Ye Fan and Er Lengzi returned to the stone fortress. In the days that followed, he diligently studied the art of source-finding from the elders of the village.

At the same time, he was actively preparing himself. To enter the Purple Mountain, he first needed to understand everything about it.

“You’ve been asking so many questions — surely you’re not still thinking of entering the Purple Mountain?” Over these past few days, Ye Fan had been constantly asking about it, and Old Man Zhang the Fifth frowned. “Truly, do not take that risk — you’ll only end up losing your life.”

“Don’t you want the Source Heavenly Tome to be recovered?” Ye Fan said with a smile.

“Of course I hope the inheritance left by our ancestors does not end here — but what can be done? A thousand years ago, that ancestor ignored the clan’s warnings, used the tome to break open the Purple Mountain, and walked inside, never to return. It seems impossible to recover it.”

According to Old Man Zhang the Fifth, the Source Heavenly Tome was a spiritual object that could even be used as a weapon.

“If you tell me the details of what happened back then, perhaps I can bring the Source Heavenly Tome back.”

Old Man Zhang the Fifth shook his head. “You have done great kindness for our fortress. I cannot send you to your death.”

“I have the means to protect myself. You need not worry.”

No matter how Ye Fan tried to persuade him, Old Man Zhang the Fifth refused to support the venture.

Five days later, Ye Fan arrived at an ancient mine more than a hundred li from the stone fortress — the place where Big Beard Chen’s gang had found the jade fragment.

That shard of ancient jade was connected to the Purple Mountain, so he naturally had to come and investigate.

The location was utterly desolate, without a single sign of human habitation. The ancient mine had an eerie, ghostly atmosphere. It had long been abandoned — no one could say for how many ages — and a damp, musty smell seeped from within.

This was an enormous mine shaft, gaping like a natural chasm in the earth. Below was pitch darkness, without a visible bottom. Standing alone at the edge of it was enough to make one’s skin crawl.

“Is there something strange lurking down there?”

The interior of the mine shaft was utterly silent — not a single sound. Ye Fan descended a full thousand meters before reaching the bottom. He could not help but be taken aback: this was an enormous vein of source, something exceedingly rare. In its day, it must have yielded vast quantities of source stones.

Unfortunately, all of it had been sealed away long before the Desolate Age. There would be no extraordinary source stones left behind.

“Crunch!”

A sound came from beneath his foot — he had stepped on a skeleton. This must have been someone who died within the past hundred years; it was not a relic from ancient times.

The vast ancient mine was covered in the marks of chisels and axes — left behind by those who had come before — and they bore witness to the blood and tears of source-miners from ages past.

“Whoever left this ancient jade here must have been someone of no ordinary standing. It could not have appeared in this place without reason.”

Ye Fan quickly located the spot where the jade had been found, though there was nothing particularly distinctive about it. He searched the area for an hour, then pressed on, wanting to explore the deepest part of the ancient mine.

He walked five thousand meters underground and still had not reached the end. This mine seemed to stretch all the way to the underworld — dark and utterly silent.

Another three thousand meters, and Ye Fan drew a sharp breath. Eight thousand meters of ancient mine, and still no end in sight. What kind of scale was this?

An ordinary mine shaft stretched no more than a few hundred meters. This one was enormous beyond reason. He began to feel it could not possibly be a single source vein — it must have been many separate shafts, bored through and connected.

But then — why was there only a single exit?

“If this truly were a single, enormous source vein… it might be what legends call a dragon vein…” Ye Fan’s heart jolted. In other words, this place might once have nurtured divine sources.

It was clear that many people had come here after the Desolate Age — there were numerous traces of their presence.

It was a full ten thousand meters in before Ye Fan finally reached the end. And there, he heard it — the rushing, gurgling sound of water.

There was no path forward. Only a shaft dropping straight down into the earth, and the sound of water rising from within.

Ye Fan peered downward. The underground river below was intensely cold — cold enough to feel like a dull blade scraping across the skin, making the flesh ache just from proximity.

