Chapter 195 - Layer One and the Battlefield Records
The group continued deeper through Layer One.
Whenever they passed a ruined storage hall or collapsed side chamber, Tang Sisi would casually point somewhere and say, "I went there before."
Then the group would skip it.
At first, some people did not understand why.
After the third empty ruin, they understood.
Every place Tang Sisi had passed through had been swept clean.
The shelves had been emptied. The cracked boxes had been opened. The weapon racks had been checked. Even loose pieces of metal embedded in collapsed walls had been pried out if they looked useful enough.
Tang Sisi explained again, "I only took the expensive-looking things."
No one believed her.
In the Fallen-Star Sanctuary, especially inside the Inner Area, even a broken piece of metal on the ground could become something expensive outside. If Tang Sisi had only taken the expensive-looking things, then that meant she had taken almost everything.
Su Bai glanced at her once.
Tang Sisi looked back with clear, innocent eyes.
Su Bai looked away.
He had no right to criticize her. If he had been trapped here first, the result might have been even cleaner.
The group therefore skipped the ruins Tang Sisi had already entered and focused on the surrounding paths she had not fully searched. These areas were more dangerous, but also more likely to have useful remains.
As they walked, Tang Sisi’s gaze quietly drifted toward Su Bai several times.
She had noticed several strange things about him.
The lotus barriers around the others resisted the Ashen-Blood Miasma. His was an inverted lotus barrier that pulled the mist in.
Tang Sisi watched for a while, then she looked at the jade bottles Su Bai had given her.
She suddenly felt that she might have wronged him earlier.
He really did not seem to need ordinary Immaculate Lotus-Heart Pills.
Tang Sisi opened her mouth. Before she could ask, Tang Ziyan’s gaze landed on her.
She closed her mouth.
Tang Ziyan’s meaning was clear. Do not ask.
Tang Sisi understood.
...
The group continued.
Before long, they found another skeleton.
Everyone stopped naturally.
Like usual, Su Bai stepped forward first.
Tang Sisi watched curiously from the side.
Su Bai took out the Vanguard’s Entropy-Detonator. He touched the cursed rune and activated the Detonator.
A moment later, fragments of its memory rose.
Su Bai closed his eyes.
The battlefield appeared in his mind.
...
When Su Bai opened his eyes again, his gaze had become heavier.
The memories here were clearer than the ones in the Outer Area.
The cultivators who died in this part of Layer One were also much stronger. Many of them had been at least Golden Core.
In the current era, Golden Core cultivators were already powerful experts.
But in this ancient battlefield, they had only been part of the support forces.
This had not been an ordinary battle.
It was a war large enough that Golden Core experts were only support soldiers.
That realization made Su Bai quieter.
...
They continued.
The deeper Layer One roads were not empty.
False bodies wandered between collapsed halls. Miasma beasts crawled out from cracks in the ground. Occasionally, human figures wearing ancient armor moved along old routes, repeating duties that had already ended countless years ago.
The group killed them quickly.
When ordinary false bodies appeared, Qin Baoshan held the front, Ji Ruyue froze their movement, Chen Feng cut through the openings, Yan Lie burned away the weaker miasma residue, and Tang Ziyan’s hidden weapons struck from the side.
Tang Sisi watched the first few exchanges carefully, then she began moving too.
Her methods were quiet.
One moment, she stood beside Tang Ziyan.
The next moment, a human figure would stiffen with a needle behind its ear.
A breath later, threads tightened around its joints, and poison seeped through the gaps in its miasma-supported body. It would collapse before the others even fully noticed she had attacked.
When Soul-Bloom traces appeared, Su Bai moved first.
Sometimes he deceived them through the same wrong recognition he had used before. Sometimes he did not bother and simply let the Starving Wraith’s Devouring Maw bite into their miasma support while Nether Threads restrained the bloom structure long enough for the Soul-Bloom Bud to pull.
The first time Tang Sisi saw it happen, she stopped moving.
The Returnee had tried to bloom after death, but the force twisted unnaturally and bent toward Su Bai.
Tang Sisi stared. Her head hurt.
She had spent days being chased by enemies that bloomed after death. Every eruption had damaged her barriers and wasted her pills. She had to plan distance, angles, escape routes, replacement barriers, and trap layers just to avoid being caught by the aftermath.
Su Bai simply took the explosion away.
That was not fighting. That was correcting the enemy’s behavior.
Tang Sisi slowly turned to Tang Ziyan.
"Cousin."
Tang Ziyan did not look at her. "What?"
"Is he always like this?"
Tang Ziyan was silent for a moment.
"Yes."
Tang Sisi’s expression became complicated.
During the journey, she had heard stories from Tang Ziyan about Su Bai.
She had believed half of it.
Now she felt that believing only half had been disrespectful to reality.
The enemies were supposed to be the ones who deceived people in this place.
Now Su Bai was the one deceiving them.
Tang Sisi thought back to how she had guarded herself from him when he offered pills.
Her face warmed slightly beneath the cloth covering it.
Another group of enemies appeared along the road.
This time, Tang Sisi watched closely.
Su Bai sensed the bloom structure first, stepped forward, let the enemy hesitate after recognizing the wrong bloom, and used that instant to kill it. The explosion that should have followed was dragged inward again, swallowed before it could fully erupt.
Tang Sisi’s eyes twitched. She finally sighed.
"I understand now."
Tang Ziyan glanced at her. "What do you understand?"
