Yin Mountain Realm

A faint breeze began to stir within the flower bed. Yellow Wind Little Sage's golden fur gleamed faintly in the darkness, while the fine sand swirling around him began to rotate and flow.

Light twisted and refracted through the windblown sand, blurring Yellow Wind Little Sage's figure until he looked like a translucent shadow.

This was a basic application of the Flying Sand and Rolling Stones Spell. Though it could not render him completely invisible, under dim lighting, ordinary eyes could barely detect him.

Relying on wind arts to conceal himself, Yellow Wind Little Sage avoided the pedestrians and entered the metro station.

The metro station after nightfall was utterly different from how it was during the day.

Most of the bustling daytime crowds had dispersed. Only a few scattered passengers remained in the vast station hall, most of them looking down at their phones, their faces weary and numb. No one noticed the warped patch of light and shadow in the corner.

Yellow Wind Little Sage followed the escalator downward and soon arrived at the platform.

Peering through the gaps in the safety barrier, he saw a pitch-black metro tunnel ahead, with only a few faint lights barely visible in the distance.

Howling wind occasionally echoed from deep within the tunnel, mixed with the shrill scrape of metal. The air was thick with a bone-piercing, frigid chill.

Even while remotely controlling him from home, Zhou Yao could clearly feel that piercing cold through his avatar.

Taking a deep breath, Yellow Wind Little Sage leaped over the safety barrier and landed beside the tracks.

Yellow Wind Little Sage pressed all four limbs close to the ground, his tail slightly raised to maintain balance. The wind and sand around him grew denser, completely enveloping him and blending him into the surrounding darkness.

A long whistle sounded in the distance. Accompanied by an increasingly loud rumble, a metro train emerged from the depths of the tunnel.

The train briefly stopped at Stonepress Station. After all the passengers had disembarked, it continued onward into the unknown depths of the tunnel.

The train roared past, and the gale it stirred scattered some of the sand around Yellow Wind Little Sage. Yet he remained firmly pressed into a recess in the wall, allowing the massive beast to brush past him.

A ghastly white light shone from within the carriages. It was clearly the final train, yet for some reason, Yellow Wind Little Sage saw several figures inside.

Some wore hospital gowns, while others wandered between the carriages dressed in red burial clothes. Every face was equally pale and gloomy.

As the train entered the darkness, the lights inside gradually went out, and those wandering figures were swallowed by the dark along with them.

The train departed, and the tunnel sank once more into darkness and silence.

"Those were... dead souls?"

Through the eyes of his Mythic Walker, Zhou Yao saw something beyond his understanding on the Yin Mountain Metro for the first time, and several suspicions about the metro suddenly rose in his heart.

But the current situation clearly left no time to test those suspicions. Yellow Wind Little Sage stirred up the wind and sand around himself again and ventured deeper into the tunnel.

His claws crunched softly over the gravel beside the rails, but the sound was quickly drowned out by the wind echoing through the tunnel.

The farther he went, the stronger that icy aura became. It felt as though countless invisible fingers were brushing over his skin, bringing wave after wave of bone-deep cold.

Yellow Wind Little Sage could clearly sense that the cold aura contained faint Mythic Factors, identical to those Zhou Yao had absorbed every day for the past two months.

And this phenomenon further confirmed Zhou Yao's guess.

The entrances to the Celestial Circuit Realm were not fixed. Mythic Invasions, battles between great powers, and the descent of Godforsaken Ruins could all create temporary entrances to the Celestial Circuit Realm, so the Federation could not maintain complete control over them.

As a product of a Mythic Invasion, the Yin Mountain Metro was essentially the result of the Celestial Circuit Realm merging with the real world.

In theory, as long as he found the node connecting the Yin Mountain Metro to the Celestial Circuit Realm, he could bypass the Federation's control and step directly into the Celestial Circuit Realm.

Based on Zhou Yao's observations over the past two months, the ever-expanding new platforms of the Yin Mountain Metro were the most unusual. They were highly likely to be where the Yin Mountain Metro's node lay!

The Zhou Yao of the past had merely been an ordinary person, incapable of entering the metro tunnels to investigate.