“Something is off here…”

He thought for a brief moment, then — “splash!” — jumped straight in and began making his way through the underground river.

The water was bone-chilling. He shielded himself with divine power, yet still felt the cold seeping in. He pressed forward for about ten-odd li before the chisel and axe marks from the mining work gradually disappeared along the river’s edge.

Ye Fan steeled himself and kept going. He noticed something strange: the underground river ran in an unwavering straight line without a single deviation. Another twenty li, and still no change.

In the end, he followed the underground river for a total of forty to fifty li before coming to a stop.

Because, at that very moment, he sensed enormous danger ahead. In front of him yawned a great black void shaped like a giant funnel — and the entire underground river poured into it, as if it could never be filled.

For no clear reason, standing here made Ye Fan shiver. That vast black hollow ahead — like an enormous drain into the earth — seemed capable of swallowing one’s very soul. A sensation of cold, creeping dread took hold of him.

“This is no good place. I came here to investigate the ancient jade, and what I need is to enter the Purple Mountain — there’s no need to press my luck here.”

Ye Fan had no desire to rashly plunge into that enormous black void leading into the depths of the earth. He turned back along the underground river, tracing the way he had come, and only exhaled with relief once he was back in the ancient mine.

“Hmm!” At that moment, something suddenly struck him. He murmured to himself, “Could it be…?”

He rushed out of the ten-thousand-meter-long, thousand-meter-deep ancient mine, emerged onto the surface, confirmed the direction of the underground river, and began running across the ground above.

When he had run several dozen li — roughly the distance corresponding to where the underground river ended below — Ye Fan’s eyes went wide.

There, directly ahead, a desolate ridgeline lay across the blood-red earth, blocking the way forward. It wound and twisted like a coiling dragon — towering, majestic, immense.

With the Purple Mountain as the center, nine ridgelines extended outward in all directions. This was one of them.

“What a grand design!” Ye Fan exhaled in wonder. For dozens of li in every direction — perhaps close to a hundred — everything was connected to that Purple Mountain.

He had flown high into the sky to observe more than once. Every one of the nine ridgelines had one end pointing directly toward the Purple Mountain, following a perfectly ordered pattern.

He thought it over briefly, then returned to the stone fortress. He carved the Purple Mountain and the nine ridgelines onto a piece of cowhide in their proper proportions, presented it to Old Man Zhang the Fifth, and asked, “What is the significance of this kind of terrain and geography?”

Old Man Zhang the Fifth had spent his life here, but he was after all an ordinary man — he could not do as Ye Fan had done, standing high in the sky and taking it all in at once.

When he saw the clear topographical sketch before him, he rose to his feet in astonishment. “This is… you actually worked that out?”

“So you do know about all this?”

“It was because of these nine ridgelines that my ancestor first recognized the Purple Mountain for what it was.” Old Man Zhang the Fifth spread the cowhide flat. “Look at this — what does it resemble to you?”

“I can’t quite say what it resembles — I only get the sense that the arrangement is very symmetrical, with all nine ridgelines pointing one end toward the Purple Mountain at the center.”

“These are nine dragon veins, encircling a pearl!”

Ye Fan was briefly speechless. He looked at the nine ridgelines and could not say they resembled dragons in the slightest. And the Purple Mountain, standing there blunt and upright, looked more like a massive iron sword than any pearl.

“You haven’t studied the Source Heavenly Tome, so you would not naturally think of it in those terms. But this truly is what it is — dragon veins. Nine Dragons Encircling a Pearl!”

“And what is the significance of that?” Ye Fan asked.

“The significance is immense. The Source Heavenly Tome records it in detail, though I only know a fraction of it. The great configuration here is wondrous beyond description.”

Ye Fan stirred with excitement. “What do you mean by that?”

“My ancestor once said: Nine Dragons Encircling a Pearl exhausts the very limits of heaven and earth’s transformations and mysterious workings.”

“What limits — what mysterious workings?” Ye Fan pressed.

“Not only would an ordinary person be unable to withstand this kind of great configuration — even a powerful cultivator could not endure it. My ancestor said only one thing clearly: only an ancient great emperor could set this kind of great configuration in motion.”

