Dragon Platform Mountain was vast, a winding mountain range that stretched across the land. Seen from afar, it resembled an immense dragon crouching on a high platform, hence its name.
Hidden Dragon Pool lay at the summit and was equally vast, its waters as expansive as several lakes joined together. A thin mist shrouded it year-round, and it saw sunlight only a few days out of the year.
That was why, even before the Spiritual Qi Catastrophe, legends claimed that dragons lived in the pool and that the Dragon King forbade outsiders from entering.
Only when the Spiritual Qi Catastrophe descended did people learn that places perpetually dark and damp like this might or might not harbor dragons, but they certainly harbored evil spirits. Gradually, it became a gathering place for monsters and fiends, with evil spirits everywhere in the mountains and pools.
Later, human cultivators expended considerable effort to clear the place out.
After the Five Great Immortal Sects suppressed the Fox Demon Lady and thoroughly eradicated the evil spirits within the city, they began building the City-Guarding Grand Formation. Dragon Platform Mountain posed a difficult engineering problem at the time. Including the entire mountain would require extending a substantial section of the formation outward, consuming far more resources.
But leaving all the peaks outside would mean losing a large swath of terrain and forcibly altering the formation's course.
The final plan was to cut through the mountain with the City-Guarding Grand Formation, incorporating the treasured inner lands with their flourishing spirit veins into the city while leaving the remote outer mountains to the Wasteland Zone. Although this solved the problem, it left a new one: Hidden Dragon Pool's waters connected to a complicated network of underground waterways, and monsters would occasionally find their way in from the Wasteland