Now that he possessed Yellow Wind Little Sage's avatar, Zhou Yao was finally qualified to truly set foot in the Celestial Circuit Realm.

Although the node created by this Mythic Invasion was unstable and carried certain risks, Zhou Yao knew well that if he did not dare to take a risk now, then once the Yin Mountain Metro continued expanding, he would face an even greater crisis in the end.

Yellow Wind Little Sage accelerated, his golden figure streaking through the darkness like a shooting star as he raced deeper into the tunnel.

As Yellow Wind Little Sage pressed onward, even the last faint glimmer in the tunnel was completely swallowed by darkness. Absolute blackness shrouded everything, as though it had become tangible and cut Yellow Wind Little Sage off from the outside world entirely.

Then, amid that dead silence, faint fragmented sounds could be heard.

At first, they were only the softest murmurs, like dry leaves rustling in the wind. But soon, the sounds multiplied and grew louder, surging in from every direction.

They were countless overlapping whispers—men and women, old and young. Some voices were shrill, others hoarse, all brimming with venom and despair as they burrowed relentlessly into Yellow Wind Little Sage's body.

Far away at home, Zhou Yao closed his eyes, his consciousness fully immersed in Yellow Wind Little Sage's senses. The whispers echoed beside his ears with an eerie rhythm, like some ancient curse aimed at the living.

His brows furrowed instinctively, but soon relaxed.

These whispers were attacks aimed at the soul, but Yellow Wind Little Sage was an avatar he controlled, essentially an extension of his consciousness. He had no independent soul at all.

Those soul-targeting attacks were like blades hacking at empty air, unable to find anything to strike.

The whispers became ever more intense, gradually warping into piercing shrieks and mad laughter.

Yet Yellow Wind Little Sage merely controlled the wind and sand around him and raced onward with his head down. His amber eyes remained bright in the darkness. To him, those whispers were nothing more than irrelevant background noise.

Just then, a faint light appeared ahead, like the glow of a firefly in boundless darkness.

Yellow Wind Little Sage sped toward it. The light gradually expanded, growing from the size of a needlepoint to the size of a palm, then to the size of a washbasin. At the same time, the concentration of Mythic Factors around him abruptly surged, pouring endlessly from that light ahead.

Yellow Wind Little Sage suddenly leaped through the light, and the scene before him changed in an instant.

No longer was it a narrow, enclosed tunnel, but an open expanse. The dim sky held neither sun, moon, nor stars—only a monotonous, oppressive gray.

The earth was gray-black, with endless mountains rising and falling like waves. Those peaks held not the slightest trace of life, only bare rock and exposed soil. The air reeked of decay and death, as though this world had been abandoned for countless ages.

Yellow Wind Little Sage turned to look back. Behind him lay an enormous canyon, over a hundred meters wide and bottomless, its nearly vertical cliff walls covered in savage cracks. Boundless darkness filled the canyon like a gigantic wound torn open in the earth.

The light Yellow Wind Little Sage had just passed through was a fissure at the canyon's edge.

Is this the Celestial Circuit Realm corresponding to Yin Mountain City? The thought had only just surfaced in Zhou Yao's mind when a gust of sinister wind arose from nowhere, howling down from the sky and sweeping up dust and stones from the ground. Then a black shadow arrived with the wind.

It was a vicious ghost, towering over two meters tall, its entire body wrapped in tattered black strips of cloth. The exposed skin was bluish gray. It gripped a steel fork in its hand; the shaft was thick with rust, but the prongs gleamed with cold light.

The ghost landed not far in front of Yellow Wind Little Sage, its feet striking the ground with a dull thud. Its miserable green eyes locked onto Yellow Wind Little Sage as it split its mouth in a piercing laugh.

"Hehehe! To think I'd catch an intruder here!" Its voice was harsh and grating, like two rusted iron plates scraping together.

The ghost raised its steel fork and swung it through the air, the prongs slicing through the wind with a shrill whistle. It took a step forward, reeking of rot and radiating an intense icy aura, while the savage gleam in its eyes burned ever brighter.

"Come! Let's have a little spar!"