It was indeed a humanoid creature — nearly two meters tall, with wings that spread a full four meters wide. It came barreling toward Ye Fan from the depths of the ancient mine.
Razor-sharp claws flashed like blades, driving straight for his throat. At the same time, its mouth emitted a strange vibration, causing Ye Fan’s eardrums to buzz and ring with pressure.
Ye Fan raised the stone knife and thrust it forward, cutting off the humanoid creature’s advance.
“Clang!”
Those sharp claws struck the stone knife and rang out with the sound of metal on stone, sparks scattering in all directions.
“Old Man Zhang said the stone garment wards off evil — so why have I attracted some kind of strange creature the moment I set foot inside?” Ye Fan was puzzled, though not afraid. He could already tell this humanoid creature was not difficult to deal with.
“Whoosh!”
The humanoid creature spread its wings and shot upward, gathering momentum, then dove down again. This time it opened its mouth and spat forth a beam of brilliant white radiance — sharp as a sword’s edge, slicing downward.
Ye Fan put away the stone knife. The creature clearly had innate abilities — using the knife to deflect would only break it.
“Hiss, hiss, hiss…”
He spread his five fingers wide, and five streaks of sword light surged upward — brilliant as lightning — illuminating the pitch-black ancient mine.
“Clang!”
The blade of light the creature had spat from its mouth was shattered. The remaining four streaks of sword light slashed across its body.
“Pfft!”
Blood and light burst outward. The humanoid creature was pierced through. It beat its wings frantically, trying to flee back into the depths of the ancient mine.
Ye Fan could not allow it to escape. He let out a low shout, and a wave of force surged upward, slamming the creature directly back to the ground.
He knew this could not be a creature from before the Primordial Age — it was far too weak, nowhere near what the legends described.
Ye Fan stepped forward, spread its wings wide, and exposed its true form for careful examination.
The humanoid creature stood nearly two meters tall. Its entire body was covered in grey fur, with wings of fleshed membranes — like a massive humanoid bat.
“This is…”
Ye Fan thought of records from ancient texts. This was a species that lived underground — known as a Demonic Bat. Exceedingly rare, almost never seen.
According to legend, when a bat cultivated to the point of great ability, and generations upon generations of its descendants were born, the bloodline gradually diluted — and if they could not continue advancing, they would degenerate into Demonic Bats.
“According to the ancient texts, wherever Demonic Bats are found, the location is invariably one of great misfortune and evil…” Ye Fan felt a chill settle in his heart.
Whether by instinct or some other nature, the ancient texts recorded that this rare underground species always made its home at places that sat at the edge of absolute forbidden ground.
“This is no good omen!” Ye Fan muttered to himself. He had assumed the Purple Mountain likely held the inheritance of an ancient great emperor — but looking at things now, the signs pointed in a far darker direction.
Ye Fan did not linger. He pressed forward. After going ten-odd li deeper, he ran into serious trouble — over a hundred Demonic Bats, and he showed no mercy. Any that dared strike at him were cut down by his golden scripture.
Finally, one last Demonic Bat appeared — enormous, fully five meters long, its wings spreading ten meters when unfurled — and after Ye Fan crushed it with a single punch, the ancient mine fell completely silent.
Twenty-odd li further in, all was still and soundless. The ancient mine was pitch black, profoundly eerie. He murmured to himself, “Have I entered the range of the forbidden ground?”
Ye Fan advanced another seven or eight li, steady and unhurried, gradually pushing deeper — and on the walls of the cave, he noticed many stone carvings: the marks of chisels and axes left by people of old.
The images were crude and simple, recording the many things that had happened during the excavation. Ye Fan did not find it dull — he examined them with patient attention.
At first, they depicted only trivial and mundane matters. But as they went on, the carvings began to include more and more bodies — human figures lying collapsed on the ground.
“What was it that the ancient people of ten-plus-thousand years ago were trying to record?”
The more Ye Fan looked, the more astonished he became. It felt like a story — and toward the end, these people had dug up something strange, and the death toll had climbed even higher.
Then a creature appeared in the carvings — one with a single horn growing from its brow, emerging from within the mine vein. With the creature’s appearance, nearly every person was wiped out.
