The Rabbit's Embrace
Yun Jingheng stood up from the wreckage of the bushes and brushed the fallen leaves and dirt off his clothes.
The spot on his back where he hit the tree trunk was still throbbing, and the salty, metallic taste of blood lingered in his mouth, but he could stand, walk, and think.
He looked around carefully. The forest was very dense, and his view was heavily obstructed by tree trunks and bushes, so he couldn't see far.
The sky was a dark, grayish-brown, and the clouds were eerily unsettling in color—pale purple, dark green, grayish-blue, and some other colors he couldn't name, as if someone had spilled a box of paint onto the sky.
A strange smell filled the air, not the dry, metallic smell of the Moon Domain, but a more moist, heavier smell, like rotten wood that had been buried in damp soil for a long time.
A breeze blew from the depths of the forest, carrying a hint of coolness and a faint, almost imperceptible scent reminiscent of ambergris.
Dragon Valley.
He was certain that this was Dragon Valley.
But how do we get out?
Chen Weitao said that the outer perimeter of Dragon Valley could be traversed on foot, but he didn't even know his location within Dragon Valley, let alone which direction the outer perimeter was.
He spread his Divine Power outwards, sensing the surrounding environment.
Divine Power can be used.
Soul Power...
He gave it a try.
No, the same goes for Martial Soul.
"Wait a minute, isn't Dragon Valley supposed to restrict cultivation levels? How come I, a Quasi-Soul Emperor, haven't been kicked out?"
Just then, he sensed something.
It didn't come from the outside, it came from the inside, from the depths of his body, from the deepest part of his Martial Soul.
A very faint, indistinct feeling, like hearing someone speaking underwater—"Come here."
Something was calling to him from the depths of Dragon Valley, calling to him with its very existence.
Standing there, he could sense that thing was somewhere in Dragon Valley, deep, deep inside, waiting for him.
Yun Jingheng took a deep breath and strode in that direction.
He walked for a long time.
Dragon Valley has no distinction between day and night; the sky is always a dark, grayish-brown. He didn't know how long he had been walking.
His legs were very sore, his back was very painful, and his Soul Power could not be restored here.
But the feeling of being called grew stronger and stronger, so strong that every step he took felt like he was being pulled by something, not walking, but being dragged along.
The forest receded behind us, replaced by a vast, greyish-white wasteland.
The wasteland was barren, the ground cracked and parched, as if it had been scorched by fire long ago.
Occasionally, tiny, faintly glowing crystals can be seen in the cracks; their colors range from silvery-white to pale gold to deep purple, and their luster is very weak.
In the distance, there was the outline of a mountain, not an ordinary mountain, but one that looked as if its top had been cut off, as if something had smashed it from above. The edges of the mountain were irregular and pitted, like a bone that had been gnawed by a dog.
At the edge of the wasteland lies a basin.
He didn't know how the basin was formed, but his limited geographical knowledge told him that it was the kind of basin that was created by something crashing down from the sky. It had steep edges, a flat bottom, and an astonishingly large diameter, so large that you couldn't see the opposite edge from the edge of the basin.
Yun Jingheng stopped at the edge of the basin.
He saw the corpses.
Hundreds and thousands of bodies were densely packed across the bottom of the entire basin.
Some were hundreds of meters long, while others were only a few meters long. Some lay intact on the ground, some were broken into several pieces, and some had only a few scattered bones lying on the ground.
Their bones glowed in the dim light of Dragon Valley, white, pale gold, deep purple, ice blue, dark red—various colors of light intertwined, like a luminous ocean made of bones.
Soul Bone...
It's still a dragon's Soul Bone.
The Core Area of Dragon Valley, the last resting place of the dragon race, where countless dragons died, their corpses lying in this basin for countless millennia.
Yun Jingheng stood at the edge of the basin, looking at the glowing Dragon Bone Ocean. Even though he didn't have a dragon Martial Soul, he felt a surge of inexplicable grief and indignation in his chest.
After much hesitation, he still chose to continue.
He walked very slowly, not out of fear, but because his Martial Soul was trembling.
The tremor began the moment he stepped down the slope of the basin; it was very light and faint, as if something deep within his body was beating a tiny drum.
The drumbeats rose up, one after another, from his dantian to his chest, from his chest to his throat, and from his throat to the top of his head, making his scalp tingle.
