"What happened? How did I end up like this?"
One after another, everyone awoke. The mountaintop immediately rang with a series of miserable cries that made one's hair stand on end, followed by waves of sobbing.
Aging before one's time, youthful beauty turning white-haired—this was simply the most tragic thing in the world. They were in their twenties, at the prime of their lives, yet in the blink of an eye, their hair had turned prematurely gray and wrinkles had spread across their faces. How could they bear it? They were practically wishing for death.
Among this group, aside from the classmates to whom Ye Fan had given some ginseng, everyone else had lost at least around ten years of their lives even after eating plenty of Divine Crocodile corpses, turning into people in their thirties. The most miserable few could easily have passed for fifty or sixty.
Gu Sheng's voice came from the side. "There is a mysterious power within the Desolate Ancient Forbidden Zone. Time passes rapidly there. Those of you without any cultivation could still move about normally after entering, and the problem only became apparent when you left.
"But cultivators who had already begun cultivating would turn into decayed ash after entering for only a short while. If I hadn't had a divine weapon protecting my body, I would have died of old age on the spot long ago.
"Your opportunity to enter that forbidden zone came only once. When you left, the forbidden zone's power helped open the path of cultivation for you, consuming a great deal of your life force. That is why you aged, and why I had you bring along the Divine Crocodile corpses.
"The Divine Crocodile possesses divine flesh and blood, making it a rather precious medicinal ingredient. Eating it raw