Cangxian Lake Below
The lake at the marked location wasn't far from Ting City. Xu Huo hadn't heard from Nie Xuan, so he decided to go take a look first.
He informed Team Leader Wu, who didn't know the full story. Following the usual procedure, Wu filed a report, and the Special Defense Department eventually approved Xu Huo's visit, but told him he could only enter from a location designated by the department.
It wasn't that the Special Defense Department was deliberately restricting him. A player soon brought them a brief, encrypted document.
Cangxian Lake had been sealed off half a year ago. The reason was a sudden surge of enormous energy from beneath the lake. To detect possible entrances to emerging Dungeons, the Special Defense Department had installed monitoring devices in many places. Usually, wherever energy fluctuations occurred, no matter what kind of energy was involved, strange phenomena would appear—for example, Random Instances, bizarre plants and animals, or ancient artifacts turning into living things. In short, changes in energy always had a cause. And compared with densely populated cities that might eventually develop fixed Dungeons, the energy at Cangxian Lake was on an entirely different scale.
The lake had been under investigation by a dedicated team for the past six months. Thanks to equipment acquired in the game, diving beneath the lake wasn't difficult. The existence of an ancient civilization's Ruins down there had also been confirmed. What's more, players had brought back some ancient artifacts, including several that contained unusual energy. The Special Defense Department still hadn't figured out what this energy did, but as they were attempting to remove the Ruins in sections, another surge of energy erupted beneath the lake.
Somehow, energy vortices had appeared deep within the Ruins. More than half of the players working