"Ah..."
Faintly, Mo Jiao's heart-rending screams, filled with unwillingness and defiance, still echoed through the stone chamber.
Though he was not in the Three Flowers Realm, he had reached Sky Soaring Great Perfection.
To fall like this at the hands of a Human Race member at eighth meridian opening like Lin Shisan was an insult, a naked humiliation.
He could not close his eyes in death.
At the same time, a vast, chaotic mass of Divine Sense fragments surged into Lin Shisan's sea of consciousness through the cauldron's mouth like a flood bursting through a dam.
Those fragments carried the lingering images of fifteen hundred years of memories, weighing heavily upon his Divine Sense.
He saw what the Purple Sky Dragon Palace had looked like in its earliest days, saw Mo Jiao's youthful face, saw him entrenched deep within the Dragon Palace's earth vein, spending long years embedding himself, bit by bit, into the core of the Dragon Palace's restrictions, until he became Dragonfolk, second only to one dragon.
Those images were not continuous. They came in fits and starts, like old silk that had been torn apart and forcibly stitched back together.
But one image was particularly clear.
Mo Jiao stood in a dim stone chamber, its walls embedded with one restriction rune after another.
At the center of the runes, a figure sat upright upon a stone platform.
He wore purple-and-gold robes, the dragon horns on his forehead dull and lightless, his entire body wreathed in heavy deathly energy.
The Purple Sky Dragon King.
Lin Shisan's pupils abruptly contracted.
The Purple Sky Dragon King in the image seemed like an entirely different person, his face an unnatural grayish white.
Fine, dark markings had even appeared at the corners of his forehead, like veins spreading across a withered leaf,