Southwestern Great Jin, the Kunwu Mountain Range.
The mountain rose in towering grandeur, like a pillar supporting heaven, thrusting deep into the clouds. Its outer slopes were shrouded year-round in iridescent spiritual mist. As the mist churned, thunderous rumbles sounded faintly within-the phenomenon produced when the mountain's internal restrictions operated on their own and clashed with the spiritual energy outside. Countless enormous, broken stone pillars and ruined walls were faintly visible across its surface. Their runes, long stripped of spiritual power, resembled the fossils of giant beasts, silently recounting the devastating calamity that had swept across the entire human realm in ancient times.
Today, this ancient forbidden land, silent for untold tens of thousands of years, finally reached the moment of its awakening.
A dark sea of people had already gathered at the mountain's foot. Streaks of flight light in every color dotted the air and valleys as densely as stars on a summer night. Baleful energy surged into the sky, casting the once spiritually vibrant valley in bizarre, shifting hues, as though a grand procession of a hundred ghosts were roaming the night.
Han Li stood on a secluded high cliff at the edge of the crowd, still dressed in an unremarkable blue robe, his aura restrained like a deep pool. Beside him stood Shi Jian, the manager of the Myriad Treasures Pavilion in Heaven's Secret City. By now, this knowledgeable old man at the Nascent Soul Early Stage had lost all his usual composure and shrewdness. In their place were the awe and fervor of someone facing a mighty power of heaven and earth. Even his hands trembled slightly with excitement.
"Fellow Daoist Li, this is Kunwu Mountain." Shi Jian gazed at the colossal mountain that seemed to link heaven and earth, his voice trembling slightly with excitement