A terrifying boom erupted—not in Lu Changsheng's ears, but deep in his primordial spirit, and in the souls of every living being across the entire Primordial Land!
In that instant, Lu Changsheng's vision went black. His primordial spirit felt as if it had been struck by a colossal Heaven-Opening hammer.
"Pfft!"
He didn't even have time to react before he spewed a mouthful of blood flecked with dark golden light.
An invisible, terrifying force hurled him away, and he slammed hard into the cave's solid stone wall.
"What's going on?!"
Lu Changsheng scrambled to his feet in utter horror. He didn't even bother wiping the blood from the corner of his mouth as he stared intently around the cave.
The earth shook and mountains rocked.
No, those four words didn't begin to describe the scene before him.
The heavens were collapsing and the earth was splitting!
The entire Nameless Low Mountain was shaking violently.
Huge chunks of rock broke loose from the cave ceiling. Deep, bottomless cracks began spreading across the walls, which Lu Changsheng had reinforced by smelting countless rare ores into them.
"Crack... crack..."
A series of grating fractures rang out from every direction in the cave.
Lu Changsheng lunged for the control console and pressed both hands hard against the White Jade Array Eye, recklessly sending his divine sense into the mountain-protecting array.
What he saw nearly scared him out of his wits.
His pride and joy—the three thousand layers of the Mysterious Yellow Pure Yang Array, built at the cost of immeasurable effort and resources—was now under an unprecedentedly devastating assault!
The outermost thousand layers of illusion and entrapment formations didn't hold for even a breath. Like bubbles in the sunlight, they shattered in an instant, scattering into a sky full of spiritual light.
Next, the middle thousand layers of the Thick Earth Defense Array, built from countless immortal stones, began to twist and warp. The piercing, mournful wail of the overloaded array plates resounded throughout the cave.
"An enemy attack?! Has a Daluo Golden Immortal come knocking?!"
Lu Changsheng's first thought was that some peerless powerhouse had discovered his hiding place and was forcibly breaking the array.
But he quickly realized something was wrong.
The pressure bearing down on the array wasn't coming from a divine ability attacking from some direction outside. It was coming from... beneath the earth!
"The Earth Vein... the Earth Vein is breaking?!"
Lu Changsheng stared in disbelief. Through the array's core, he clearly sensed the dire state of the miniature spiritual vein beneath Nameless Low Mountain.
That sturdy Earth Vein, which he had once restored with merit and reinforced with the Earth Dragon Pearl, now seemed to be gripped at both ends by a pair of invisible, colossal hands reaching to the heavens—and was being torn apart with wild force!
Once the Earth Vein broke, Nameless Low Mountain, built upon it, along with the three thousand layers of arrays, would plunge into the endless void currents in an instant and be ground to dust!
"What happened? What on earth happened to the Primordial Land?!"
Lu Changsheng's eyes reddened as he pushed the Water Mirror Technique to its limit.
The image in the water mirror flickered wildly, then finally settled on the sky beyond Nameless Low Mountain.
At the sight, Lu Changsheng went completely still. It was as though the blood in his veins had frozen into ice.
The sky had collapsed.
The Primordial Land's once-vast, boundless firmament had split open, torn by a terrifying gash billions of miles long.
Endless streams of chaos poured through the rift, turning every mountain, river, and stream in their path into nothingness.
Beneath the shattered firmament, a blood-red sun radiated a light that filled him with despair.
Blood rain fell from the heavens, and gale-force winds howled.
In the depths of his being, Lu Changsheng could even hear the Primordial Heavenly Dao's grief-stricken, furious will raging throughout the world.
This wasn't a clash between great powers at all.
At the end of the Tribulation of Measure, a peerless fiend had ignited the Western Main Spirit Vein of the entire Western Continent, right in the Primordial Land's west, all for that elusive chance to attain the Dao!
The Western Spiritual Vein had been destroyed, damaging the foundations of heaven and earth.
The terrifying shockwave, powerful enough to destroy a small chiliocosm, surged outward from the west in every direction.
The desolate place where Lu Changsheng lived lay billions of miles away from the west, yet it still couldn't escape the aftermath of this world-destroying wave.
"Madmen... every last one of them is a fucking madman!"
Lu Changsheng roared hysterically.
He had gone to great lengths to evade karma and avoid the Dragon Phoenix remnants, who had slaughtered their way into a frenzy.
But he had never imagined that the great powers who truly stood at the pinnacle of the Primordial Land would go so mad as to flip the table and destroy heaven and earth!
"Crack, crack, crack..."
While he stood stunned, several more cracks split open across the White Jade Array Eye on the control console.
The middle thousand layers of defensive arrays collapsed as well.
Now, all that remained to protect the cave were the innermost thousand layers of the Pure Yang Killing Array, along with the array's core, suppressed by the Nine Heavens Breathing Soil.
"It can't break! Hold on, you have to hold on!"
Lu Changsheng snapped back to his senses and rushed frantically toward the open space at the center of the cave.
He poured out the several million low- and mid-grade immortal stones he had seized from those four Mystic Immortals, dumping them around the array hub as carelessly as if he were tossing out garbage.
"Activate the array! Drain the spiritual energy from these immortal stones! Pour every last bit into the Nine Heavens Breathing Soil!"
Lu Changsheng's hands moved through seals so quickly they left only afterimages.
The power of a mid-stage True Immortal surged out without restraint, guiding the boundless spiritual energy of the immortal stones into the array's core.
With the spiritual energy of several million immortal stones supporting it, and the unrivaled weight of the Nine Heavens Breathing Soil's Origin of Earth pressing it down, the innermost thousand layers of the array finally stemmed their decline. A resilient, mysterious yellow curtain of light appeared, stubbornly resisting the tearing force from deep underground.
But Lu Changsheng's face showed no trace of joy.
He knew this was nothing but drinking poison to quench his thirst.
"Treating the symptoms, not the cause..."
His face pale, he watched the ground tremble incessantly.
The shockwave was terrifying, but what was truly fatal was the breaking of the Earth Vein that the shockwave had triggered.
The Earth Vein beneath Nameless Low Mountain had already developed irreversible cracks because the Western Main Spirit Vein had collapsed.
Those cracks were spreading outward at a visible speed. Countless underground baleful energies surged through them, constantly corroding the foundation of the array.
No matter how many immortal stones he had, they would eventually run out. And no matter how powerful the Nine Heavens Breathing Soil was, it couldn't conjure a complete Earth Vein out of thin air to support the mountain.
If the Earth Vein was allowed to keep tearing apart, Nameless Low Mountain would inevitably collapse completely—within ten years at the earliest, or a hundred at the latest.
"I've kept my head down for thirty thousand years, survived the Fierce Beasts and the Dragon Phoenix... and now I'm going to die in a fucking Crustal Movement?"
Lu Changsheng slumped to the ground, staring at the crumbling stone walls, his eyes full of despair and unwillingness.
For someone who followed the Dao of Cowardice, there was no greater sorrow than locking the door tight, only for the whole building to collapse.
"What do I do... what do I do..."
Lu Changsheng forced himself to calm down as his mind began racing.
"Repair the Earth Vein... right, I have to repair the Earth Vein!"
"Only by stitching the broken Earth Vein back together and stabilizing the Earth Qi across a hundred-li radius can I save Nameless Low Mountain!"
But how could he repair it?
Before you continue