Stone Ridge Mountain, thirty thousand zhang underground.
There was no wind here, no light.
Only the crisscrossing purple veins pulsed across the rock walls, giving off dull, muffled thumps. That was Stone Ridge Mountain's breathing, and also the sign of the Ancient God Torso awakening.
Chu Qing stood barefoot on ground that had completely crystallized.
The chill from the soles of his feet crept up through his ankles and burrowed into his marrow, jolting the Purple True Blood within him into a sudden surge. His Adam's apple bobbed. With every breath, it felt as though his lungs had been filled with fine mineral grit, burning with sharp pain.
This was Progenitor Status bearing the weight of the entire mountain.
"Come out."
Chu Qing spoke, his voice hoarse as layers upon layers of echoes rose within the vast Crystal Cavity.
The void twisted slightly.
A half-transparent young girl's figure peeled away from that ten-thousand-zhang crystalline torso. Her hair fell like a river of stars, her facial outline indistinct beneath the flickering purple glow. Only that Aura of Primordial Desolation pressed down so hard that one's spine ached.
Shang Xie.
She did not float. Instead, like a startled sparrow, she gingerly shuffled to a spot three steps away from Chu Qing.
Her fingertip pointed toward a patch of shadow at the deepest point of the underground cavity.
That was the end of the Graveyard World Shadow, a place even the Progenitor's Golden Light could not reach.
"Master." Shang Xie's voice was thin, devoid of discernible joy or anger, yet it carried the texture of metal grinding against metal. "It... is absorbing. Absorbing the 'qi' produced by those grindstones."
Chu Qing followed the direction of her fingertip.
His pupils abruptly shrank into needlepoint black dots.
With his focus stretched to the limit, the