As it sensed the Fierce Sha Qi rapidly draining from heaven and earth, the brutality in its eyes gradually deepened.