He walked past a huge dragon skeleton, its bones silvery-white in color and at least three hundred meters long. Its ribs resembled rows of enormous arches, beneath which lay a dark void.
"What a huge Soul Bone..."
Maybe there will be some god-level ones. Should I take a few out?
He shook his head violently. "The attributes aren't right for me. This thing seems useless to me."
invest?
To whom? And on what grounds?
I'm not one of those people in the college...
As he walked past that row of ribs, several pale silver lights floated out from the gaps between the bones. They didn't come from the outside, but from inside the bones, as if something had been sleeping inside the bones for a long time and had been awakened by his footsteps.
The ball of light condensed, expanded, and deformed before him, slowly outlining a blurry shape—a dragon, a translucent, white dragon composed of light and memory.
Dragon Soul?
I have no Soul Power, damn it!
Yun Jingheng clenched his fist.
The dragon soul lowered its head, its massive head less than three feet in front of it, with only two pale silver lights burning in its empty eye sockets.
The two beams of light looked at him for a long time, without hostility, without murderous intent, and without even scrutiny. It was a softer, warmer gaze, like that of an elder looking at a junior.
Then it moved aside.
The enormous, silvery-white dragon soul drifted to the side, its body passing through its own ribs and those arch-like bones, floating to the side of the basin, hovering on the ground, motionless.
It yielded a path, a path leading to the deeper, more central, and darker parts of the basin.
???
Yun Jingheng silently walked through the dragon bone "archway," the dust still rising and scattering beneath his feet, but he did not stop.
Then, the dragon souls appeared one after another.
With each dragon skeleton they passed, a dragon's soul would float out from the bones.
They come in all sorts of colors: white, pale gold, purple, blue, and red; some are as large as mountains, while others are as small as horses.
They drifted out from the gaps in the bones, from the shattered skull, from the broken ribs, coalesced and took shape in the air, and then parted.
Instead of panicking and dodging, they made way solemnly, slowly, like a military parade, clearing a straight path leading to the center of the basin.
Yun Jingheng walked on the path cleared by the dragon soul, the ground beneath his feet trembling slightly, and the dragon soul behind him slowly closing in.
He didn't look back, but kept his head down and walked forward step by step.
Without his Soul Power, he was actually quite hesitant to look back.
He didn't know why these dragon souls were making way for him, whether they were afraid of him or respected him, but he didn't have time to think about these things, because the feeling of being called was so strong that it almost swallowed him up.
At the farthest point of the basin, far from the center, the last corpse came into his view.
That's not the remains of a dragon.
It looked like the carcass of a rabbit.
Its body was unusually large, and the outline of its skeleton vaguely resembled that of a rabbit. Its thick hind leg bones were half-buried in the soil, and its round skull lay on its side with empty eye sockets facing the sky.
The bone was a color between pink and white, like snow dyed by the morning glow.
Yun Jingheng stopped in his tracks.
He saw a person, on the other side of the Moon Rabbit's corpse, across the basin, standing a girl.
Her long, silvery-white hair gleamed coldly in the dim light of Dragon Valley, her purple eyes were like two stars burning in the darkness, and a corner of her white dress was blown up by the wind, the hem stained with dust and dark red marks from who-knows-where.
She stood there, beside the enormous carcass of the Moon Rabbit, on that land, amidst the dragon bones and dragon souls, like a white flower blooming in the ruins.
Gu Yuena.
Yun Jingheng's throat tightened abruptly.
He wanted to call her name, but the sound got stuck in his throat, and he couldn't utter a single word.
His legs began to tremble, not from exhaustion, but because he suddenly felt a stinging sensation in his nose and a burning sensation in his eyes. Something had been stuck in his chest for a long time, suppressed for a long time, and endured for a long time, and finally found a crack at this moment, slowly gushing out.
He wanted to run over to her, to hug her, to tell her he was alright, to ask her why she was there, and to ask her how long she had been waiting for him.
But before he could take a step, the corpse of the Moon Rabbit lit up.
It's not the bones that are glowing; it's something inside the bones that's glowing.
Light seeped from inside the bones, overflowed from the cracks, condensed, swirled, and contracted in the air, then transformed into a slender, bright, and warm beam of light that shot out from the skull of the Moon Rabbit corpse.
The beam of light was moving at an astonishing speed, so fast that he had no time to react.
The pinkish-white light passed right through his chest; there was no pain, no impact, and he felt no sensation of being hit.
I was careless!
They even launched a sneak attack?!