Yefutidaolu

Chapter 397 Under the Yellow Springs
Every flash of the rusty blade in that meticulously arranged "aristocratic camp" inevitably brought forth a splash of tragically beautiful blood, or simply shattered the target into a cloud of blood mist.

Terrified screams, desperate roars, the wailing of shattered magical artifacts, and the muffled thuds of flesh being torn apart... all these sounds intertwined, forming a brief but cruel cacophony.

It was indeed very brief, because all the sounds quickly faded into silence.

Faced with a seventh-realm martial artist who was determined to kill and whose strength completely overwhelmed them, these aristocratic cultivators, who were at most seventh-realm and had long lost their courage, were simply unable to put up any effective resistance.

Escape? In this relatively enclosed cave, their speed was as slow as a snail in front of Gao Jian.

Forming an array? Before the array could even take shape, it was torn apart along with the caster by the overwhelmingly powerful blade light.

They are too close to having profound insights.

In just a dozen or so breaths.

The last scream in the cave came to an abrupt end, and the light of the last magical artifact dimmed and went out.

The whole world seemed to fall silent instantly.

All that remained was the pungent, nauseating stench of blood that filled the air, and the thick, viscous blood that flowed freely across the ground, almost forming streams. Severed limbs and broken entrails were scattered everywhere, staining the luxurious animal-hide carpets and exquisite tea sets a mess.

Gao Jian stood in the center of a pool of blood, spotless, not even a trace of blood on the blade of his rusty knife. He breathed a few times, not from exhaustion, but more like a sigh.

He casually walked to a relatively intact chair, ignoring the chaotic scene around him, and sat down, closing his eyes and gently adjusting his breathing.

He is feeling.

Confirmed, good, my body is warming up.

He's reached his peak form.

Well, it's time.

Gao Jian stood up without hesitation and strode through the mountain of corpses and sea of ​​blood that he had created himself, heading towards the deepest part of the cave, where the deathly aura of the underworld was almost solidified and emitted a low roar.

Gao Jian was already quite adept at the art of jumping into the underworld.

In the past, in the realm of the living and the dead, he had voluntarily leaped into the river of all beings' final destination, witnessing firsthand how the memories of countless deceased were like fragile bubbles, tumbling, breaking, and ultimately being washed away in the river, leaving only the purest trace of their true spirits to be cast into the vast cycle of reincarnation.

He even visited Yuan Lü's cave dwelling deep in the Yellow Springs, as Yuan Lü was able to build his cave dwelling in the Yellow Springs.

This shows that although the Yellow Springs is a dead end, it is not entirely inaccessible, as long as the method is appropriate and the strength is sufficient.

Reaching the edge of the underground cave, below flowed a viscous, yellowish river that seemed to boil and churn, exuding an aura of death and icy chill. That was a tributary of the Yellow Springs manifested here.

Gao Jian took a deep breath and leaped into the air!
A familiar feeling of weightlessness washed over me, and the surrounding light was instantly swallowed up by the dense death energy of the underworld, turning everything dark.

Based on Gao Jian's experience, the next moment should be when he falls into the icy waters of the underworld, and then sees countless floating souls and shattered bubbles of memory...

however--

Just as he was about to touch the murky yellow water!
A sudden change occurred!

“Buzz——!!!”

An indescribable, enormous buzzing sound, seemingly from the very beginning of the universe, suddenly pierced through his soul! Everything around him was like a shattered mirror, abruptly distorted, broken, and then reformed!
He did indeed "fall" into something, but it was definitely not the Yellow Springs he knew!

In an instant, everything around me changed!

An incredibly ancient, dim light, seemingly traversing the barriers of infinite time and space, shone from an indescribably distant shore, enveloping all his senses.

The world was quickly shrouded in a gray, flowing fog.

Deep within the mist, the scene was bizarre and surreal. In the distance, a vast and desolate river, beyond description, stretched across the seemingly endless gray sky. The river was utterly still, with no sound of flowing water. As far as the eye could see, there was no sign of its source or end, only an eternal, frozen, dusky yellow.

What's most terrifying are those colossal pillars that stand tall outside the cliff, leading to the endless darkness above and below!

