Chapter 353: No Way Back
The sensation of falling was absolute and merciless.
Shen Yu felt the strange, suffocating gravitational force wrapping around his limbs like iron chains, completely disrupting his center of gravity and paralyzing his motor control mid-air.
Wind roared past his ears as the jagged black fissure swallowed him deeper into the earth, cutting off the dim red light of the sky above.
He remained composed, keeping his dantian primed and ready.
After descending hundreds of meters through the absolute dark, a faint, pulsing red glow emerged far below.
In the very same heartbeat, the unnatural gravitational pull vanished without warning, releasing its hold on his body.
Reacting with instantaneous battle instincts, Shen Yu flicked his wrist.
A heavy, low-tier spirit spear materialized in his grasp.
Channelling his condensed physical might, he drove the spear tip fiercely into the grey stone wall beside him.
CLANG— SCREEECH!
Sparks erupted in a blinding shower as the spearhead bit deep into the petrified rock.
The sheer downward momentum dragged him sliding down the sheer cliff face for several yards, gouging a deep trench into the stone before friction brought him to a dead stop.
Dangling in the gloom, Shen Yu tested his balance.
He placed his boots against the rock face and attempted to push upward to climb back out, but the moment he made a move toward the surface, an invisible, crushing atmospheric pressure bore down from above, sealing off the upper route like a solid ceiling of lead.
Shen Yu let out a quiet sigh.
’A one-way spatial trap,’ he noted inwardly.
Shifting his golden eyes downward, he peered toward the distant crimson radiance.
He unleashed his divine sense to gauge the remaining drop, but the subterranean air was dense with spiritual interference, obscuring anything beyond a few hundred meters.
Refusing to plunge blindly into the unknown, Shen Yu yanked the spear free from the wall and allowed himself to free-fall once more, keeping his senses hyper-alert.
He plummeted through the darkness for nearly five minutes.
The red glow beneath him steadily expanded, revealing the cavern floor roughly one hundred meters below.
Without hesitation, Shen Yu gripped his spear with both hands and drove it into the rock wall once again.
CRACK— SCREEECH!
The blade tore through the stone, deceleration washing over him as he slid smoothly to a halt twenty meters above the chamber floor.
Hanging suspended from the wall, Shen Yu swept his divine sense across the ground beneath him.
His perception returned clean, no concealed spell arrays, no hidden pressure plates, and no signs of lurking subterranean beasts.
Still, hundreds of years of survival instincts from his past life kept him vigilant.
With a subtle flick of his finger, Shen Yu retrieved a heavy gold coin from his spatial ring and shot it down with pinpoint accuracy.
Clink.
The coin bounced against the smooth, dark stone tiles and rolled to a stop. Nothing triggered.
Not taking any chances, Shen Yu withdrew a second spirit spear from his storage ring and hurled it down with force.
THUD!
The weapon impaled the floor, the metallic vibration echoing down the wide corridor without provoking a single defensive mechanism.
Satisfied, Shen Yu released his grip on the wall spear, descending lightly through the air and landing gracefully upon the stone floor, his boots making scarcely a whisper against the tiles.
He recalled both spears back into his spatial ring, keeping his divine sense actively scanning every inch of his surroundings.
Lifting his golden gaze, Shen Yu examined the subterranean domain.
He stood inside a vast, ancient underground tunnel.
As Shen Yu stood taking in his surroundings, a sudden, grinding screech of shifting stone reverberated from the heights above.
The vertical shaft he had just plummeted through churned with violent Qi.
Reacting on pure instinct, Shen Yu pushed off the ground, blurring backward several yards.
RUMBLE— CRASH!
Massive slabs of petrified bedrock slammed together in rapid succession, sealing the vertical drop completely.
Within seconds, the ceiling smoothed over, leaving not a single seam where the fissure had once opened.
Shen Yu kept his divine sense locked onto the sealed ceiling for a few steady breaths.
Seeing no residual spatial turbulence, he cast a cool, indifferent look at the blocked exit.
The path back to the surface was severed, only moving deeper remained an option.
Turning his gaze, he calmly surveyed the two opposing directions of the subterranean tunnel.
Perched along the vaulted roof at strict ten-meter intervals were natural, jagged blood-red glowstones, bathing the long corridor in a rhythmic, crimson haze.
The walls themselves were bare and unadorned, yet distinctly different from the chalky, ash-grey stone of the drop above, here, the rock was a dense, mottled grey infused with faint veins of dried-blood crimson, hardened by millennia of concentrated ancient Qi.
Shen Yu pondered which path to take.
He extended his divine sense down both ends, but the dense, Qi-saturated rock swallowed his mental waves within a few hundred paces, revealing no obvious clues.
Then, as faint as a dying breath, a razor-thin ribbon of cool air grazed the bridge of his nose and slipped past his cheek.
To an untrained survivor, it was barely a whisper against the stagnant subterranean chill.
But underground, air never moved without purpose.
Instead of pushing forward into the source of the breeze, Shen Yu turned on his heel and moved in the direction the current was traveling.
A narrow fissure or choked corridor would have bottlenecked the airflow, but a steady, continuous draft meant only one thing, a massive expanse lay ahead, pulling the current inward like the slow inhale of a subterranean beast.
Only a colossal hollow, a grand hall or an open cavern, could swallow that much air without resistance.
Shen Yu began to walk in that direction.
He maintained a measured, steady pace, his boots silent against the crimson-veined stone, with his divine sense spread outward to dissect every shadow, shift, and breath in the dark.
-x-
A/N:
Weekly PS: 153 / 80
Monthly GT: 29 / 30