155: The emergence of the cave

Inside the stone hut, time seemed to become thick and slow.

Chen Linsheng had maintained his posture, palms pressed against the stone, for a full day and night.

The aura around his body was heavy and condensed. A very faint layer of earthy-yellow light on his skin pulsed with his breathing, as if he had established a mysterious resonance with the earth beneath him and the Earth Mountain Stone in his palms.

The Mind-Cultivation Technique of the Mountain Suppressing Seal circulated within his body in a continuous cycle.

Initially, as the mountain Mountain Essence entered his body, it brought only a heavy sense of oppression, as if he were carrying an invisible peak. His Qi and blood became sluggish, and his muscles felt sore and swollen.

However, Chen Linsheng's will was as firm as a rock, and his Hunyuan Foundation was exceptionally robust. He did not forcefully resist this heavy pressure, but instead used the all-encompassing nature of the Hunyuan True Body to slowly guide and fuse it.

Gradually, within that heaviness, a sense of being 'grounded' emerged.

It was not a static stability, but a 'steadiness' that contained boundless vitality, like the earth supporting all things or mountains standing tall through wind and frost.

The essence within the Earth Mountain Stone was no longer merely an external burden; it began to intermingle with his Qi and blood, his fascia, and even the vitality nurtured deep within his bone marrow by the Jade Marrow Guiding Technique.

With the integration of every wisp of essence, his understanding of the word 'Mountain' deepened by another degree.

His consciousness seemed to sink into a boundless world of the Earth element.

In his perception, he no longer saw the four walls of the stone hut, but the thick and infinite meridians of the earth and the silent spine of towering mountains.

Wisps of pure Earth Concept, like shimmering lights flowing through the earth's veins, were carefully captured and refined by him, merging into the illusory image of the 'Mountain Seal' condensing in his palms.

That phantom was initially just a cluster of blurred earthy-yellow halo, but as time passed, it gradually became solid, its outline faintly revealing the embryonic form of a mountain peak.

The base was thick and broad, and the peaks rose and fell. Although not fully formed, it already emitted a reassuring and heavy Aura.

Chen Linsheng could feel that his understanding of the 'Suppressing the Mountain' form of the Hunyuan Palm was deepening and expanding at an astonishing speed.

In the past, 'Suppressing the Mountain' was more of a Concept of force application, but now, he was touching upon something more fundamental—the 'Aura' and 'Intent' that belonged to the 'Mountain' itself.

At the same time, he did not completely give up on his attempt at the 'Yang Fire Tempering' Concept.

While guiding the Earth essence, he diverted a portion of his mind to maintain that wisp of warm fire intent he had visualized in his Dantian.

Earth is thick and carries things, while Fire rises and tempers. Under the harmony of his Hunyuan Qi and Blood, the two actually formed a subtle balance and cycle.

The Earth essence nourished the fire intent, making it gentle rather than scorched; the fire intent, in turn, calcined the Earth essence, making it condensed and pure.

Under this dual tempering, his physique underwent extremely slow but solid changes. Within the faint golden light beneath his skin, a trace of hard-to-detect warm color would occasionally flash; the elasticity and contraction of his muscle fibers added a hint of restrained explosive potential atop their heavy Foundation... Just as Chen Linsheng was immersed in the profound insights of the Mountain Suppressing Seal, thousands of miles away on the Northern Frontier, there was a completely different scene.

There was no bustling noise of Jiuqu Prefecture here, nor the gentle elegance of the southern water towns.

As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but vast Gobi desert and continuous brownish-grey barren mountains.

The sky was forever that gritty greyish-yellow, polished by wind and sand.

Water was scarce, and vegetation was sparse; only the most drought-resistant thorns and camel thorns took root among the gravel in scattered patches.

The faces of the people living here were carved with deep furrows by the year-round wind and sand. Their skin was rough and cracked, and their eyes held a mixture of numbness and resilience toward the harsh environment.

Most were widows of military households, refugees fleeing famine, or descendants of criminals banished here, struggling to survive on this frontier regarded by the Central Plains as a 'bitter cold land of death.'

Earning a living here was, in the most literal sense, the most brutal struggle.

Men formed small teams, risking attacks from wolf packs, sand bandits, and even small groups of barbarian raiders crossing the border. They ventured deep into the Gobi to find rare Ore, dig for drought-resistant plant roots buried deep underground, or set simple Trapping to catch small beasts like sand foxes and jerboas. Every time they left home, they might never return.

Women and children gathered at the edges of the few oases formed by tiny underground springs. They built low adobe houses or simple tents, tended to a few scrawny lambs, wove coarse felt, and used every method possible to wring a trace of life from this stingy land.

That afternoon, the sky was as dusky as ever.

