The evening breeze stirred his clothes, but he stood utterly motionless, like an iron stake driven into the ground.
About thirty feet from his feet, the soil was shifting.
Cao Xianming's pupils abruptly contracted.
Yang Yong smelled earth.
It was no ordinary earthy smell.
It was deeper, heavier, carrying an aged chill, as though it had been churned up from deep underground.
A tiny mound rose on the soil's surface. A crack split its top, and a wisp of exceedingly faint blue-black mist seeped out, swirled once in the air, and dispersed.
Yang Yong did not move.
His thumb gently rubbed the saber's hilt, his fingertip feeling its texture.
In the corner of his eye, the crack slowly widened. Soil trickled down, exposing a hole as thick as a finger.
The hole was pitch-black, its bottom nowhere in sight, yet wind blew out of it...
Cold wind, carrying moisture and the faintest trace of a snake's rank scent.
Yang Yong's nostrils twitched.
A snake's scent.
And it belonged to a living creature, fresh as though it had just crawled out of the water.
He moved his right hand off the saber's hilt and let it hang at his side, his fingers slightly spread.
Extremely fine strands of silvery-white light swam around his fingertips, darting beneath his skin like capillaries.
That was the residual heat spilling out as the Thousand-Hammer, Hundred-Refinement Furnace operated within his body.
Two points of light suddenly appeared inside the hole.
Green.
Cold and eerie, like two beads of ice embedded in the darkness.
The two lights bobbed up and down and moved a few inches outward. Immediately afterward, an enormous snake head covered in blue-black scales squeezed out of the hole.
The snake's head was the size of a washbasin, with a patch of silvery-white