During his flight, Lin Ming occasionally spotted ancient city ruins on the land below. Those cities stood on the remaining patches of land between the abysses, their walls tall and massive, yet every one of them had been utterly destroyed.
Some walls had been cleaved in two, their cut surfaces smooth as mirrors; some cities had been smashed into basins by a single palm strike, every building reduced to dust; others had been completely erased from the ground by some power, leaving only enormous circular craters.
As Lin Ming swept over those ruins, he gave them a few cursory glances. Nothing of value remained in the cities, only broken stone implements and metal fragments scattered amid the rubble.
He therefore did not descend to investigate. He merely committed the locations of those ruins to memory and continued flying onward.
Even flying at full speed, it took Lin Ming nearly half an hour to reach the peaks.
Those mountains were even more majestic than they had appeared from far away on the ground. Each rose several thousand zhang high, its slopes sheer as if hewn by a blade. The rocks were a deep bluish gray, their surfaces covered in densely packed weathering cracks.
He flew along the ravines between the peaks and finally landed atop the highest mountain.
There stood the ruins of a vast hall, more intact than any he had seen before. Although most of its dome had collapsed, its main structure still stood, like the skeleton of a colossal beast that had been dead for ten thousand years yet had never fallen.
Lin Ming looked at the ruined hall before him. Outside it, he could see skeletal remains.
Those remains lay scattered across the square before the hall, on the steps, and at the threshold. Some were complete