Chapter 629 - The Depths, A Painting - Part 3

Time passed.

And the deeper the expedition team went, the more the Hall of Life seemed to reveal.

At the entrance of the hall, the winding corridors were like a labyrinth, narrow, complex, perfect for hiding people and masking their presence.

But the deeper they went, the more the passageways opened up, widening into spaces like vast, corroded caverns. The walls grew smoother, as if time itself had polished them clean.

Forks and side paths grew fewer. The corridors became enormous, so vast that an ordinary person would struggle to see the other side. It stirred a strange disbelief in the heart, a creeping suspicion. From the outside, the hall hadn’t looked nearly this large.

Yet inside, space itself seemed to have

expanded.

Many of them were familiar, at least vaguely, with the concept of dimensional realms, so they weren’t entirely surprised. And yet...walking through these corridors didn’t feel like stepping into a separate realm at all. There was no shift, no boundary crossed. Just a seamless, surreal vastness.

Even the smallest details of this strange passages left these elite cultivators from the Eastern Sea awestruck.

Here, they walked not as masters of their fate, but like mortals treading sacred ground, hearts full of reverence.

The air within the Hall of Life shimmered faintly with light from an unknown source. But that light did not comfort, it carried a creeping rot, a quiet despair that gnawed at the soul.

The terrain grew less tangled.

But the blood fiends grew more numerous.

When they encountered small groups, or solitary ones, Li Yuan would strike them down with ease. The combat power of the blood fiends was only a little less than a million while his own peak power had already soared past five million.

But when they came across massive hordes, it was different. In those moments, the Puppetry Dean would unleash their puppets, and Ping'an would send in his clones to lure the fiends away, buying the group time to move deeper inside.

With Li Yuan among them, the pace of exploration picked up rapidly.

At first, many had feared some greater terror awaited them deeper within. But so far, they had only encountered blood fiends in these vast halls.

Yet some of the fiends bore broken weapons jutting from their bodies. Judging by their armor and skeletal remnants, it seemed many of them had once been human.

That was when Li Yuan shared what he knew about the blood walkers and ancient gods.

His words carried a heavy weight.

The implication was clear. These blood fiends might not just be mindless monsters. They might blood walkers...or perhaps the fallen, lost remnants of ancient gods.

A grim silence settled over the group.

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

Nearly three months passed.

The expedition had gone so deep that even the round-trip took days.

And then finally, they found it.

A painting bathed in a dim glow like fireflies, a fine gray mist had quietly risen, spreading in a veil that drifted gently through the cold, gleaming corridor.

And on the smooth walls of the passage etched into the stone were the carvings.

It was just a series of shallow marks.

But somehow, within those marks, were

everything

, the joys and sufferings of all living beings, the full arc of lif...birth, sickness, aging, and death. The beginning, and the end.

One glance was enough to drown in it. The onlookers stood frozen, as if spellbound, mesmerized, drunk on the vision before them.

The Puppetry Dean reached out, gently tracing his fingers along the wall. “Who could have carved something like this here?”

The Wood Hall Master murmured, “Whoever it was...it proves one thing. This world has known beings far stronger than we’ve ever imagined. And these, these are the traces they left behind.”

His voice carried a rare note of joy.

The others, too, felt their spirits lift.

After all, to have reached this depth and to find something etched into these walls meant it couldn't have been left here casually. It

had

to mean something.

Li Yuan stood silently, gazing at the painting. But what he saw was not mere carvings. What he saw...was something felt deep within the soul.

He glanced at the excited crowd, and at his son, and a quiet heaviness settled over him.

Because while everyone else was seeing surface-level markings, he, whose soul housed 138,800 ancestral seal seeds in constant motion, saw something far more profound. His soul was strong enough to

perceive

it. What they thought were wall carvings...were actually impressions etched directly into the soul.

And that raised a troubling question.

Such things shouldn’t be able to produce

replicas

. They were not material, not physical. So how had these people seen what appeared to be a painting at all?

He kept that to himself.

He feared that revealing the truth would crush their morale.

Right now, whether the path ahead was right or wrong didn’t matter anymore.

Anyone who had made it this far didn’t need doubt, they needed courage. The kind that charges forward, no matter what.

