At this moment, the fear in Xu Hong's heart had yet to fade. What he feared was not only the powerful strike he had just suffered from Qin Fengming. More importantly, he feared Chao Zhang.
Although he did not know exactly what had happened before him, he was certain it should be related to a legend passed down through Blood Crane Mountain.
That legend concerned Ancestor Daoyan, who had disappeared many years ago.
It was a very distant and highly legendary rumor. It was said that before Ancestor Daoyan left the Black Swallow Clan—that is, before he disappeared—he had once asked an extremely skilled divination master to perform a divination for him, who had declared that his journey would be fraught with danger and unlikely to end well.
Ancestor Daoyan and that divination master had been sworn friends, and thus he had placed great faith in the other's words.
Therefore, Ancestor Daoyan postponed his departure and spent more than two hundred years setting up this secret realm of statues. According to the rumor, the statue contained a wisp of Daoyan's soul consciousness. As long as it could be opened by a special method, that soul consciousness would be able to emerge.
The rumor said that the statue contained only Ancestor Daoyan's soul consciousness, not an essence-soul avatar. Yet Xu Hong had once heard that, with the aid of Ancestor Daoyan's soul blood, that soul consciousness could reconstruct an essence soul and allow Ancestor Daoyan to be reborn in the Cultivation World.
However, that rumor had never been recorded anywhere; it was merely something cultivators discussed in private. Over countless years, the matter had never become reality. Thus, the rumor gradually faded from people's attention.
Now that he had seen Qin Fengming arrive carrying Ancestor Daoyan's essence blood, and seen Chao