The despondent Auspicious Sentinel finally raised its head at this exact moment, a flash of majesty and divinity belonging solely to a Divine Beast flickering in the depths of its eyes.
Its front hoof, covered in dense, heavy scales, slammed violently down toward the blood pool.
BOOM—!
The earth shuddered aggressively.
The subterranean hall, three hundred meters deep, felt as if it had been struck face-first by an invisible, ten-million-ton hammer. Countless finger-thick fissures instantly fractured across the rigid granite walls.
A ring of pure kinetic pressure expanded outward in a manic frenzy. Hundreds of tons of viscous blood plasma, accumulated over decades within the central pool, were blasted into mid-air by the sudden high-pressure shockwave.
Not a single drop fell back to its original place; under the terrifying repulsive force, the plasma atomized into a sky-spanning crimson rain, which was instantly whipped into nothingness by a casual gust of Fengqi's storm.
The basin of the pool was stripped entirely bare, revealing a shriveled, fractured floor of deathly, ash-grey stone.
At the exact center stood the ten-foot-tall stone-carved dog head. Under the residual force of the Auspicious Sentinel's strike, the rock covering its surface and the encrusted blood scale began to peel away in massive sheets.
Clatter, clatter...
Debris and clotted chunks of dead blood struck the floor, exposing a texture beneath that made everyone's scalp tingle with absolute horror.
It was not stone at all.
It was an unknown, divine iron radiating a freezing, ghostly-blue glare. Its surface flowed with countless ancient sigils and forbidden tendrils of black energy. Within those dense, hair-thin mystical runes, liquid-like streams of ghostly-blue energy were flashing frantically at a frequency of tens of thousands of cycles per second.
Click, clack, crunch...
A succession of crisp, mechanical shifting sounds—resembling the rapid alignment of ancient clockwork deep inside a hidden tomb—echoed clearly from the absolute deepest layer of the earth.
Under the unyielding glare of Maomao's two-meter-wide beam of high-energy white light, the iron dog head began to collapse inward with rapid, irregular distortions. Its metallic panels folded and reconfigured like a mechanical puzzle, grinding against one another to emit a sharp, freezing screech of interlocking iron plates.
Two seconds later, the rigid, absolutely solid floor of the blood pool slid smoothly toward both sides without a single hint of warning.
It revealed a perfect circular shaft, five meters in diameter.
A straight staircase, glowing with a piercing, pale white fluorescence and forged entirely from that unknown divine iron, plummeted vertically into the endless darkness deep within the core of the black mountain.
At the base of the staircase, there was no longer a single trace of blood stench, nor did it carry the stomach-churning odor of decaying flesh left by the human cult. Here, there existed only a deathly, mechanical hum—a freezing, calculated rotation characteristic of an ancient, high-level forbidden array.
Dong—
A heavy, archaic brass chime resonated from the absolute depths of the subterranean shaft without warning, detonating abruptly inside the brainstem of every entity present.
This was not a conventional physical sound. It was the absolute vibration of universal laws, generated as the air rubbed against shifting elemental frequencies across a thousand-meter radius, triggered because the ancient subterranean seals had been violently disturbed.
This sound served as an absolute declaration: the disguise masking the Blue Planet had been cracked open, and this yin-yang geocentric coordinate array, hidden for countless eons, had officially awakened within the depths of the earth.
Fengqi's long hair drifted gently within the pale white fluorescence. Her gold-and-green double pupils locked onto the unfathomable staircase, and the fractured golden divine light within her left eye tightened abruptly.
"The Hive possesses no record of this," she muttered, staring down into the shaft. Her tone was freezing, entirely devoid of human emotional inflection.
Maomao stood upright on its hind legs, emitting a sharp, squeaking shriek. Its silvery-white short claws dug fiercely into the stone floor, and the white light waves pulsing inside its pupils expanded into a massive, red-hot spike.
Within the vision of its Eye of Truth-Piercing, the structural lines extending downward from this divine iron staircase formed a dense, overwhelming grid of iron-black mystical chains, driven deep into the absolute core of the planetary crust. Those chains were behaving exactly like parasites, frantically devouring the geocentric kinetic energy of the Blue Planet's origin source.
The despondent Auspicious Sentinel tilted its head. At this moment, the five-colored auspicious clouds surrounding its frame finally re-ignited with a fraction of their former brilliance, yet the confusion in its eyes grew even deeper.
This creature of blessing, which usually symbolized supreme peace, glanced at the empty, blood-stained altar that sat beside them, and then looked down into this freezing, calculated, pitch-black passage. Within its divine heart, a bizarre, sobering realization suddenly emerged.
