Death Stone Forest seemed to have no end.
Pale stone pillars stood one after another in eternal darkness, their honeycomb-like holes resembling countless hollow eye sockets that watched intruders with cold indifference. The wind had become strange here, sometimes shrill as weeping, sometimes low as a sigh, carrying decayed dust and frigid currents of energy.
The deeper he went, the more unnatural space became. Light twisted, and his sense of direction gradually vanished. In some areas, even the flow of time seemed subtly distorted. One second, he felt he had walked for a long time; the next, he found that he had merely been stepping in place.
Dark-red crystals began to appear on the ground, like dried bloodstains, emitting faint energy fluctuations that made the heart pound. Occasionally, he saw twisted corpses long devoid of life, crystallized into the ground or embedded in stone pillars, dead for who knew how many ages.
Neji moved with exceptional caution. His Divine Eye was fully open. Not only did he need to discern the energy traps and spatial folds ahead, but he also had to analyze the chaotic force fields everywhere that disrupted perception. Chaos True Essence stretched out like the most sensitive feelers, sensing the truth of every inch of ground in advance.
Even so, he encountered danger several times. Once, when he stepped into an apparently flat area, the ground beneath him instantly turned into a quicksand trap that devoured everything. Countless dark-red energy tendrils reached up from beneath the sand and coiled around him, carrying powerful corrosive and draining force. Had he not reacted swiftly, shattering the tendrils with Chaos True Essence and using the recoil to escape, he might already have met with disaster.
Another time, as he passed through a narrow gap between two stone pillars, the stone