Tang Sisi’s expression became peaceful.
"When it comes to Brother Su, I should kill my emotions first."
Tang Ziyan paused.
"What?"
"If I keep being surprised, my heart will suffer."
Tang Ziyan looked at her cousin for a long moment, then she looked at Su Bai, then she found that she could not refute it.
Tang Sisi continued with a calm expression, "From now on, if Brother Su does something unreasonable, I will accept it first and think later."
...
The group continued searching Layer One.
Tang Sisi’s previously explored areas had been emptied, but the wider supply routes still yielded gains.
Not every ruin had storage rooms left, but the battlefield itself was rich.
Star-metal was everywhere.
Lin Weiyang’s eyes grew brighter each time they found another piece.
"This is good material."
She said that often.
After the fifth time, Chen Feng looked at her and said, "You sound like Tang Sisi when she sees treasure."
Lin Weiyang paused.
Tang Sisi looked over.
For a moment, both girls seemed to consider whether that was an insult.
Then Lin Weiyang looked down at the star-metal fragment in her hand.
Tang Sisi looked down at a small broken blade she had just picked up.
Neither of them denied it.
The group gathered what they could carry. Su Bai stored the heavier pieces, while Lin Weiyang marked anything that might be useful for formations or mechanisms later. Tang Sisi still somehow found smaller valuable fragments before anyone else noticed them.
No one questioned her anymore.
But compared to the materials, the records mattered more.
They found damaged jade slips buried inside collapsed command boxes. Some were too deteriorated to read. Some shattered the moment spiritual power touched them. Others only released broken phrases.
Still, fragments were better than nothing.
Zhuge Jing, Lin Weiyang, Bai Zhi, and Su Bai worked together to preserve what they could.
Zhuge Jing reconstructed patterns from repeated terms. Lin Weiyang stabilized cracked jade slip structures. Bai Zhi used gentle lotus light to slow further corrosion, while Su Bai checked for old impressions clinging to the records.
Bit by bit, the battlefield became clearer.
Orders. Retreat commands. Supply allocation. Formation repair requests. Casualty counts. Warnings about red mist exposure. Instructions to evaluate returning soldiers. Emergency messages sent toward the second defensive line.
Most were incomplete, but some repeated words were enough to make the group’s expression change.
Immortal. Immortal envoy. Immortal descent.
At first, no one spoke.
The word appeared in one damaged jade slip, then in another, then in a half-broken command record carved into a metal plate.
For the current cultivation world, immortals were no longer a fact people could point to.
They were legends.
Some believed they had existed. Some believed they were exaggerated titles from a lost age. Some believed "immortal" simply referred to cultivators who had reached a height so far beyond ordinary realms that later generations could no longer understand them.
But here, in the records of the Fallen-Star Sanctuary, the word appeared as part of military orders.
Yan Lie swallowed.
"Immortals were real?"
No one laughed at him.
Because this time, everyone was asking the same thing.
Bai Zhi’s expression was solemn. "The Glass-Lotus Holy See has ancient hymns mentioning immortal light descending during calamities."
Zhuge Jing’s fingers tightened around his fan.
"The Zhuge Clan has records that reference immortals."
Lin Weiyang looked at the damaged jade slip in her hand.
"This one says... ’after the immortals descended...’ The rest is damaged."
The silence deepened.
’After the immortal descended...’
Those words were too heavy.
Tang Sisi looked at the record, then at the red mist outside the broken hall.
"If an immortal descended here, why is this place like this now?"
No one answered.
That question was more frightening than the discovery itself.
If immortals had truly descended into this battlefield, then the Fallen-Star Sanctuary was more dangerous than any of them had imagined.
Because there were only a few possibilities.
Either the immortal had failed, or the immortal had died, or the immortal had left after sealing something so terrible that even countless years later, the battlefield still remained drowned in Ashen-Blood Miasma.
None of those possibilities were comforting.
Su Bai looked at the damaged records silently.
If there had been immortals here, then where were they now?
If they were alive, would they have allowed this place to rot into its current state?
If they were dead, what had killed them?
That thought was much more concerning.
Still, the group did not stop exploring.
If anything, the discovery made them more determined.
This was too big.
They needed clarification. They needed more records.
They needed to know whether "immortal" was a title, a realm, a race, an envoy, or something beyond the current world’s understanding.
They found more fragments as they moved deeper through Layer One.
A broken order mentioning an immortal command seal.
A damaged plate warning that no one was permitted to cross toward the third region without authorization from the immortal envoy.
Each fragment made the air heavier.
Layer One no longer felt like a simple supply region.
It felt like the outer edge of a history that should have remained buried.
Su Bai continued collecting memory fragments from skeletons whenever they found them.
Some impressions showed panic. Some showed duty. Some showed awe when orders from higher levels arrived.
Su Bai opened his eyes after one such fragment and did not speak for a while.
Zhuge Jing watched him.
"Brother Su?"
Su Bai looked toward the road ahead.
"We are close."
The others turned.
The terrain had changed.
The supply roads were becoming wider. The miasma in the air felt heavier, not yet like what Tang Sisi described near the solid barrier, but denser than before.
Far ahead, through Bai Zhi’s intermittent Glass-Lotus Clear Sight, the silhouette of something larger appeared.
A broken defensive line stretching across the battlefield.
Su Bai knew what it was even before the memory fragments fully connected.
Layer Two.
The active main battlefield and defensive region. The place where the shape of the ancient war would finally begin to show itself.