103: Chapter 103 Desiccated Corpses of Gods

Li Xiuyuan and Gu Xiao entered the Ancient Grotto-Heaven first.

Upon landing, Gu Xiao stepped onto the dark red scorched earth, and a crisp sound rang out from beneath his feet, "Snap!"

He crouched down and used his fingers to brush away the surface soil, revealing a layer of dark brown hard shell. Its texture was rigid, and the surface had fine, dense patterns, resembling marks left by repeated scorching with intense fire.

Gu Xiao pinched a bit of dust and brought it to his nose to sniff lightly; an overwhelming scent of blood and rust shot straight to his brain.

The smell was persistent; it didn't seem to be attached to the soil, but rather like an aura emitted by the land itself, seeping out from its very bones.

"Such heavy blood energy."

Gu Xiao looked up and gazed toward the horizon.

The sky was pressed down by an extremely thick layer of red clouds, like a quilt soaked in blood, weighing heavily overhead, almost pressing down to the ground.

Light leaked through the gaps in the clouds, dyeing the entire world a chaotic dark red, making it impossible to tell if it was day or night.

The air was filled with a dense scent of blood and rust. The smell wasn't pungent, but it was heavy, as if something were pressing on his chest, making every breath laborious.

Li Xiuyuan coiled beside him, his golden slit pupils slowly sweeping across the surroundings.

The moment he entered this Ancient Grotto-Heaven, his Spiritual Sense had been suppressed by the blood energy within, but he could still perceive from the dense blood energy of this Ancient Grotto-Heaven what this land had once experienced.

"It seems to be an ancient battlefield," Li Xiuyuan said.

"An ancient battlefield?" Gu Xiao was taken aback and turned his head to look.

A place worthy of being called an ancient battlefield was not merely a place where a fight had occurred.

To put it bluntly, if the number of deceased beings was insufficient, it wouldn't even qualify to be called an ancient battlefield.

"Many people died, as well as Rising Beingss, and even gods died here."

Li Xiuyuan's perception extended deep underground. Having refined the origin of the Lord River God, he could, to some extent, glimpse some of this place's past through the tentacles of his Spiritual Sense.

It was an extremely tragic battle, with slaughter filling the sky and blood flowing like rivers.

It was a chaotic battle between three factions: cultivators, demonkind, and gods.

The reason it was called a chaotic battle was that the course of this conflict was extremely strange. At first, cultivators and gods joined hands to fight against the aquatic tribes led by the Lord River God.

After several days of fierce fighting, just as the Lord River God was about to be defeated and flee in disarray, that god suddenly went mad, turned against them without warning, and struck back at the human cultivators.

The human cultivators quickly noticed the abnormality, but they did not engage the god; instead, they kept trying various methods to wake the other party up.

Unfortunately, all efforts were in vain; the god had completely lost its sanity.

After the Lord River God sensed the change in the situation, he immediately ordered the aquatic tribes to stop fighting and watched coldly, sitting by as the crazed god slaughtered all the human cultivators.

When the god had killed until it was exhausted and its aura had weakened to the extreme, he suddenly erupted, wielding the dragon lord blade to pierce through the god's chest with a single strike.

"What a cruel battle," Li Xiuyuan said in a low voice, returning to his senses.

That god's sudden madness was without warning, exactly the same as the crazed gods of the Ancient Heavenly Court.

He looked up toward the distance. The red clouds hung very low, and at the edge of his vision was a layer of dark red mist, within which some higher silhouettes were vaguely visible, resembling collapsed buildings or perhaps mountains of bones.

"That dragon lord blade might just be in this Ancient Grotto-Heaven."

Gu Xiao's eyes lit up immediately upon hearing this. "Good, good, good, finally there is something to gain."

Li Xiuyuan, however, was not as excited as him; a sense of indescribable heaviness weighed on his heart.

He had not sensed any spiritual acupoints or springs; or rather, the spiritual acupoints and springs of this Ancient Grotto-Heaven had all dried up, and the reason this Ancient Grotto-Heaven had not yet collapsed was likely due to the blood energy of this world.

