"You're Evil Cultists, and I'm a wanted criminal. If we didn't take these godforsaken mountains, were we supposed to go have tea at the High-Energy Center?" Dong Fan answered with extreme impatience.
"Quite right, quite right." Dragon Scribe actually accepted this seemingly reasonable yet utterly absurd explanation.
Dong Fan glanced around once more, then added after a moment, "The first time, I wasn't a wanted criminal yet..."
Dragon Scribe immediately asked, "Oh? There were many times? When?"
"In October. The eleventh or twelfth, I think. Sometime between evening and dawn."
"That was the first time?"
"Yeah. The flooding was bad back then. I went to the outskirts for a job interview and ran into the Internal Affairs Bureau and the Intelligence Management Center searching the mountains. I followed the crowd and somehow fled this way, running for most of the night. Then, right here, my whole body suddenly sank down. Something held me fast, and then I passed out. When I woke up, I really had sunk into the ground. I crawled out in a daze and ran away... Then my powers awakened. Yeah, right here."
Dong Fan was very certain that every word out of his mouth was nonsense.
This place had actually been where Ronan had instructed Snake Tongue to explore the Cloud Top World through dreams. It had brought back fragmented information from a brutal Grandparents and Grandchild War beyond the distant Starry Sky, chiefly the killing power of the Dawn Blood Curse. Ronan had used Unranked Divine Power to establish a closed cycle that internally digested the curse sounds, creating this bizarre and terrifying environment.
Earlier, when Snake Tongue had hosted Madam Shan Chuan's soul, Ronan had had her study the subtleties of Unranked Divine Power and cursecraft here. The Virtue Association had thus claimed this