Those colossal pillars were unimaginably enormous, stretching upwards into the endless darkness and rooted downwards into the bottomless abyss, presenting an extremely terrifying and eerie sight to the heavens.

Countless corpses of various shapes and sizes were densely and twistedly "fixed" to the giant pillar!

Or rather, these colossal pillars reaching to the sky were themselves constructed from an endless stream of corpses!

Countless corpses of various shapes and sizes, exuding an aura of mystery or terror, were forcibly fixed, compressed, and piled up by some incomprehensible force, forming these terrifying things that support the heavens and the earth!
There were all sorts of human corpses, dressed in ancient clothing, with distorted or serene faces;
There are countless strange insect shells of varying sizes, shimmering with a metallic or jade-like luster;
There were piles of white bones, intertwined and embracing each other, as if they had died in extreme fear;

There are the remains of bizarre beasts that are huge, have a dull appearance, and seem to have had their life drained away in an instant;
Even more terrifying remains of monsters, indescribable in words, from the abyss or other dimensions, covered in tentacles or compound eyes…

Countless! Together they form this despairing and vast sea of ​​corpses!

Gao Jian even clearly saw that there were enormous, scaled dragons! Their celestial dragon bodies were a deathly grayish-white, like prepared specimens, with empty dragon eyes, drooping dragon whiskers, and their massive dragon bodies tightly wrapped around the corpse pillar, having lost all the luster of life.

Not just one! There are many!

Those dragons that should have soared through the heavens, sacred and majestic, were now like gray-white specimens devoid of all color. Their enormous bodies were limply wrapped around the pillar of corpses, their heads drooping, their eyes empty. All their glory and power had been drained away, leaving only cold, dead shells that had become part of this terrifying pillar of corpses!

Any one of these real dragons would probably be tens of thousands of miles long!
But compared to the giant pillar, it is nothing, looking small and exquisite.

How many corpses were there exactly?
These pillars of corpses formed a scene that would drive any sane person to madness and shock.

Gao Jian's pupils contracted, and his mind was shaken!
Where have we come from?!

Countless! The variety is beyond imagination!

Countless colossal pillars stood silently amidst the boundless darkness and nothingness, leading to the infinite depths of space! Gao Jian was deeply shaken!

Where did this come from?

This is definitely not the Underworld! At least not the Underworld he knew!

However, despite the drastic changes in the environment, an immense and irresistible "push" still exists, carrying his body downstream in a fixed direction through this eerie void.

Gao Jian tried to resist, but found that the power was far beyond his imagination. Even with his physique as a seventh-level martial artist, he was like a small boat in a raging sea, only able to drift along.

Unable to control his direction, he was forced to continue forward, traversing the suffocating forest of giant pillars composed of countless corpses.

After drifting for an unknown amount of time, the scene before us suddenly changed again!

The pillar of corpses, the void, and the dim yellow light slowly disappeared.

The next moment, what appeared before Gao Jian was another scene that left him dumbfounded, almost making him doubt whether he had lost his mind—

universe!

The boundless and vast universe!

Large, colorful nebulae spread across the dark curtain like splashes of ink, with countless stars rising and falling within them! He could see how aging stars collapsed and dimmed, and how supernovae exploded with a roar, releasing brilliant auroras that illuminated the starry sea! The mesmerizing light and shadow emitted by those distant stars intertwined to create a magnificent and grand cosmic landscape.

Countless rays of light were born, evolved, and perished within it! The flames slowly died down, then burst forth with dazzling light, emitting a magnificent and mesmerizing light and shadow that briefly illuminated the distant darkness.

The starlight in the universe outlines the shapes of many unimaginable behemoths!
Some resemble winding galactic serpents, others like shelled creatures carrying planets, and still others are aggregates of pure energy... The silhouettes of these celestial monsters appear in colorful outlines in extremely distant directions, blending with the ever-changing cosmic light and shadow.

The starlight in the universe reflects the silhouettes of these colossal beasts lurking in the darkness! In an extremely distant direction, they form one after another enormous, colorful, translucent silhouette of celestial monsters!

The overlapping silhouettes blended with the ever-changing light and shadow of the nebulae, giving the entire starry sky an unreal, layered texture!