To chase after what they deemed fame, fortune, and sainthood, humans had systematically slaughtered living spirits in this place for eighty long years.
Yet, in the end, the evil deity they had fed with their own lives and blood was not even a living immortal or a demonic entity—it was merely a cold, absolute, forbidden ancient array that held not a single trace of living vitality.
Fengqi did not hesitate for a single fraction of a second. With a fluid sweep of her black trench coat, she drifted downward along the pale, divine iron staircase toward the absolute deepest layer of the earth, moving as weightlessly as a phantom. Maomao dropped onto all fours, darting and bounding down the steps with exceptional speed. The Auspicious Sentinel followed with heavy strides, each impact of its colossal hooves against the unknown divine iron producing a dense, muffled metallic boom.
Five hundred meters beneath the earth. The atmospheric pressure exerted by the array's enforcement rules here was easily one and a half times greater than that of the surface. Had a standard human physical body stepped into this chamber, it would have been crushed into a mass of raw pulp within a single second under the sudden, explosive increase of its own relative mass.
At the base of the staircase, the spatial layout opened up abruptly.
Before them lay a titanic subterranean tribunal, easily spanning nearly ten thousand square meters in area with a ceiling towering a hundred meters high. The entire platform was completely devoid of any human masonry or craftsmanship. The floor, the vaulted ceiling, and the surrounding walls were forged entirely from a dark grey divine iron that featured a precise, honeycomb-like matrix structure.
Right in the center of the tribunal stood ten colossal, semi-transparent crystal pillars, each ten meters thick. Inside the pillars, a dense network of silver-black metallic lines intertwined with one another, constructing an ancient array that was operating at a frantic speed. The emission radiating from that construct was absolutely not divine light; it was a high-frequency, highly volatile surge of concentrated malevolence and boundless resentment that physically distorted the surrounding visual field.
The Auspicious Sentinel stepped past the final tier of the staircase. The precise microsecond its beast-like pupils registered the imagery playing out at the absolute epicenter of that array, the grand Divine Beast was shaken to its core.
"This... this is impossible..."
The Auspicious Sentinel's mane erupted entirely into rigid tufts in an instant. Within its typically low, raspy voice, a trace of an unconscious tremor born of pure, unadulterated fury emerged for the very first time.
Floating directly above that silver-black grand array—which was rotating at extreme velocities and discharging blinding arcs of pitch-black celestial thunder—were thousands upon thousands of semi-transparent animal souls, emitting a synchronized, ear-piercing shriek of sheer agony.
This was not a matter of dozens, or even hundreds. It was a dense, overlapping torrent of countless spirits locked securely into the absolute core of the array like a silent, raging hurricane.
There were wolves with severed spines, red foxes skinned alive, cats with ruptured eyeballs, and countless stray dogs whose bones had been entirely pulverized to splinters. Their spiritual forms were being forcefully warped, torn apart, and reconfigured by the array, turning into pure streams of raw, un-individualized energy that were continuously pumped down into the deepest layer of the planetary crust along those ten massive crystal pillars.
This was the true face of the "Evolution Pool" that the human cultists had spent eighty long years constructing through systematic slaughter and the accumulation of boundless resentment and dead blood.
This was no ladder designed to elevate humanity into sainthood. This was a brutally cruel, highly efficient trans-dimensional processing plant—a "Soul-Refining Furnace" engineered specifically to strip and butcher the destiny and vitality of the Blue Planet's native living spirits.
Fengqi stared blankly at the scene before her, the ghostly-green storm vortex within her right eye suddenly grinding to a complete, rigid halt. Maomao ground its teeth fiercely, a low, guttural snort escaping its snout.
At this exact moment, whether it was Fengqi, Maomao, or even the Auspicious Sentinel, none of them possessed the knowledge to comprehend what was truly unfolding deep beneath the earth. They could not fathom why an ancient array capable of draining the planet's core kinetic energy would be buried here.
Amidst this suffocating, deathly confusion—
Hum—!
The air in the center of the tribunal rippled with a brutal wave of spatial energy. A thick, majestic aura of dark gold light tore open a transit corridor in mid-air without a single hint of warning. Immediately after, a titanic beast exceeding twenty meters in length, its entire frame blanketed in fractured gold scales, forcefully thrust the front half of its colossal body out from the spatial rift.
