Deep in the Gobi Desert, within a cavern buried by windblown sand, dust drifted slowly through faint shafts of light filtering through cracks in the rock. Han Li stood motionless before the enormous Ancient Teleportation Array, his Profound Yin Spirit Eye carefully sweeping over every carved line and every rune. The air carried the weathered aura of antiquity, along with an exceedingly faint yet incomparably pure spatial fluctuation.
This array... is anything but ordinary. Han Li's heart tightened. Its complexity far surpassed that of any teleportation array he had ever seen. Many of its runic structures were entirely unfamiliar, seemingly involving profound applications of Space Laws. Even severely damaged, its lingering fluctuations still faintly resonated with the spiritual power within his Golden Core. He took out a Jade Slip and meticulously recorded everything he observed, especially the crucial foundation runes that still glimmered with faint light.
Just as he focused his spiritual sense on copying a strange, vortex-shaped rune at the array's center, something suddenly changed!
The wisp of profound yin fiend essence that had lain dormant in his dantian began trembling violently without warning, conveying an overwhelming sense of hunger! Like a starving wretch catching sight of a feast, it surged out of his dantian on its own, beyond his control, and became a slender thread of dark silver that shot toward the vortex rune like lightning!
"Hm?" Startled, Han Li instinctively tried to withdraw the fiend essence, but it was already too late!
Hiss-!
The instant the dark-silver thread touched the rune, it gave off a barely audible sound. The rune suddenly blazed with dazzling light, and a vast torrent of pure profound yin fiend qi, bearing an endless sense of desolation and deathly stillness, flooded back along the thread of fiend essence like waters bursting through a