The Beginning of Exploration

(Poor Sixue discovered Qidian had muted her! How miserable—what happened? She asked an administrator, who said it would take a day or two to restore her account. Boo-hoo! Sixue hadn't done anything except reply to readers' reviews, and then... that was that! Once her account was restored, she'd answer the rest of the reviews one by one!)

The group returned to the cave.

Er Dongsheng sat on the freshly made sand bed, staring at the stone in his hand and the cracks running across it. He sank into thought.

This strange Demon Core was just like a rock. No, it was a rock! Its composition was almost identical to that of the islands floating around them. Yet it was unnaturally heavy, weighing a thousand pounds in his hand. The only thing Er Dongsheng had seen with such weight was azure-gold demonstone. Its density was astonishing! The floating islands were nothing like it. Their stone was so light that a piece of the same size weighed barely a third as much as water.

But why did this thing have life when the other stones did not?

What made it different?

Crack!

He squeezed, crushing the little Rock Core completely. Like a piece of weathered stone, it crumbled to powder beneath his immense strength.

"System, magnify the image!"

The image enlarged layer by layer. At the finest scale, the tiny grains came into focus. Most looked like ordinary rock, but Er Dongsheng found what appeared to be markings etched onto the surfaces of some particles!

Compared with the eerie patterns on that Undead creature, these markings were a jumble, as though someone had scrawled them there at random!

What were they?

"Big brother, it's time to eat!" Seeing Er Dongsheng lost in thought again, the little girl could not help reminding