The Golden Loong slammed its two massive claws securely into the dark grey divine iron ceiling, the razor-sharp tips scraping against the unknown metal to unleash a cascade of piercing sparks. Its burning, oversized gold vertical pupils locked dead onto the array operating between the ten crystal pillars.
The precise moment the Golden Loong mapped the trajectories of the array woven from those silver-black lines, the expression upon its cold, arrogant face turned unimaginably grave within a fraction of a second.
Among everyone present in the chamber, only the Golden Loong—by virtue of its status as an ancient Divine Beast—understood exactly where this power and this array originated from! It recognized this divine energy; it was an aura saturated with boundless greed and tyrannical domination.
"Senior Golden Loong," the Auspicious Sentinel stepped forward, its massive front hoof striking the ground with a raspy rumble. "This array... this is absolutely not an capability that humans of the Blue Planet could ever possess. Why is there a..."
The Auspicious Sentinel had keenly registered the anomaly. It wanted to ask who the true mastermind operating behind this grand array was.
However, before it could even finish its inquiry, the Golden Loong in mid-air snapped its head around. Those vertical pupils, radiating a terrifying, high-pressure authority, glared dead at the Auspicious Sentinel.
Immediately after, the Golden Loong shook its massive head with slow, deliberate force, emitting a low, resonant roar that forcefully cut off the rest of the Auspicious Sentinel's questions.
The true mastermind behind this planetary harvest is an entity known only to the ancient Golden Loong, and the stakes have just escalated far beyond human greed!
It refused by shaking its head.
The Golden Loong's whiskers vibrated violently through the air. It would not permit the Auspicious Sentinel to ask, and it forbade itself from even uttering that name within this chamber. The secrets intertwined behind this grand array were far too massive, far too terrifying—completely beyond what the current Fengqi or Auspicious Sentinel could ever hope to bear.
The atmosphere within the tribunal compressed to a localized boiling point in an instant.
Rustle, rustle...
The exact ten-millionth of a millisecond the Golden Loong and the Auspicious Sentinel plunged into this deathly, silent confrontation.
Beneath them, along the edge of a minuscule divine iron conduit used to pump the streams of destiny energy at the absolute base of the frantically rotating silver-black array, a multi-legged black shadow darted past without a single hint of warning.
Maomao's high-energy beam from the Eye of Truth-Piercing slammed straight onto the target within a ten-thousandth of a second.
It was a grotesque beetle, roughly thirty centimeters in length. Its body bristled with over a hundred fine, divine iron jointed limbs, and its head featured no eyes—only a ring of miniature, runic gear-teeth. It was absolutely not a biological creature of the Blue Planet; it held no blood within its frame. Its body, forged from some primordial, forbidden dark iron, was currently clinging to the conduit, using that ring of gears to frantically devour the molten spirit form of a ferret.
It was acting on behalf of the entity behind the curtain, forcibly consuming and plundering the spiritual destiny of the Blue Planet's living souls.
ROAR—!!
The Golden Loong unleashed a tyrannical, furious roar.
It engaged in no redundant movements whatsoever. Its colossal, dark gold claw smashed downward through the empty air with a thunderous boom. The force behind this strike exceeded hundreds of thousands of tons. Under the pure, rule-based exclusion of this claw, the high atmospheric pressure inside the tribunal was instantly drained into an absolute vacuum fault line.
BOOM—!
The multi-legged insect shadow failed to endure for even a single microsecond.
Crushed under the absolute physical strength of the Divine Beast, the Golden Loong, its dark iron carapace—along with the runic gear-teeth grinding frantically upon its head—was pulverized directly into a state of primitive nothingness within a tenth of a second.
There was no splatter of blood, nor any mechanical components flying apart. The multi-legged insect puppet merely dissolved into a plume of ash-grey smoke in the air before vanishing completely from sight.
Yet, before the Golden Loong could even retract its massive claw, the mysterious runes lining the depths of the tribunal erupted with a massive glare. The previously ghostly-blue light flipped entirely into a piercing, blood-red color in an instant.
Dong! Dong! Dong!
Three massive, archaic chimes detonated in rapid succession from within the array.
Following the chimes, the rotation speed of the silver-black lines inside the ten giant crystal pillars surged exponentially over a massive area. The rate at which the torrent of myriad spirits trapped within was dissolving accelerated instantly.
Countless streams of gold destiny energy, dense enough to solidify, began to sink frantically toward the absolute core of the geocenter along the planetary crust chains.
They were accelerating their plunder of this planet's foundational destiny of living spirits.
At this absolute, cliffhanger microsecond, Her voice resonated.
"Freeze."