At some point, a secret passage leading underground had opened inside the main hall. Cultivators filed into it one after another, and the hollow echo of footsteps drifted up from deep below.
Everyone followed the passage in a spiraling descent. After walking for about the time it took an incense stick to burn, they arrived before a Bronze Gate.
The gate was thick, ancient, and weathered, its aura of age washing over them. A soaring dragon was carved upon its doors, lifelike enough to seem almost alive.
The gate already stood open, with pale red mist churning behind it.
The cultivators who arrived did not linger. They streamed into the red mist and vanished. The open Bronze Gate and the surging red fog seemed like some invisible beast crouching within, swallowing cultivators one after another into its belly.
Lu Ye stood directly behind Xie Jin and followed him into the red mist.
Yet the moment he stepped inside, a sensation of weightlessness seized him. It came quickly and vanished just as quickly. When Lu Ye came back to himself, Xie Jin was nowhere to be seen. Not only him—even the cultivators who had entered before them had disappeared.
Lu Ye did not panic. On the way here to gather, Qiao Qiao'er had asked about the Dragon Spring. Xie Jin had not concealed anything and told them quite a lot, though his cultivation was not particularly high, so most of what he knew was merely hearsay.
One detail concerned the strange experience of entering this place. Everyone who came in would appear in an independent small space, with no contact whatsoever with anyone else.
As for why this happened, Xie Jin could not explain. He only said that some senior members of the sect suspected this place was connected to the