Chapter 1240: Blood Lake
Qi Xuansu had seen this scene before in a dream. It was the Xuan Jade of Death that had brought new changes to his dreamscape. That time, Qi Xuansu was fully aware that he was dreaming, so he began to try to explore where the boundaries of the dream lay.
All around were numerous ancient palaces that were already in ruins, and the various statues nearby were reduced to nothing but broken limbs and remnants.
Below lay a horrific battlefield that had completely turned into a world of ice and snow, covered in frost. Countless lifelike ice sculptures still preserved the appearances they had worn at the moment of death.
There were also many illusory human figures standing expressionlessly along the mountain paths. Aside from their slightly ethereal forms, they were no different from living people, crowding together, numbering in the hundreds.
These figures had already lost all consciousness, like clay or wooden figurines. It seemed they had been struck by some powerful spell that forcibly extracted their souls while their physical bodies had been reduced to drifting ash.
Qi Xuansu tried to walk toward the surrounding palaces and the battlefield below, only to discover invisible walls around him, confining him to a small, fixed area. Whether it was the battlefield beneath or the towering palaces hidden in darkness, they were nothing more than distant backdrops—visible yet unreachable.
Although he could not leave, he was able to see parts of the mountain’s true form through these invisible barriers and the surrounding darkness.
Lingshan was already on the verge of collapse. Outside the mountain, several gigantic tornadoes and bolts of lightning stretched from heaven to earth, ceaselessly ravaging the mountain’s mass. Portions of the mountain had already fractured, yet due to some bizarre power, these sections did not peel away and fall. Instead, they remained roughly in their original positions, though vast fissures separated them. From far away, the cracks might not even be visible, but up close, one would see that these 30-meter-wide fissures had become insurmountable chasms. Many fragments of rock were frozen in midair in the very state of shattering and scattering, neither falling nor moving, fixed at this precise moment.
It was as if someone had used a supreme divine power to freeze everything, forcing it to remain at the instant just before breaking. It resembled a mirror shattered into pieces and then forcibly pieced back together. Once broken, it could never be made whole again, the cracks on its surface impossible to conceal.
The tornadoes and lightning outside the mountain were alive and in motion, while the mountain itself was dead and motionless. This formed a strange image between motion and stillness.
Then, Qi Xuansu saw two people locked in fierce combat. The two did not fear the tornado nor the lightning. They moved effortlessly and severed the wind pillars and lightning bolts. Countless motionless rock fragments were shattered by the aftershocks of their clash, and ripples visible to the naked eye spread outward, even breaking the mountain’s frozen state in places and sending sections crashing downward.
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