sinovels Chapter 944 Outside the Arena
Chapter 944 Outside the Arena
Lin Qiye stepped out of the heavy black iron door.
The door slammed shut behind them with a dull thud.
The sound was like some kind of ancient sigh.
He raised his head.
The sky was gray.
It wasn't the leaden gray of a cloudy day, nor the oppressive darkness before a storm.
It's a gray that's hard to describe.
It's as if someone has soaked the entire sky in a vat of stagnant water for millions of years, until even its color has rotted away.
The sky was gray and hazy, with no sun, no moon, and no stars.
Only clumps of unidentified, fluffy matter were slowly drifting down.
The fluffy material was grayish-white with dark red scorch marks at the edges, like paper ash that had been burned but not completely burned.
They drifted down silently from the depths of the sky, endlessly.
Lin Qiye reached out and caught one of them.
The thing landed in my palm; it felt very light, almost weightless.
But when he gently rubbed it between two fingers, the fluffy substance crumbled into powder and slipped through his fingers.
The powder is grayish-white.
It has a very faint fishy smell.
Lin Qiye lowered his head and looked down at his feet.
His boot got stuck in something.
It's not soil, it's not sand.
It is an extremely fine, grayish-white powder.
The powder covered the entire landscape as far as the eye could see, a thick, bottomless layer.
Lin Qiye lifted his foot and took a step forward.
puff-
The boots sank right up to my ankles.
When he pulled his foot out, the powder kicked up by the sole of his boot slid off, revealing a shallow footprint.
But in just a few breaths, the footprint was slowly filled in by the newly fallen grayish-white powder.
Lin Qiye squatted down and picked up a pinch of powder with his fingers.
The powder was crushed between the fingertips.
It contains extremely fine debris.
It's not sand.
It is bone.
It's ashes.
Lin Qiye stood up and looked into the distance.
wilderness.
An endless wasteland.
There are no mountains, no water, no trees, and no grass.
There was no trace of life.
There are only these layers upon layers of ashes, piled up to an unknown depth.
The grayish-white, fluffy things in the sky continued to fall.
Each piece of ashes that falls adds another layer of thickness to the layer of ashes.
Lin Qiye stood still and watched quietly for a while.
He was counting.
Take a breath.
Two breaths.
Three breaths.
In those three breaths, the layer of ashes beneath his feet thickened by about the thickness of a hair.
He looked up into the distance.
At the edge of the wasteland, the horizon is blurred under the gray sky, making it impossible to distinguish where the land ends and the sky begins.
But at the edge of that blurry horizon, he vaguely saw something.
bone.
Huge bones.
The bones protruded from the ash layer, like broken white pillars, piercing the sky crookedly.
The thickest one, by visual estimation, has a diameter of at least a hundred feet.
It was covered with marks from being chopped and hacked, as well as some charred burn marks.
Those are not the bones of an ordinary creature.
Those were the remains left behind by some incredibly massive being after its death.
Even though only bones remain, it still exudes a chilling aura of power.
Lin Qiye withdrew his gaze.
He didn't rush forward.
He stood in front of the black iron gate outside the east side of the arena and carefully surveyed his surroundings.
The arena is a huge black stone building.
From the outside, it looks like a giant beast that has been forcibly nailed into the wasteland.
The surrounding walls were towering, their surfaces covered with dark red runes that shimmered faintly in the dim light, like countless sleeping eyes.
Every so often, a thick black stone pillar is embedded in the wall, with heavy chains wrapped around its body. The other end of the chains is embedded in the ash layer, and it is unknown what it is connected to.
Lin Qiye glanced down the chain.
The chains were engraved with fine patterns, somewhat similar to the blood pact on the Black Source Bone Fragment.
He looked back.
The two black-armored guards at the entrance of the arena had retreated inside.
The black iron gate slowly closed behind him.
Boom!
The door was completely shut.
From that moment on, he was all alone.
Lin Qiye took the jade pendant out of his pocket.
His number was engraved on the jade plaque, along with a line of smaller characters: "Duration of absence: three months."
Three months.
The Yuanqing Pill must be found within three months.
He carefully put away the jade pendant, raised his head, and looked once again at the desolate wasteland of ashes.
Those unidentified grayish-white fluffy substances are still falling.
It drifted down quietly.
There is no wind.
The entire wasteland was deathly silent.
There were no insects chirping, no birds singing, no flowing water, and no wind.
Even the sound of his own footsteps seemed to be swallowed up by the deathly silence.
He took a step forward.
puff.
The ashes were placed inside the boot.
One more step.
puff.
One step, another step.
The footprints behind him formed a shallow line.
But after a few breaths, the line began to blur.
New ashes fell, filling in the footprints.
A little while later, there wasn't even a trace of him left.
Lin Qiye did not turn around.
He knew that turning back would be useless.
He just kept walking forward.
We walked and observed.
This wasteland is incredibly vast.
Lin Qiye walked for about an hour, and the surrounding scenery remained almost unchanged.
Boundless gray-white ashes, endless gray-white wispy matter, an eternally gray and hazy sky.
The only thing that has changed is the huge white bones that are half-buried in the ashes.
At first, there were only a few scattered ones.
The further you go, the more bones you see.
Some resemble broken stone pillars.
Some resemble collapsed mountain beams.
Some resemble the ribs of some creature, spreading out in an arc tens of meters wide, arching out from the layer of ashes, with a thick layer of ashes still accumulated in the cavities between the ribs.
Lin Qiye stopped in front of a huge rib.
He reached out and touched the rib.
Icy.
It has no temperature, no breath, and no vitality.
It's just an inanimate object.
Pure and utterly lifeless.
But the instant his fingertips left the bone, he sensed something.
He lowered his head.
The ashes formed a faint, shallow circular indentation around his boots.
That dent wasn't made by him stepping on it.
It is the bone ash around the bones that was pushed away by some residual force.
This force is extremely weak and almost imperceptible.
Lin Qiye had spent nearly a year in the arena and had developed a keen sense of the world's source energy.
He sensed it.
On those white bones, there remained a very faint trace of primordial energy fluctuations.
It is not the source of life for living things.
It is the source of energy for inanimate objects.
Or rather—
It is the primordial energy of the original universe that is slowly devouring these corpses.
Lin Qiye didn't know who these remains once belonged to.
But he could sense that the owners of these bones in life were no ordinary beings.
Even after being dead for so long and buried so deep, the fluctuations of the source energy in the bones can still create a small "domain" within the ash layer.
This kind of power is not something that ordinary creatures can possess.
Lin Qiye withdrew his hand and continued walking forward.