A Place to Return To
Long Tian stood on the powder layer for a moment, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dim light below.
The powder remained flat beneath his feet. He glanced down—the outline of the footprints left by his boots was clear, the edges intact, like stepping on some kind of continuously compacted fine sand. He took two steps, and a second set of footprints appeared next to the first, evenly spaced. The powder layer didn't actively refill after he passed; it simply maintained its pressed-out state.
Yu Jin leaped down from the edge of the opening and landed on the platform, causing a small ripple of powder as he landed. However, the ripple subsided on its own after he regained his footing, like water returning to its smooth surface after the pebbles have settled. The light from the dark gray bead on his chest continued to shine, illuminating an area of about ten feet around him. Within this illuminated area, Long Tian saw that the platform surface was not completely smooth—a shallow groove extended along the outline of the platform at the edge, about a palm's width wide and level with the powder layer, like a deliberately dug channel. The bottom of the channel was not covered by powder, revealing a smooth, dark stone surface, on which fine, vertically arranged patterns could be faintly seen.
Long Tian walked halfway around the guide channel. The vertical lines on the bottom of the channel were evenly spaced, as if they had been repeatedly carved with the same tool. He squatted down and used his fingers to feel the depth and direction of the lines. The lines extended into the darkness outside the platform, where they were cut off by darkness at the edge of his vision. The Dragon Shadow hovered above the platform, its wings half-spread, and a layer of light evenly scattered down, illuminating a circular area in the center of the platform. Within the illuminated area, Long Tian saw a slightly raised part in the very center of the platform, like the exposed top of a disc buried in the ground.
He walked over and squatted down beside the raised section. It was indeed a disc embedded in the ground, about a foot in diameter, with its edges flush with the stone surface of the platform. Its surface was covered with a layer of grayish-white sediment that was finer than the surrounding powder, like a thin shell formed after being covered by tiny particles for a long time. Long Tian placed his palm on it, his fingertips touching the surface of the disc. The pulse of the Origin Return Pearl entered the disc from his palm—the disc warmed slightly under his hand, and fine cracks appeared on the sediment layer, like an eggshell being cracked by internal forces. The direction of the cracks was similar to the tortoise shell cracks on Dragon Shadow's forehead, radiating outward from the center. As the sediment continued to heat up, it gradually crumbled into small pieces, falling off to reveal the disc's material itself—a dark gray, translucent stone. On the surface, one could see flowing patterns inside, like the direction of flow frozen in solidified lava during the cooling process.
Yu Jin walked to the other side of the disc and squatted down. He also placed his palm on it, and the light from the dark gray bead flowed through his palm into the surface of the disc. The flowing patterns inside the disc changed direction the moment he touched it, and two forces from different sources converged inside the disc— Long Tian's Origin Return Pearl pulsed along one of the patterns, and Yu Jin's Power of Origin flowed along the other. The two paths intersected at the center of the disc, and a point of light lit up at the intersection. The color of the light was a uniform grayish-white, like the texture of morning mist evenly illuminated by sunlight.
Long Tian and Yu Jin simultaneously withdrew their hands. The grayish-white light at the center of the disc did not extinguish after they withdrew their hands; it continued to glow inside the disc, like a wick trapped between layers of stone, burning continuously. The dark stone surfaces of the guide channels on the platform began to conduct light sequentially along the grain the moment the light shone, like lamp oil seeping upwards along a wick. After the light had traveled a full circle along the guide channels, the entire floor pattern of the circular hall lit up, illuminating layer by layer from the center outwards, like a lit concentric ring continuously spreading flames outwards.
When the light reached the walls of the hall, a large number of patterns that were previously invisible appeared on the surface—dragon patterns, waves, continuous zigzag lines, and rows of symbols. The arrangement of the patterns belonged to the same system as the stone walls in the East Sea Caves, but the quantity here was larger and denser. Long Tian stood in the center of the platform, looking up at the patterns on the entire wall. The Dragon Shadow rose a bit behind him, and the light layer spread outward, illuminating the patterns higher up on the wall as well.
At the highest point covered by the Dragon Shadow Light, he saw a dotted line pattern identical to that on the nautical chart. The dotted line started from the middle of the continent, passed through the East Sea Islands and the arc-shaped turning point, and continued to extend in the southeast, crossing the entire surface of the wall before converging at a position carved into a circular groove. The edge of the groove was engraved with a ring of fine symbols, the arrangement of which echoed the chisel marks at the end of the straight line on the nautical chart.
The vertical line on Dragon Shadow's forehead lit up for a moment the moment Long Tian noticed the image. It didn't turn on, but remained lit, like a well whose water level had dropped to its lowest point after days of drought, yet a layer of water still seeped from the bottom to maintain its moisture. Long Tian reconstructed the path of the image, combining the spatial relationships of the platform, disc, diversion channel, and wall patterns, and found a coordinate point he hadn't noticed before along the extended direction of the pattern—about a hundred miles off the southeast coast of the continent, a small area of sea without any place names marked.
He didn't read every single line of the diagram, but memorized its overall direction and the position of the circular groove mark. Yu Jin stood beside him, his gaze also fixed on the direction of the dotted lines. There was no need for them to speak. After shining for a while, the light on the wall began to gradually recede, first at the edges, then the middle layer, and finally the central disc, like a lit lamp whose wick gradually shortens upward as it is blown out by the wind. The platform sank back into the faint light from the dome of the hall, leaving only the layer of light from the Dragon Shadow floating above it.
Long Tian gathered the loose sediment and debris from the disc's surface and piled it around its edge. He stood up and took one last look at the outline of the circular groove gradually disappearing into the darkness. He turned and walked back to the opening he had come from. Dragon Shadow followed behind him, pressing against his back, while Yu Jin followed from the side. As the two climbed back to the main hall floor through the opening, the stone slabs at the edge of the opening slowly moved back to their original positions after they stood on the ground, closing silently, like a door that didn't need lubrication, slowly returning to its place under its own weight. The patterns on the hall floor completely darkened after the slabs closed, and the designs on the walls also faded back into the natural color of the stone. The dragon head relief on the dome silently looked down, the carved lines of the two heads and four eyes converging into two almost invisible gray lines in the finest shadows, like eyes that had been staring for too long and could maintain their gaze without blinking.