“What?!”

Everyone was taken aback. They trusted that Ye Fan was not speaking without cause, and that he must have discovered something. Even Li Changqing, and the female classmate who had consistently targeted Ye Fan at Liu Yunzhi’s side, changed expression — nervously sweeping their eyes around in all directions.

Ye Fan had just spent the entire episode watching every person’s reaction in full, with his own demeanor calm and still as a quiet lake throughout. In doing so he had come to understand who was sincere and who was not. Only now did he begin to clear his own name — by laying out a single key and telling point.

“You can put your own hands on his throat and feel it — the Adam’s apple is shattered. No matter how strong a person’s grip might be, that would be impossible to achieve.”

Someone crouched down and verified Ye Fan’s words by touch. The majority stepped backward several paces — facing the unexplained corpse, their hearts filled with cold dread. If it wasn’t human hands that had killed him, then what had? Everyone felt a chill creeping up their spine.

“Ye Fan — do you know what that thing was? Will it… come for us as well?” someone asked, trembling.

The dark violet bruising on the body’s neck looked uncannily like the fingerprints of a vengeful spirit — and at the thought, more than a few pairs of eyes drifted involuntarily toward the coffin within the coffin.

“We haven’t escaped the divine crocodiles…”

When they heard Ye Fan say this, everyone was horrified. They gripped the divine relics in their hands tight and anxiously scanned their surroundings.

One female classmate spoke through tears: “Has the Ancestral Crocodile that was sealed beneath the Great Thunder Sound Temple followed us in?”

That was a supreme great demon — personally suppressed by the Buddha’s own hand. Though they had only caught a glimpse of it for a brief moment, it was something they would never forget for the rest of their lives. That earth-shaking, incomparable display of terrifying power was without equal.

“Impossible — it didn’t follow us in. It’s not that one!” Li Changqing’s face had gone deathly pale. With no divine relic of his own in hand, he hovered in tense anxiety at Liu Yunzhi’s side, clutching the vajra treasure pestle in a death grip.

“I didn’t say the Ancestral Crocodile followed us in. What I mean is — small crocodiles have gotten inside the Ancient Bronze Coffin.” He crouched down as he said this, casting the faint glow of his phone onto the corpse’s face. “His expression is full of terror — his eyes are wide open, unable to close in peace. The expression is exactly the same as those of the other thirteen classmates who had passed before us.”

“In that ancient text’s miscellaneous records, I found accounts of the divine crocodile — beyond descriptions of its form, it was also recorded that ‘when the divine crocodile devours a person, it consumes both soul and spirit; the heart is seized with fear and the soul is shattered and scattered.'” Ye Fan’s ancient lamp had long been extinguished, yet he still gripped it tight — as though guarding against something. “This is no coincidence. The manner of death is the same as those thirteen classmates who went before us, and the same as what was recorded in the ancient text: terror that sends the soul scattering and fleeing. There must be divine crocodiles running amok in here.”

Without flinching at the corpse, Ye Fan pried open its mouth — and sure enough, inside the mouth he found a blood-hole, running upward straight through the skull. Everyone instantly felt their whole body go cold. That tiny blood-hole was identical to the wounds on those classmates who had died before — and only the divine crocodile, that terrifying creature, could so easily bore through the human body. Shattering the Adam’s apple from within was naturally no difficulty at all for such a thing.

Divine crocodiles had actually gotten inside the Ancient Bronze Coffin. How many had entered? Could the divine relics hold them off now that they had lost their divine radiance? The uncertainty left everyone unsettled.

“So the divine crocodile is still inside his body?”

“Hard to say.” Ye Fan shook his head.

“It’s still in his body — there’s something moving inside his chest!” Zhang Ziling suddenly cried out, pointing to the corpse’s chest.

Pft!

A blossom of blood burst out. A familiar, hideous creature appeared at the chest wound of the corpse, its slender head emerging — it was a divine crocodile, ten centimeters in length. It transformed into a streak of dark light and launched itself upward, shooting straight for Ye Fan’s forehead.

