The ancient return was exposed by his sister's live stream.

Fu Zhaojie's expression changed.

"What...what happened?"

He strode to the rock face and ran his hand over the surface. Nothing. No dents, no marks, no indication that anything had ever existed.

"Impossible... It was here last time I came... right in this spot..."

Fu Zhaojie was covered in sweat. He turned around and looked at Chen Hao.

"God, I'm not lying...it really exists...it's right here..."

Chen Hao didn't look at that wall.

He stood in the center of the cave, his head slightly tilted to the side.

What are you listening to?

Chen Siyao noticed it too.

Quiet.

The cave was so quiet. The sounds of dripping water and breathing were amplified. But apart from that...

"Ugh..."

A low growl.

It came from deeper inside the cave.

It wasn't from the direction they came in... it was from the other end of the cave. There was a larger gap there, leading deeper underground.

The low growl shook the water beneath our feet.

Like a tiger. But not entirely a tiger. There's something else mixed in that frequency... a hoarse, strange resonance from multiple sound sources.

Fu Zhaojie's face turned completely pale.

"That's it! That's the sound!"

He took two steps back, the tip of the stick pointing towards the gap.

"God! It's inside!"

Chen Hao walked towards the gap.

"elder brother!"

Chen Siyao called out.

Chen Hao didn't stop. He walked to the gap, looked down, and saw that although the gap wasn't large, it was wider than the passage they had come in through.

The ground sloped downwards, the gradient becoming steeper. There was a faint light below... not natural light filtering through the cracks. It was something else.

"Keep up." Chen Hao's voice came from behind.

Fu Zhaojie glanced at Chen Siyao, then at the dark gap.

His knuckles, gripping the wooden stick, turned white. He gritted his teeth... and followed.

Chen Siyao and Yang Wanqing followed closely behind. The light from the photographic crystal illuminated the passage below.

This stretch of road is longer than before. The passage is winding, sometimes wide and sometimes narrow; in the narrowest places, you have to squeeze through sideways.

The air grew increasingly stuffy, and the fishy smell grew stronger... not the salty smell of seawater. It was another kind of smell. The smell of animals. The smell of living things.

It took almost five minutes to walk.

The angle of inclination of the soles of the feet has leveled out.

The light ahead has come on.

A wide-open space appeared at the end of the passage.

This is not a cave...it's a huge underground cavity. The ceiling is at least twenty meters high.

A bluish-green glow seeped from the cracks in the rocks at the top…some kind of luminescent mineral or fungus. The light wasn't strong, but it was enough to make out the outline of the entire space.

Chen Siyao manipulated the image crystal to rise into the air, and the beam of light swept around the surroundings.

The center of the cavity.

There is something.

Chen Siyao's scalp tingled.

Five meters high.

That thing... was lying on the rocky floor in the center of the cavity. Its body was enormous, taking up most of the field of vision.

It had the body of a tiger, but was ten times larger than any tiger. The contours of its muscles undulated in the bluish-green glimmer, and its skin was dark gray, unspotless, and abnormally smooth...like the texture of some kind of amphibian.

Eight tails.

It spreads out from its rump, each tail being two to three meters long, with the tips dragging on the ground and covering a large area behind it.

Then comes the head.

Not one.

Eight.

Eight heads emerged from the same thick neck base. Each head faced a different direction. Each...

They are all human faces.

It's not a complete human face. The facial features are positioned correctly... two eyes, a nose, and a mouth.

But the proportions are wrong. The eyes are too big, taking up a third of the face.

The pupils are vertical. There are no lips—the mouth is merely a straight, narrow slit. The nose is flat, almost flush with the face.

Eight faces. Facing eight directions.

Four of them have their eyes closed.

The other four... are open.

Chen Siyao took a half step back.

Yang Wanqing held the Heavenly Thunder Halberd horizontally in front of him, his fingers gripping the shaft.

Fu Zhaojie had stopped trembling—because his entire body was frozen. His feet were rooted to the ground and he couldn't move.

The chat in the live stream...

Almost no one posted any words.

More than 400 million people stared at the enormous eight-headed human-faced creature on the screen, speechless.

Two or three seconds later, the comments started to appear one by one.

"Holy crap..."

"What is this thing?"

"All eight heads are human faces"

The uncanny valley effect is at its peak.

"I dare not look, I dare not look, yet I can't take my eyes off it."

Does anyone know what this is?

A blue verified comment – ​​"Chief Researcher of the Classic of Mountains and Seas Research Institute":

"The Classic of Mountains and Seas, Overseas Eastern Classic: 'In the Valley of Chaoyang, there is a god named Tianwu, who is also the Water God. As a beast, he has eight heads and human faces, eight feet and eight tails, all blue and yellow.' -- A tiger's body, eight heads and human faces, eight tails. This is Tianwu, an ancient water god."

The live chat exploded with comments.

"Tianwu!!"

"Water God Tianwu!"

"The mythical beasts in the Classic of Mountains and Seas"

"Is this thing god-level?"

"Oh no, this thing is going to be really strong!"

"Can the Supreme God defeat him?"

Of those eight heads, four had their eyes open... one of which was facing them directly.

His vertical pupils gleamed with a cold light in the dim glow.

It saw them.

one second.

two seconds.

The mouth of that human face split open.

"Holy crap...!!"

An explosive roar burst forth from that mouth.

It wasn't just one head roaring... Three other faces with open eyes opened their mouths simultaneously, and the roars from four directions overlapped, exploding in the underground cavity. The sound waves swept over visibly, and the water underfoot was shaken into a layer of mist.

The four open faces all turned...not to look at Chen Hao.

It's about Fu Zhaojie.

Of the eight pairs of vertical pupils, four were fixed intently on Fu Zhaojie, their rage reaching its peak. The hatred they felt wasn't hostility towards a strange intruder, but a more personal, more profound hatred.

Tianwu's eight tails lashed the ground, splashing water everywhere. Its tiger-like body changed from lying down to arching its back... its spine arched up segment by segment, and muscles rolled beneath its dark gray skin.

Fu Zhaojie took two steps back, the tip of the wooden stick pointing forward, his arm trembling.

Chen Hao glanced at Fu Zhaojie indifferently.

There was something in that glance. Chen Siyao noticed... the way her brother looked at Fu Zhaojie wasn't doubt, but more like confirmation.

"Yaoyao, Xiaoqing, step back."

Chen Hao's voice was flat, no different from when he usually called them to eat.

"elder brother!"

"retreat."

Chen Siyao grabbed Yang Wanqing's arm and pulled her back. Yang Wanqing, clutching the Heavenly Thunder Halberd, was reluctant, but still followed her back more than ten meters, until they reached the rock wall at the edge of the cave. Fu Zhaojie was even faster... he practically tumbled and crawled back behind Chen Siyao.

Tianwu didn't give them any more time.

Its eight mouths split open at the same time; it wasn't lips... it was seams on its face tearing open to reveal countless sharp teeth inside.

The dark gray tiger sprang up from the ground, its massive five-meter-tall body charging straight toward Chen Hao.