The car crossed the vast Gobi. The moment a mountain range rose across the far edge of the world, every small detail of the landscape faded into insignificance.
The three of them got out and stood at the foot of the mountains.
It was Su Mu's first time seeing Kunlun Mountain with his own eyes. The so-called Ancestor of Ten Thousand Mountains, the Kunlun Dragon Vein, was no hazy legend confined to books. It stretched beneath the heavens, a vast truth that struck straight at the heart.
It had none of the gentle beauty of ordinary mountains. The range ran a thousand miles from west to east, a wall across heaven and earth. At an average elevation of over five thousand meters, its peaks seemed to have broken free of the mortal world.
Ridge after ridge rose higher, steep and rugged. The folds left by the earth's crust buckling upward were plain to see on the rock faces.
Bare stone showed its raw textures of dark brown and blue-gray, while deep canyons crisscrossed the mountains, hidden among the peaks.
This bleak, hard terrain bore the magnificent contours carved by millions of years of wind, snow, and shifting earth.
The high-altitude sky was exceptionally clear. Not a wisp of cloud crossed its endless expanse, and a bitter gale swept the wasteland, carrying the plateau's piercing chill.
Snow and glaciers that never melted gleamed atop the peaks. Sheets of ice wound down the ridges like frozen silver rivers set into the dark mountainsides, their contrasting hues both sacred and immense.
Around the foothills stretched a vast frozen desert, dotted with sparse, pale-green plants hardy enough to survive the cold. Gobi, meadow, snow mountain, and glacier unfolded one after another. In that boundless world, scarcely a person or living creature could be seen.