Bang!

Ye Fan reacted instantly, raising the bronze lamp to shield himself. Several faint sparks flew — the divine crocodile let out a piercing shriek, struck by one of the sparks and nearly bored through, sent flipping through the air.

Clang!

Pang Bo was quick of eye and hand, swinging the Great Thunder Sound Temple’s bronze plaque and smashing it hard into the ground. Threads of divine light shot out, and the plaque ground the divine crocodile to paste.

“Liu Yunzhi — what do you have to say now?” Pang Bo held the bronze plaque and demanded of Liu Yunzhi.

“I was too impulsive. But who could have imagined a divine crocodile would get inside the bronze coffin.” Liu Yunzhi said nothing further, and made no apology. Given how things had escalated at this point — essentially a standoff — backing down now would serve no purpose.

Crack!

At this very moment, Pang Bo suddenly struck — bringing a heavy open-handed slap down, landing squarely and solidly across Liu Yunzhi’s face.

In that process, both the vajra treasure pestle and the Great Thunder Sound Temple’s bronze plaque simultaneously released faint glimmers of dim radiance, colliding with each other and enveloping the two of them. But none of it prevented that slap from landing; Liu Yunzhi’s face was struck clean and solid, and a thin trickle of blood immediately seeped from the corner of his mouth.

“My apologies — I was too impulsive as well.” Pang Bo said to Liu Yunzhi with a mocking tone.

“You…”

Everyone quickly moved to stand between the two of them, preventing conflict. Liu Yunzhi’s expression had gone as dark as a storm cloud. He gripped the vajra treasure pestle and moved to charge forward — but recalling that the bronze plaque, too, had shown a flicker of divine radiance moments before, he ultimately restrained himself.

“Shh!”

Ye Fan suddenly made a gesture for silence, then fixed his gaze on the coffin within the coffin at the very center, as though listening intently to something. After a moment, Ye Fan asked the group: “Did any of you hear that?”

Everyone was startled — for they had heard nothing at all. A look of puzzlement crossed Ye Fan’s face. Finally, he began slowly walking toward the smaller Ancient Bronze Coffin, four meters in length.

At this very moment, the Bodhi Seed against his chest suddenly grew warm, filling the area over his heart with a gentle heat — and it was precisely then that he heard a far clearer sound.

He could not help himself. He reached out and placed his hand upon the coffin within the coffin. It was covered in a patina of verdigris and engraved with numerous figures of primordial ancestors and divine beings, exuding a quality at once ancient and profound, heavy with the weight of ages.

In this moment, he felt as though the Bodhi Seed against his chest had forcibly opened a door for him — letting him hear a sound of extraordinary, singular character.

At first that sound was still very faint — and then it grew steadily more vast and far-reaching. The Bodhi Seed at Ye Fan’s chest grew hotter and hotter.

The Bodhi tree — also known as the Tree of Wisdom, the Tree of Enlightenment, the Tree of Contemplation — is the tree under which, according to legend, the Buddha attained enlightenment. Ye Fan’s Bodhi Seed bore a naturally occurring image of the Buddha, formed entirely by the convergence of natural grain patterns, which made it clearly no ordinary thing.

From the ancient, mysterious bronze coffin before him, the sound grew ever more vast and magnificent — like the great voice of the Dao sounding from heaven, or like a profound and wondrous truth being spoken aloud.

“The way of heaven diminishes the excessive and supplements the insufficient…”

This mysterious heavenly voice of the Dao opened with a line drawn from a famous passage in Taoist scripture — and yet what followed was an ancient scripture the like of which had never been heard before, its meaning impossible to fathom.

Vast and deep, the sound seemed to have torn through time and space from the most distant primordial wilderness to arrive here, and at last rang out like the great bell of a sacred temple in Ye Fan’s ears, transmitting itself into the very center of his heart.