Gao Jian could even clearly see several cosmic behemoths with different shapes from the same visual angle. Their bodies seemed to exist in different spatial layers, but were forcibly superimposed and displayed at this moment! There were even some more bizarre and indescribable beings that could only exist in the void turbulence, which would occasionally flash by in these overlapping silhouettes!
"Space... has completely overlapped?" Gao Jian muttered to himself, a storm raging in his heart. He had no idea what he was going through, but the Yellow Springs before him were definitely experiencing some unimaginable, mind-blowing anomaly!

The scene before me grew faster and faster, more and more bizarre and fantastical! It became increasingly surreal and surreal. Soon, countless lights, seemingly from nowhere and containing ineffable information, began to fill this overlapping space. They fought and reflected each other, creating a wondrous and beautiful spectacle.

In that instant, Gao Jian did not hesitate at all and gripped the rusty knife at his waist tightly!

With a single thought, the rusty knife's power is unleashed!

With a single thought, the deepest power of the rusty knife is unleashed—the clear lake of the heart!
hum!
A cool, pure sword intent, powerful enough to sever all external evil influences, emanated from the rusty sword, instantly protecting his core soul.

However, in the very next instant after the clear lake of the heart was formed—

Gao Jian felt a loud "boom" in his mind!
The once calm and still lake of the heart, like a mirror, seemed to have collided head-on with some kind of infinite source of information on the scale of the Big Bang!

A massive amount of information, immeasurable and overwhelming, flooded his mind like a bursting dam of stars!

Only then did he realize that the magnificent and dazzling lights around him were not ordinary lights at all!
Each of them possessed an incredibly condensed and immense divine essence! And within each essence lay a fragment… or rather, a memory of an entire world!

He "saw" the pulse of day and night quickly turn into an unchanging gray, and the sky take on a mesmerizing deep blue, like the brilliant light of dawn. The rising sun streaks across the sky in a fiery arc, a magnificent arch, while the moon becomes a dim ribbon.

He "saw" the growth and changes of trees like wisps of mist, sometimes yellow, sometimes green. They grew, stretched, withered, and died. I saw enormous buildings rise from the ground, looming indistinctly, then flashing by like a dream.

Everything melted and flowed before Takami's eyes...

He "saw" an elusive, hazy world flashing before his eyes, rising and falling.

Countless extraordinary achievements and the great prospects of civilization could not possibly appear before our eyes.

He saw magnificent buildings rising around him, more spectacular than any he had ever seen, yet they seemed like mirages built in a hazy, ethereal space…

Infinite worlds, infinite civilizations, infinite lives... their births, glories, struggles, and declines... like fast-forwarded images, frantically flood into the perception of the insightful!
What he "saw" were the complete or fragmented "memories" of countless worlds from their birth to their end! This included the evolution of countless life forms, the rise and fall of countless intelligent civilizations, countless joys and sorrows, and countless loves and hates, all of which eventually returned to oblivion!

Such a massive, heavy, and vast torrent of information is frantically crashing against Gao Jian's mind!
The amount of information was too enormous and too overwhelming! Even with the protection of the rusty knife's power, Gao Jian's soul, which had been tempered through countless trials, emitted a "crackling" sound as if it were about to be covered with cracks, as if a fine porcelain piece was about to be covered with cracks!

The once clear, mirror-like surface of my heart began to ripple violently, even emitting faint, strained sounds, as if it might shatter at any moment!
However, the origin of the rusty knife is mysterious and extraordinary, and the power of its guardian spirit is far beyond imagination.

Despite the turmoil in his heart, Gao Jian's soul remained clear under the protection of his sword intent, like a point of absolute tranquility in the eye of a storm.

He was forced to "read" the final memories of countless worlds.

A vague, preordained fact began to surface in Gao Jian's mind.

These are all worlds that have already reached their end. Everything about them has ultimately settled and converged here.

Life may be born unequal, with some being strong and others weak, noble and lowly, with different starting points and opportunities, but ultimately all are destroyed in this place.

These... are all worlds heading towards their own doom.

A guess gradually formed in his mind—

The idea that all lives are equal is wrong.

Death is equal for everyone.

And now, he is dying.

This is the land beneath the Yellow Springs.

(End of this chapter)