Ye Fan’s heart burned with curiosity as he listened. He asked, “Did your ancestor — that Source Heaven Master — leave behind any more detailed account?”

“He did not. But one thing is certain: it was precisely because my ancestor glimpsed the hidden workings of the Purple Mountain that he was driven back in alarm, and why he ultimately dared not even invite the immortal maidens of Yaochi to assist.”

“This…” The weight of what he was hearing shook Ye Fan to his core.

“The later members of my Zhang Family who studied the Source Heavenly Tome never managed to fully comprehend it — they could only speculate that this place conceals an enormous secret.”

Ye Fan grew all the more desperate to know the answer. “Has there truly been no trace found, no slightest clue — no thread of the hidden workings glimpsed at all?”

“Many of our ancestors came to the same conclusion: all of this points back to that ancient great emperor. He may have set something truly terrifying in motion here…”

“He used this place’s great configuration to arrange something.” Ye Fan murmured, mostly to himself. “The Desolate Age in cultivators’ reckoning was a hundred thousand years ago — more than a hundred thousand years before that, a great emperor arranged all of this. What purpose could it possibly serve him?”

Ye Fan could not grasp it. A great emperor who had long since turned to dust — what could be the meaning of doing all this?

“Perhaps it was prepared for those who came after…” Old Man Zhang the Fifth shook his head slowly. “Only by fully comprehending the Source Heavenly Tome could one understand what that great emperor truly intended.”

A living creature dwells within that place — something from before the Primordial Age. Ye Fan turned this over in his mind, unable to make sense of the great emperor’s motive.

“I noticed an ancient mine not far away, pointing directly at one of the ridgelines. The entire thing was hollowed out underground — as though it were a source vein along a dragon line. Could divine sources have been found there once?” Ye Fan brought up the abandoned ancient mine.

“In fact, every one of those ancient mines connects directly to one of the nine ridgelines. All nine have been hollowed out from below.”

“This…” Ye Fan was deeply shaken. “What an enormous undertaking that must have been.”

“The power of an ancient great emperor is beyond imagination. Something like this would be well within his reach.”

“So this was also the great emperor’s work — it was not later generations who mined it out?” Ye Fan asked.

Old Man Zhang the Fifth said, “Some of our ancestors theorized that each of the nine dragon veins contains a peerless divine source — but all of them were excavated and gathered into that one pearl.”

“Why would that be?” A jolt went through Ye Fan’s heart.

“The ancestors who had studied the Source Heavenly Tome theorized that it was done to set this place’s great configuration in motion — to gather the life essence of all nine dragon veins and concentrate it within the pearl, so that the nine dragons truly encircle that single pearl and bring out its full nature.”

Everything was concentrated within the pearl. The layout the ancient great emperor had arranged all centered on the Purple Mountain — the nine ridgelines were nothing more than leaves framing a flower.

“I truly want to know — what was a great emperor of a hundred-thousand-years-past trying to accomplish!”

Throughout history, the Eastern Wastelands had produced only a handful of great emperors. They could forge supreme weapons. They could create the most profound ancient scriptures. Their methods defied the heavens.

For a great emperor to go to such extraordinary lengths and carry out something on this scale — what was the goal?

Time passed swiftly. Two months went by in the blink of an eye.

Ye Fan had absorbed no small amount of the foundational knowledge from the Source Heavenly Tome. He had been preparing for a long while, and had learned enough — even tracking down which route the Zhang Family ancestor of a thousand years ago had used to enter the Purple Mountain; he had mapped it all out clearly.

Now he made his decision: it was time to act. He would enter the Purple Mountain and recover the Source Heavenly Tome.

The Purple Mountain held boundless secrets — and the Source Heavenly Tome held boundless power. If he could obtain the tome and master it, he could come to understand all things.

“I must become a Source Heaven Master. I can only take the gamble. Otherwise, the road of my cultivation is nearing its end.” Ye Fan resolved to enter the Purple Mountain at once.