The entrance to the Middle Cavern was a natural fissure less than five feet wide. Its rock walls pressed close together, and at the narrowest point, only one person could squeeze through sideways.
The moment Li Xiang ducked inside, his Earth Vein Affinity jolted beneath his feet.
Something was wrong.
The thought sprang into his mind almost by instinct.
The Dragon Vein's presence in the Outer Cavern had been strong, but the underlying rules governing its flow were broadly the same as outside. Only its density had increased by an order of magnitude.
The Middle Cavern was different.
The pulse of the earth veins coming through the rock beneath his feet had changed rhythm.
In the Outer Cavern, the earth veins had beaten like a human heart: steady and measured, beat by beat.
Here, that rhythm suddenly quickened and turned erratic, like a sick heart jolted into irregular spasms.
Li Xiang's spine tightened slightly.
The three-dimensional map generated by his Dragon-Seeking Instinct blurred across a vast area the instant he entered the Middle Cavern.
The earth-vein nodes that had once been clear now flickered in and out, their positions and bearings shifting subtly but constantly.
This was the distortion of heaven and earth's rules that the Eighth Dragon Head had spoken of.
The earth-vein nodes were drifting.
That meant the sense of direction he had built in the Outer Cavern could serve only as a reference here, not something he could rely on.
The fissure widened as they went, and the space ahead opened up.
The five of them and one beast emerged into a spacious underground stone hall.
The ceiling was high, at least fifteen zhang by his estimate. Fluorescent minerals were much sparser along the walls than in the Outer Cavern, and their glow had changed from ghostly