First Arrival at the Returning Ruins

The world before him was unlike anything Lu Chen had imagined.

He stood upon a boundless gray-white wasteland.

The ground was not earth, but a strange stone material—fine yet hard, as though ground down by some mighty force. It was covered in crisscrossing, bottomless fissures, like a riverbed dried up for hundreds of millions of years.

The sky was an eternal leaden gray. There was no sun, moon, or stars, only a uniform, dim light blanketing heaven and earth, making it impossible to tell dawn from dusk.

The air was steeped in an ancient, desolate aura so dense it could not be dispelled. Spiritual energy was exceptionally active, yet carried a wild and violent nature. Absorbing it into one's body required extra focus to refine and purify it, or it could easily damage one's meridians.

At the same time, he could faintly sense an indescribable pressure and sorrow lingering in the air, as though it had come from ancient times.

Looking into the distance, the wasteland stretched to the horizon, merging with the leaden-gray sky in an emptiness that made one's heart palpitate.

Upon the distant horizon, he could vaguely make out warped, grotesque black silhouettes. They seemed like mountains, yet also like the remains of some enormous creature.

There was no wind, no sound—only deathly silence. This silence was more oppressive than any clamor.

"So this is... the Returning Ruins?" Lu Chen frowned slightly. It was utterly different from the secret realm he had imagined, one shrouded in immortal mist and filled with exotic flowers and strange grasses. This place resembled more an ancient battlefield abandoned for countless ages, or the wreckage left behind after the death of a world.

He steadied his mind and immediately extended his divine sense as far outward as possible.

Yet his divine sense