The Bronze Gate closed behind them.
Pitch-black darkness.
They couldn't see a thing around them.
The group sped forward through the secret passage.
"Do you really have no information at all about this ruin?" Gu Qingshan asked.
"The secrets passed down through my clan since ancient times are sealed in my mind. Unless we reach the corresponding place within the ruin, the seal won't lift, and we won't learn anything about it," the King said.
"Brilliant. It prevents secrets from being revealed by accident," Gu Qingshan praised.
He wasn't worried in the slightest that the King might be lying.
—He had given up every possible reward in exchange for information alone.
By their contract, the King had to reveal anything he knew.
The dark passage was long.
They sped through it for a long while before slowing down.
A cliff lay ahead.
Beyond it, fierce winds mixed with a bone-piercing chill surged up from deep underground, howling straight into the unseen darkness above.
One colossal pillar after another towered beyond the cliff, revealing something terrifying to the group—
Countless corpses were fastened to the pillars.
Or rather, the pillars were made of corpses.
All manner of mysterious, unfathomable corpses.
Layers upon layers of insect carapaces,
human corpses locked in one another's embrace,
motionless strange beasts,
and bizarre, unfathomable Abyss Monsters.
Countless beyond measure.
Gu Qingshan even spotted a creature found only in the myths of the cultivation world.
—A Heavenly Dragon.
The Heavenly Dragon coiled around a corpse pillar, its enormous body a lifeless gray-white, like a specimen drained of all vitality.
The corpse pillars stood in bottomless darkness, stretching toward an endless, distant void.
Without end above or below.
The sight shook everyone to the core.
The King pressed a hand to his forehead and let out a series