White Tiger Ridge!
Unlike the Azure Dragon River, with its surging dragon qi, this place was filled with suffocating geng metal fiendish qi.
Gales howled, whipping up not dust but countless grains of golden gravel as sharp as tiny blades. They sliced through the air with vicious hisses. Jagged rocks jutted out like a giant beast's fangs and claws, and the entire ridge exuded a savage, deathly stillness, as though waiting to devour its prey.
Luo Yue pursued that faint yet bitterly cold sensation, ignoring the fiendish golden winds that could tear apart an ordinary Four Extremes cultivator's flesh. As she circulated her Mysterious Art, a jade-like luster flowed over her skin. With divine light shielding her as well, she weathered the corrosive fiendish qi without slowing in the slightest.
Following the direction where the black shadow had last merged into the mountain, she arrived before an enormous tiger den.
The cavern was deep and dark, its entrance framed by grotesque rocks like a tiger's throat. Dense geng metal fiendish qi mingled with a stale, bloody stench and gushed out from within. From farther inside came faint, unsettling fluctuations like rattling chains, echoing the sensation of the shackled dragon vein across the way at the Azure Dragon River.
That thing's aura had vanished into the darkness at the entrance.
"Hiding in your lair?"
Luo Yue sneered. Her Qi Gazing Art pierced the darkness like a sharp sword. She could sense that deep within this cavern lay one of the core sources of fiendish qi sustaining the "trapped tiger" configuration.
Without the slightest hesitation, she stepped into the tiger den.
Strange ores embedded in the cavern's pitch-black walls emitted a pale, sickly glow, barely illuminating the path ahead. The passage wound downward over uneven ground. The deeper she went, the heavier