"Hmm? That mysterious power of precognition is warning me... to pay attention to the inside of that stone stele."
Li Hai stopped and turned to look at the stele.
"Could something... be hidden inside?"
As he muttered to himself, thousands of broken fingers suddenly sprouted from the cracks in the ground beneath the massive stele, which he watched with a shadowed gaze, and wrapped tightly around it.
Thump!
With a dull boom, the fingers crushed the stele to powder.
And there, clear as day amid the pile of stone dust, was a book made of animal hide.
Whoosh—
A gust of icy wind swept past, and the hide-bound book appeared in Li Hai's hand.
He glanced down and saw the title written plainly on its cover: Northern Profound Fate-Defying Art.
Without hesitation, Li Hai opened the technique, whose name alone made it sound formidable.
The text at the beginning turned out to be the personal account of a man named Lie Xinghuo.
"Lie Xinghuo..."
Li Hai looked up and murmured, "I remember seeing that name on the stele. He was... the founding patriarch of the Deer-Hunting Pavilion, an ancient who lived before the Great Xuan Dynasty."
Then he lowered his head and read on.
Perhaps because the Deer-Hunting Pavilion's founding patriarch had lived so long ago, his account was written in language so convoluted and archaic that Li Hai had a hard time reading it, despite it being only a personal memoir.
In short, rendered in plain language, Lie Xinghuo's account said—
...My name is Lie Xinghuo, and I was born in the Ancient Continent. After my enemies hunted me down, I had no choice but to leave my homeland. I crossed the vast ocean and arrived in Yu Province...
...Unlike the Ancient Continent, where humanity had long since united