This horned humanoid figure had six arms, and in addition, a pair of wings on its back. It gazed down upon the world with utter contempt — and in the image, it threw its head back and roared at the sky. The earth cracked apart, the mine shaft collapsed, and lava erupted from the ground below.
Ye Fan drew a sharp, involuntary breath. Could this be a creature sealed within a divine source? To shake the heavens and earth with a single roar — such terrifying power. No wonder so many people had died. These images made his heart go cold just to look at them.
What followed in the carvings was even more shocking: the horned humanoid creature — ferocious and mighty beyond measure — knelt down and kowtowed before an enormous piece of source.
“A being of such tremendous power — and yet it prostrated itself before something else in such trembling reverence?!” The sight shook Ye Fan to his core.
He rushed to look at the next panel in the sequence. He wanted to see what manner of being lay within the peerless divine source — a being capable of inspiring such awe.
But in the next carving, the creature from within the peerless divine source had still not appeared — it remained a vague and indistinct mass.
Though it had not emerged, the area around it was filled with endless bones — countless fallen bodies, stretching on and on into the distance.
“What is inside that source?” Ye Fan could not help but be shaken.
It had not even emerged, and already the killing was boundless. According to the carvings, the number of dead was beyond counting — tens of thousands, perhaps more.
Several consecutive panels showed the divine source simply lying there, no creature having emerged, the bones around it piling ever higher — stacked into mountains, many of which were the remains of cultivators.
Blood had gathered into real, flowing rivers, winding away into the distance. It was as though hell itself had come to earth.
And throughout it all, the horned, six-armed, winged creature remained kneeling faithfully beside the divine source — never moving, never faltering.
“Over a hundred thousand years ago, something this catastrophic unfolded here. How many lives were lost? The carvings suggest this entire stretch of earth was shattered — so how does the ancient mine still exist today?”
Ye Fan had come here for the Source Heavenly Tome, but now he found himself completely absorbed by the carvings on the ancient mine walls.
In the panels that followed, the peerless divine source remained a blurry presence, the creature within never emerging — and yet the human corpses kept accumulating.
The humanoid creature that knelt in worship before the divine source never struck out. It only kowtowed again and again, without cease.
“Whatever lay within that source must have been a terrifying existence even in the Primordial Age…”
Ye Fan could not stop himself from reading on. The creature continued to do nothing but kneel, while the cultivator’s bones piled ever higher, and blood stained all the land red.
Until at last — from the sky above, a human cultivator descended, wreathed in radiant light. Only then did everything begin to change.
The figure’s face was indistinct, impossible to make out — even the gender was uncertain — every inch of the form shrouded in a shimmer of brilliant colors. Only above the figure’s head was a single character carved: “Emperor.”
“The ancient great emperor!” A jolt went through Ye Fan. He moved quickly to the next carving.
True to the name of one who stood above all beneath heaven — the moment the great emperor struck, the horned, six-armed humanoid creature that had guarded the divine source with such reverence was subdued outright, slammed straight down into the earth.
That might — absolute and commanding over heaven and earth — expressed through the simplest of carvings by the ancient artists, somehow still carried a living essence. They had managed to capture something of the great emperor’s supreme, unrivaled presence.
Ten directions stripped of clouds, a spirit that pierced the rainbow, the stars and moon trembling — this was the might of a great emperor!
With a single strike, he had subdued the humanoid creature.
And in the next carving, he turned directly on the divine source itself — but at this point the mine wall had crumbled, and the image was severed. The outcome could not be seen.
Ye Fan skipped past the broken section and continued reading. He felt as though he had been transported back to the ancient earth of over a hundred thousand years past, standing witness to the great emperor’s supreme, matchless bearing.
The existence sealed within the peerless divine source was clearly of terrifying power — power pushed to the very edge of the conceivable — forcing the great emperor to bring forth his weapon: a great bell that rose to meet the heavens, pressing downward to cover the divine source entirely.
“A supreme weapon!”
Ye Fan’s heart lurched. The great emperor’s weapon at full power — its might was extraordinary, unlike anything he had ever witnessed. This kind of presence felt as though it could reach through the hundred thousand years and pierce through the cave wall — the great emperor’s supreme and unrivaled bearing, ready to burst free.
Ye Fan’s heart surged and heaved. The world-shaking might of the ancient great emperor filled him with a deep and fervent longing.
