That place had once been the Pills Dao square.
Every million years, the Azure Mysterious Immortal Domain held the Mysterious Garden Pill Meet here. Pills Dao cultivators from the Myriad Heavens and Worlds gathered for the occasion, furnace fires burned through the night, and the fragrance of medicinal herbs filled the highest heavens.
It was the grandest Pills Dao gathering in the entire Immortal Dao World. Someone had once said that on that day, the Pill Qi drifting above the Azure Mysterious Immortal Domain alone was enough to make an ordinary cultivator collapse into a seated position and break through on the spot.
Chen Xun had also attended that Pill Meet, playing the pig to devour the tiger.
Now, all that remained of the square was an enormous crater.
The earth along its rim had vitrified, black and smooth. These were the traces left by the unimaginable heat of that catastrophe, which had fused this land forever into its present shape, like a scar that would never heal.
Chen Xun stood at the crater's edge, looking down into the darkness at its bottom. He stood silently for a very, very long time, motionless as a stone statue.
Big Black Ox did not hurry him.
He stood behind Chen Xun in silence as well, his bovine eyes lowered, their gaze resting somewhere unknown.
The wind swept through the crater with a low moan, like the last breath this land still held, leaking slowly, slowly, from a wound that would never close.
In the end, Chen Xun said nothing.
He turned and walked on.
Farther in lay the former site of the Azure Mysterious Immortal Domain's Scripture Pavilion.
Nothing remained there, not even ruins.
That catastrophe had completely vaporized the place. Even the ground had sunk, forming a deep hollow several miles