At the very heart of the area encircled by active volcanoes lay a basin filled with deposited lava. At this moment, the basin, dozens of miles across, was brimming with blackish-red dragonblood, bubbling and churning with thick bloody froth. Countless little imps rushed back and forth, continuously dumping bag after bag of potent medicinal herbs into the dragonblood.
With these herbs mixed in, the dragonblood, already reeking enough to make one gag, now gave off a pungent herbal stench. The smell made people dizzy, yet at the same time it stirred every vein in their bodies, as though some indescribable force were about to burst forth from their marrow.
Thousands of pipes as thick as water vats, made of a material resembling living blood vessels, stretched over from afar and plunged into the basin. These pipes writhed ceaselessly as vast quantities of viscous dragonblood flowed through them into the basin. From time to time, streams of blood-red light coursed over the pipes, while strange runes flickered indistinctly within them.
Following these pipes into the distance, one could see that several dozen miles from the active volcanoes, thousands of gigantic hills stood across the boundless plain. The dark hills were roughly oval in shape, their surfaces densely covered in fine black scales.
Looking closer, these thousand-meter-tall hills were not mountains at all, but bizarre Magic Beasts standing upright like goose eggs. Their bodies were incomparably huge, and the middle of their thousand-meter frames had a diameter of three to four hundred meters. Their entire bodies were smooth and bare, without limbs; they could only remain where they were, utterly unable to move.
At their tops were huge mouths packed with sharp teeth and fangs. From time to time, great bands of imps flew into the sky and tossed enormous chunks of