Compared with the brightly lit first floor, the Second Level was much dimmer.
The instant Su Jiu landed, the first things that caught her attention were the damp earth beneath her feet and the pungent odor rushing into her face.
Su Jiu surveyed her surroundings, the corners of her lips lifting slightly. With solid ground occupying less than a tenth of the space, she had still managed to land on it. Her luck was not too bad.
There was very little solid ground on the Second Level. Only two intersecting paths crossed the space, each narrow strip just wide enough for one person to walk along.
The two intersecting earthen paths divided the space into four sections. Each resembled an enormous container filled with bloody water from some unknown source. That pungent odor came from this bloody water.
The earth was damp because it, too, had been soaked through with the bloody water.
Bubbles rose from the four blood pools from time to time, and divine sense could not reveal what else lay inside them.
At each of the four ends of the paths stood a statue with a hideous face. Neither quite human nor quite ghost, they looked exceptionally terrifying.
Su Jiu recalled the patterns traced by the flowing spiritual qi on the second-floor windows when she had been outside the Palace. They seemed to depict precisely these four things.
Aside from these, a huge cauldron stood at the junction of the two earthen paths.
Su Jiu was certain that this was no pill-refining furnace. The cauldron's opening was pitch-black. She tentatively tried extending her divine sense into the furnace to inspect its contents, but another barrier blocked her. This barrier was clearly harder to break than the one on the first floor.
There were also murals painted on