Stone Ridge Mountain, thirty thousand fathoms underground.
There was no light here, only a sticky dark purple that would not dissolve. The air was filled with the scorched stench of an ancient corpse left to rot in formalin, then dried beneath a blazing sun.
Chu Qing was barefoot, standing on the crystallized spine of the Earth Vein. The sensation under his soles was hard and rigid, like stepping on a pile of knife tips polished to a razor edge. That chill drilled straight up through the arches of his feet into the crown of his skull, making every hair at the base of his spine stand on end.
He lowered his head, his gaze sweeping over his surroundings.
In the void, countless shattered phantoms were packed layer upon layer. They were blurred faces, some clad in rust-mottled armor, some reduced to nothing but a ball of leaping ghostfire. They were the "seeds" of dead eras, those who had once looked down upon all heroes, only to become ash in the end.
They crowded densely among those hundreds of thousands of cultivation paths, like a heap of sardines stuffed into glass bottles, silently opening their mouths wide and letting out voiceless wails.
"Paths are piled up from corpses."
Chu Qing murmured, an extremely dry scrape spilling from his throat. He raised his right hand, his fingertips brushing across a path in the void that radiated pale cyan light.
That light was cloyingly sweet, yet it carried the earthy reek of something rotted through.
It was the Flesh and Blood Method of a certain era. In the system's field of vision, these supreme secret inheritances were nothing more than fertility left behind after a civilization had rotted away.
Chu Qing's five fingers abruptly clenched. He was actually trying to forcibly seize ten