In the next panel, the divine source cracked open. The being within had finally stepped out — but only a single slender, delicate hand was depicted, and after that the stone wall crumbled again, leaving the image incomplete.
Ye Fan’s heart would not settle. He walked quickly forward — but for stretch after stretch of over a hundred meters, the cave wall was broken, and all the carvings had fallen away.
Over a hundred thousand years, after all — if not for the special composition of the stone inside this mine, nothing could have lasted to this day. That some portion was destroyed was entirely to be expected.
It was not until he had gone a hundred-odd meters further that the carvings reappeared. But by then the battle was long over. The great emperor had used his supreme weapon — the bell — to subdue the Primordial Age creature and seal it once again within the peerless divine source.
In the end, he had still not been able to see the true form of that terrifying creature.
“A hand delicate and fine as jade — the look of a woman, yet power like this…” Ye Fan drew a sharp breath. Creatures of the Primordial Age were truly beyond all estimation — dwelling inside a divine source without dying, surviving into the present age.
Yet his admiration for the great emperor only deepened. To have subdued even a being as terrifying as this — truly, he deserved to be the one who looked out over all the vast world from the highest peak.
What a pity he could not see the full course of the battle — those hundred-odd meters of damaged cave wall must have recorded the most brilliant and intense moments of the fight.
Ye Fan went a dozen or so meters further and at last read through the final carvings.
The great emperor of the Desolate Age restored the earth to its original form. Then, with the bell to subdue the divine source, he flew off toward a great mountain in the distance.
“The Purple Mountain!” Ye Fan recognized it in an instant — the very pearl of the Nine Dragons Encircling configuration.
When he had finished reading, he did not move on. He stood in place for a long while without speaking — lost in silent thought.
These were carvings left behind over a hundred thousand years ago by ancient people, recording something of what had transpired here in those times. The full record of the excavation, in all its detail, lay within these images.
This particular vein ran beneath one of the ridgelines — one of the nine so-called dragon veins.
In this region, there were nine dragon veins in total, encircling a single pearl. All of them must contain divine sources. Did this mean each dragon vein also held a terrifying creature? Had similar events unfolded in all of them, each one ultimately subdued by the great emperor?
At the Yaoguang Sacred Land’s source region, when that pyramid had shimmered with light and living green had returned to the world, Ye Fan had witnessed with his own eyes the formation of a source.
Creatures sealed within a source — that happened by chance, when source liquid fell and hardened around a body lying on the ground.
Here, in this place — had these terrifying Primordial Age creatures been passively enclosed by the source, or had they entered the dragon veins deliberately and put themselves into deep slumber within the peerless divine sources by their own choice?
In principle, once a divine source hardened, it should no longer be possible to enter — after all, once the vein had formed, forcing one’s way in would only shatter the source, not preserve it.
This was a primordial, untouched source vein — not something arranged by any human hand. And yet, Ye Fan felt certain it was not so simple.
If terrifying creatures from the Primordial Age had sealed themselves within the divine sources by their own will — then far more could be inferred.
There were nine dragon veins here. At minimum, nine divine sources, each potentially containing a terrifying creature. Would beings of that kind have known one another?
In that impossibly distant past — nine terrible ancient creatures, each making the same choice to come to this same place. Had they known one another? Had they acted in concert?
The founding ancestor of the Zhang Family, that Source Heaven Master, had once said that this place’s great configuration was not something any ordinary person or cultivator could disturb — only a great emperor of ancient times could set it in motion. And yet, in that vanished Primordial Age, these ancient creatures had chosen precisely this place. They had dared to move this great configuration…
Pressing the inference further, Ye Fan arrived at a deeply unsettling conclusion. If terrifying Primordial Age creatures had already taken up residence here long ago — did that mean the Purple Mountain had similarly been claimed?
If so — nine dragon veins, each holding one terrifying creature, all encircling a single center. What were they encircling?
Only a great emperor could set this great configuration in motion. The human great emperor had ultimately been a latecomer to this place — and when he arrived, others had already made it their own.
Yes — if this line of reasoning held, the great emperor had arrived too late.
“Everything lies within the Purple Mountain…”
Ye Fan understood now. All of this — every part of it — ultimately converged on that single Purple Mountain.