Within the pitch-black passage, Li Yan crawled forward inch by inch in a strange posture, one hand raised high above his head, the other hanging down by his leg.
Li Yan neither dared nor was able to retreat. The entrance through which he had entered seemed to have been sealed shut.
Earlier, Li Yan had kicked backward several times, but the sensation from behind was no different from the walls at his sides. It simply would not budge.
As for the stretch of passage he had already crawled through, he could still move back and forth along it, but he certainly would not do that.
In the pitch-black, incomparably scorching passage, the way ahead seemed endless. As one person crawled forward slowly, the space that denied him any freedom of movement brought psychological oppression and eternal solitude.
It was not that Li Yan did not wish to circulate his spiritual power and move quickly. Advancing even a little here required enormous physical strength. He could not waste spiritual power before determining the exact situation ahead.
Within a dark, narrow space, a person would gradually lose their sense of time. You did not know how long had passed; perhaps it had only been a day, yet you would think it had been many days and nights.
In the end, even a mere moment would feel as long as decades in your heart—so helpless, so agonizing.
In such an environment, the best course was to calm oneself and then slowly seek a way out.
Unfortunately, the narrow, dark passage Li Yan occupied would not allow anyone to calm down, because it possessed temperatures capable of melting mortals in an instant.
Suffocating heat constantly surged through the passage. Even cultivators, while resisting it, would grow increasingly restless and oppressed as their spiritual power