A stone-quarrying team consisting of seven or eight lean men was swinging simple iron pickaxes, working with difficulty at the foot of a heavily weathered rocky mountain.

They hoped to find some slightly better quality stone to transport back to the simple border town a hundred miles away, to exchange for a meager amount of salt and coarse grain.

"Headman Wang, in this ghostly place, the stones are like iron balls. We've been banging for half a day and nothing's happening." A younger man wiped the sweat mixed with sand from his face and spat.

The one called Headman Wang was a one-eyed old man with a hideous scar on his face. Without looking up, he said dully, "Less talk. Better to swing a few more times than waste strength complaining. The wives and kids at home are waiting for rice in the pot."

Just then, the one-eyed old man suddenly stopped his movements. His remaining eye narrowed as he looked toward the distant horizon.

"What is it, Headman Wang?"

"The wind... isn't right." The old man's voice carried a trace of subtle tension.

Everyone looked in the direction of his gaze, but at first, they noticed nothing unusual.

But soon, a low and oppressive wail, like thousands of ghosts weeping underground, began to surge from all directions.

The distant horizon, which had been a clear grey-yellow boundary, began to rapidly blur and distort.

A heart-stopping dusky yellow, connecting heaven and earth, was expanding and advancing at a speed visible to the naked eye!

"It's a sandstorm! A Black Sandstorm!" A middle-aged man in the team, who was the most experienced, lost his voice in terror, his tone cracking from extreme fear.

Before his words could land, the gale arrived!

It wasn't an ordinary wind, but a destructive torrent carrying billions of grains of sand and gravel, sounding like billions of hornets vibrating their wings simultaneously!

Vision was stripped away in an instant. All that remained in the world was the violent howling and the sand and stones hitting their faces and bodies like knife cuts.

"Run! Run behind the leeward side of the rocks!" the one-eyed old man shrieked, but his voice was instantly swallowed by the gale.

The men of the quarrying team dropped their tools and, like startled hares, relied on their last memories of the terrain to scramble and crawl behind the nearest large protruding rocks, curling their bodies tightly and covering their mouths and noses with anything they could grab.

The sandstorm swept through ruthlessly. The world fell into a Chaos of darkness and roaring.

Sand and stones struck the rocks, making a dense pitter-patter like torrential rain, interspersed with the terrifying sounds of wood snapping, tents being torn apart, and the faint, panicked, and desperate screams of people and livestock in the distance.

This sandstorm came quickly and left just as fast.

About half an hour later, the world-destroying howling gradually weakened and receded.

After a long time, the men of the quarrying team curled behind the giant rocks finally dared to slightly loosen their nearly stiff bodies and tentatively raise their heads.

The world before them had completely changed.

The original terrain was covered and leveled by a thick layer of fresh yellow sand, and many familiar landmarks had disappeared. The sky was still dusky, but the suffocating pressure brought by the sandstorm had dissipated.

"Cough... cough... is... is everyone still alive?" The one-eyed old man was the first to struggle up, shaking off the sand covering him, his single eye urgently scanning for survivors.

One after another, people crawled out from sand piles or from behind rocks, all looking disheveled and shaken, but fortunately, all seven or eight were there. Although everyone was injured, most were just scrapes and bruises.

"Damn... almost got buried here..." the young man said with lingering fear, his legs still weak.

"Quick, see if the tools are still there!" The middle-aged man was more concerned about their means of livelihood.

Everyone began to rummage through the sand. Fortunately, most of the pickaxes and ropes had been blocked by the rocks and were not completely swept away or buried.

Just then, the middle-aged man who had first noticed the sandstorm was wrong suddenly stopped. He narrowed his eyes, which were red and swollen from the wind and sand, and stared intently toward the direction the sandstorm had come from—deep into the Gobi they had originally intended to explore.

"Head... Headman Wang... look over there..." His voice was dry, trembling with disbelief.

The one-eyed old man and the others followed his gaze.

A few miles away, where there should have been a flat sand dune, now, amidst the gradually settling dust, there stood... an unprecedented sight!

It was not a naturally formed rock formation.

Behind the hazy curtain of dust, the outline of a field of broken walls and ruins was faintly visible.

There were towering giant stone pillars of unknown material; though mostly collapsed, one could still imagine their former grandeur. There were blurred shadows of collapsed palaces and pavilions, their style ancient and peculiar, definitely not following the design of any current dynasty. Deeper in, there seemed to be a massive, non-naturally formed fissure or portal, standing open and eerie, its interior dark and deep, as if leading to an unknowable underground.

A field of ancient and mysterious Immortal Cave ruins had actually broken through the sea of sand and reappeared in the world after this sudden and terrifying Black Sandstorm!