The blood energy capable of supporting an Ancient Grotto-Heaven, combined with an ancient battlefield—it was hard to imagine what kind of monster such a place would breed.

Li Xiuyuan did not stay in one place but wandered around the Ancient Grotto-Heaven. The silver-white flood dragon flew low, skimming the scorched earth; it was not fast, but extremely steady.

On the ground, more and more bones and weapon fragments began to appear, until eventually they covered almost the entire land, making it difficult to find a place to step.

Those bones were of various shapes. The slender skeletons were clearly human, with visible cracks on the ribs. There were also bizarre skulls, some with horns, some with gill bones.

There were also some skeletons of astonishing size; a single rib was several zhang long, half-buried in the soil like a section of a collapsed beam, leaving one to wonder what kind of behemoth it was in life.

Gu Xiao lay on the flood dragon's back, looking down at the bones passing beneath him, when he suddenly noticed that scattered around those huge skeletons were many tiny golden fragments, like the residue left behind after something had shattered.

"What are those?" Gu Xiao asked, pointing at the golden fragments.

Li Xiuyuan looked down, his slit pupils tightening slightly. "Divine blood."

Gu Xiao was stunned: "Divine blood?"

"The blood of a god, after drying up, will condense into this kind of golden crystal. Over time, the crystals will shatter and melt into the soil," Li Xiuyuan said.

Gu Xiao sucked in a breath of cold air; this was the first time he had ever seen the blood of a god.

After flying for about half an hour, the red clouds in the sky became paler and paler, the thick blood energy gradually thinned, and the scenery in the distance became clear.

Li Xiuyuan suddenly stopped.

Gu Xiao poked his head out from the flood dragon's back, and upon seeing the scene ahead, his pupils shrank violently.

In front was a small mountain piled up from white bones.

The skeletons were layered on top of each other, and gray-white bone powder covered the surface like a layer of frost.

Countless weapon fragments were scattered at the foot of the mountain, covered in rust and eroded beyond recognition by time.

And at the top of the bone mountain, a corpse was hunched over with its head bowed in a strange posture, as if someone had forcibly pressed it there.

A blood-colored long blade pierced through its chest, the tip emerging from its back and sinking into the bones beneath, pinning the corpse firmly to the bone mountain.

The corpse's arms hung limply, its ten fingers half-curled, head bowed low, chin resting on its chest, as if bowing and kowtowing to this hill built of white bones.

Gu Xiao stared at the blade on the corpse for a long time and asked in a low voice: "That blade, could it be the dragon lord blade?"

Li Xiuyuan's gaze was solemn as he looked at the corpse: "Yes."

"In other words, that corpse..." Gu Xiao's breathing suddenly became heavy.

The Lord River God had used the dragon lord blade to kill a god, and now, the dragon lord blade had appeared, and that corpse, which had yet to turn into white bones, must be that dead god!

To think that in his lifetime, he could witness the corpse of a god with his own eyes!

"That's right." Li Xiuyuan's voice was low, but his heartbeat had inexplicably quickened a few beats. He felt an incomparably suffocating danger, as if a pair of invisible eyes were coldly watching them from the shadows.

Gu Xiao did not jump off the flood dragon's back to walk forward. He was also someone with a brain; Li Xiuyuan's tone and mood were very wrong.

Moreover, he had already realized that Li Xiuyuan had just taken him on a large circle around the Ancient Grotto-Heaven, and they hadn't found a single spiritual acupoint or spring.

Logically speaking, without the support of spiritual acupoints or springs, the Ancient Grotto-Heaven should have collapsed long ago; how could it have existed for so long?

"Should we retreat first?" Gu Xiao said softly.

However, before Li Xiuyuan could give an answer, the half-curled fingers of the corpse on the bone mountain were gently twitching.

"F*** you..." Gu Xiao's pupils suddenly constricted, the rest of his words choked in his throat, and he only let out a short, sharp gasp of air.