"Roar~" "Roar!" With two clear chants, the two dragon-shaped figures before the painted barge surged forth with the music. After winding through the air for a moment, they immediately hauled the barge to a halt in midair.
Then, Green Radiance flickered all over the two dragon shapes. As the radiance grew ever stronger, the dragons roared again and charged toward the stone wall. "Wuwu..." Two impacts rang out as the dragon shapes plunged into the wall. Immediately, countless rays and shadows burst from the stone wall. The instant those lights fell upon the dragons, they transformed into green stems like coiling horned dragons. The lights then followed the green stems and enveloped the painted barge, covering it entirely in moments! The instant the light and shadows sealed shut, the thunderous roar throughout the abyss vanished. Moreover, through this veil of light, the entire abyss changed somewhat! Xiao Hua and the others' painted barge had transformed into a tiny pavilion, upon which the character "Nine" glimmered with faint radiance. Vines curled around the pavilion, while the water mist filling the sky seemed like countless hands, brushing those slender vines.
Besides Xiao Hua's pavilion, eight other pavilions of differing designs stood throughout the abyss. They emitted lights of various colors, and Xiao Hua's group could not see what lay within them. Yet the numbers outside the pavilions—"One," "Two," and so on—were unmistakably clear. At the center of the nine pavilions, at the heart of the abyss, was another mound resembling a hillock. Two old men sat casually atop it. One held a fist-sized wine flask, while a chessboard floated between them in midair. They drank and played chess, as though they had not seen the surrounding pavilions at all.
The moment Xiao Hua and the others' pavilion appeared, nine beams of differently