The instant the stone doors cracked open, a sinister chill squeezed through the gap.
It was no ordinary cold.
This chill did not act on the skin. It seeped straight into the marrow, like an invisible ice snake climbing up the spine and sinking its fangs into the back of the skull.
Inside the passage, thirty-one young people tensed almost simultaneously.
Some instinctively reached for the weapons at their waists, some roused their qi and blood to resist the sinister cold invading their bodies, and others blanched, their lips losing all color in an instant.
Li Xiang reacted differently from the others.
He neither roused his qi and blood nor activated any defensive means.
The instant the yin qi came within a meter of him, [Martial Dao Pure Yang] circulated automatically. Its constant yang-flame magnetic field silently barred all invading cold.
But his attention was not on himself.
An exceedingly faint, spectral blue glimmer flashed through his eyes as [Dharma Eye] activated, weaving black-and-white lines into a net across his vision.
Beyond the stone doors lay bottomless darkness.
Two utterly different auras flowed through that darkness.
One was heavy, somber, and deathly still, carrying the sickly-sweet stench of decay—the lingering dragon vein death qi of the Dijiang Corpse.
The other was thin, sharp, and upright, flickering amid the death qi like an invisible blade stretched across the depths of the darkness.
That was the lingering martial intent of Lord Guan's heroic soul.
The two forces pulled, collided, and mingled in the space beyond the stone doors, forming a dangerous, shifting equilibrium.
The fulcrum of that balance lay right at the threshold.
Cross it, and they would enter another world.
Li Xiang withdrew his Dharma Eye and swiftly filed away everything he had observed.
Beside him, Chu Tian had noticed something