Many children, many blessings; the twelve ancestral witches forced marriages throughout the primordi

Lin Xuan ordered everyone to retreat outside the circular platform.

This includes Gonggong.

"You all stay outside. No matter what noise you hear, don't come in."

Gonggong was not entirely at ease.

"Thirteenth brother, you're all alone—"

"Don't worry. I know what I'm doing."

After Lin Xuan finished speaking, he stepped onto the circular platform.

There are only two people left on the platform.

He and Su Nu.

To be precise, it was a person standing and a person bound in chains.

Lin Xuan stopped three steps away from Su Nu.

Su Nu opened her eyes.

His light gray pupils had lost most of their luster, becoming cloudy as if shrouded in a layer of mist.

She looked at Lin Xuan, her lips still moving.

The song was forced out of her throat, each note tinged with blood.

"Don't...come any closer..."

Her voice was extremely hoarse, like sandpaper scraping against glass.

The singing stopped for a moment.

The dark red light at the base of the stone pillar suddenly flashed.

A fierce aura surged out from the crack.

Su Nu quickly started singing again.

The light slowly dimmed.

But her face was already as white as paper.

"You are Lin Xuan..."

Do you know me?

"The water of the Luo River...can talk..."

Su Nu's voice was intermittent.

"The water told me you saved the goddess Luo, Mi Fei... but you shouldn't have come..."

Why?

"This formation... has bound my life... Once I stop singing... the thing below will come out..."

"I know."

Lin Xuan squatted down to be at eye level with her.

"How many years have you been singing?"

Su Nu's lips trembled slightly.

"I don't remember...it's been a long...long, long time..."

"Were you tricked by Zhunti?"

Su Nu remained silent.

But her eyes gave the answer.

There was so much in that look.

Resentment, anger, exhaustion, and despair—all mixed together, heavy with emotion.

He said... he wanted me to help seal away an ancient ferocious beast... saying it was for the sake of all living beings... and I believed him...

Su Nu's voice grew softer and softer.

"After I came in... I realized... he had locked me in the center of the formation... bound my life with chains... and made me use Daoist sounds to maintain the formation..."

"I want to leave... but I can't... if I stop... the things below will wake up..."

"For tens of thousands of years... I have been chanting... my Daoist essence... my lifespan... all of it has been drained by this formation..."

Lin Xuan remained silent.

He looked down at the chains.

Dark red chains were wrapped around Su Nu's wrists and ankles, deeply embedded in her flesh.

The chains were engraved with the karmic marks of Zhunti, and each link was connected to Su Nu's lifeline.

If the chains are forcibly removed, Su Nu will die.

The system's prompt also said the same thing—it is necessary to find a backup energy node to replace Su Nu's power-supplying role.

Lin Xuan mentally reviewed the resources at hand.

Backup energy node?

He doesn't need to look for it.

He is one of them.

"Don't say anything yet. Keep singing."

Lin Xuan took something out of his pocket.

Chaos Orb.

The black bead floated above his palm, with chaotic energy slowly flowing across its surface.

"There might be some commotion next. Don't worry about it. Just focus on singing."

Su Nu looked at the bead, her eyes widening slightly.

She recognized what it was.

Chaos Orb.

The most precious treasure of the primordial era.

It is said to have been formed from the primordial chaos left behind after Pangu separated heaven and earth.

This man actually has something like this in his hand.

Lin Xuan didn't give her any more time to think.

He held the Chaos Pearl in one hand and placed the other hand on the stone pillar.

His divine sense probed downwards.

Pass through the stone pillar.

Pass through the deepest layer of the formation.

We've reached the heart of it all—

A bottomless black abyss.

At the bottom of the abyss, there lay a lump of something.

It was a wreck.

It was bigger than any of the ferocious beasts in the cave.

The skeleton was relatively well-preserved, with the huge bones gleaming with a dark red light.

It had two twisted horns on its head. The bones of its four legs were frighteningly thick. A pair of broken wing skeletons remained on its back.

Qiongqi.

One of the four ancient ferocious beasts.

A terrifying being at the Quasi-Saint level.

Although it has been dead for countless millennia, its remains still retain a strong sense of ferocity and resentment.

These malevolent energies and resentments have been slowly accumulating under the nourishment of the Ten Thousand Demons Array.

Without Su Nu's singing to suppress it, it could "revive" at any time by relying on the accumulated ferocity—not really come back to life, but its remains would be driven by the ferocity to become a mindless but quasi-saint level zombie.

A berserk corpse at the quasi-saint level.

If this thing were to overflow the Luo River, most of the Nine Provinces would be doomed.

After Lin Xuan saw the full extent of Qiongqi's remains, he silently cursed Zhunti a hundred times in his heart.

That bald monk.

That's really insidious.