“There must be a secret to advancing to the second rank hidden in these carvings!” one clan leader cried out, his voice bordering on delirium, like a man dying of thirst who suddenly sees an oasis.

He rushed forward and threw himself before the wall, staring at the carvings with wild eyes, muttering, “It’s here...it has to be here...”

Even though they hadn’t yet reached the final destination marked on the Radiant Treasure Map, these carvings already felt like steps on a staircase to ascension.

The Gold Hall Master, who was the former Sect Master of the Arcane Supreme Sect, remained relatively calm.

Apart from Li Yuan and Bai Xinxuan, he was the next strongest person in the team.

He spoke with authority, “This place is different from before. We should have half the group stand guard while the others meditate before the wall.”

Then he turned to Li Yuan. “Alliance Leader, what do you think?”

Li Yuan looked toward Ping’an and Bai Xinxuan, then back at the former Sect Master. “Let Ping’an and Xinxuan focus on cultivating. I’ll stand guard for them. The rest of you, split into two groups as he said.”

“Father, ” Ping'an began, but Li Yuan cut him off with a wave.

“If these carvings help you, then focus. Look closely.” Li Yuan said gently. He paused, then added in a softer tone, “Actually it’s best if you close your eyes.”

Ping’an blinked. Close his eyes? Wouldn’t that make him

not

see anything?

Bai Xinxuan, hearing the peculiar instruction, immediately sensed something deeper. She had once guided juniors in the same way. Her voice tightened with urgency. “My Lord...do you know something?”

Li Yuan didn’t mention that the carvings were an illusion. Instead, he said, “I saw two paintings. One is what you see here, the surface marks. But the other lies beyond them, invisible unless seen with the soul. To truly

see

these paintings, you must go beyond the carvings, to glimpse the deeper image hidden beneath.”

The crowd was instantly elated. With renewed excitement, they split into groups and threw themselves into the task of comprehension with fierce determination.

Li Yuan remained standing in the corridor.

From the distance came the eerie shuffle of blood fiends, sometimes near, sometimes far, chilling and ominous.

Whenever the Puppetry Dean was present, his puppets would lure the blood fiends away.

When he was absent, and Ping'an was immersed in meditation, it was Li Yuan who personally took action to handle the threat.

And in the meantime, he, too, studied the

painting

.

While the others were busy analyzing the patterns and grooves, trying to divine meaning from each line, Li Yuan was doing something different.

He barely glanced at them, and just a brief moment of immersion was enough for him to see into the soul hidden behind the lines. He saw an entire human life unfold from a single stroke, a child crying at birth, growing old, and dying amid the weeping of loved ones.

A flood of memories and emotions surged into his soul. For most people, this would be overwhelming, blurring the boundary between their own self and the person whose life they’d just seen. Some might even question who they really were.

There were many of these scenes.

Each stroke of a line represented an entire lifetime.

And to Li Yuan, the feeling was all too familiar, intimately so.

Because this was exactly what his innate gift did. Every time he maxed out a skill, this was what he received,

memories

. A flood of lives, experienced all at once.

But there was one key difference.

From his own memories, he gained power. Here, he only

witnessed

. No strength flowed from it. No abilities. Just...memory.

Still, as he kept watching, he began to notice something strange, something fascinating.

The people recorded in these carvings weren’t from the Zhou, Shang, or Xia Dynasties.

They were from the

Yu Dynasty

.

And in that ancient era, cultivating immortality seemed...absurdly easy. All it took was a legacy, a master to take you in.

With a proper teacher, you could quickly learn to summon storms, turn beans into soldiers, shift mountains, part seas, and even attain the so-called

eternal life

.

But, of course, that so-called immortality wasn’t

true

immortality. It was just longevity, a lifespan far beyond that of ordinary mortals.

Li Yuan absorbed life after life from the wall. The more he saw, the more he understood.

Anyone else would need time to process even a single memory, but not him.

No ordinary life could shake his own.

And then, from one particular memory, something truly intriguing surfaced. All those miraculous abilities, summoning storms, or raising armies from seeds, they didn’t come from spiritual roots or bloodlines.

They came from the

Heavenly Seal

.

And cultivating the Heavenly Seal? It had virtually no threshold.

Moreover, in that era, there was no such thing as cultivating Earth Soul, Human Soul, or Heaven Soul.

Suddenly, something clicked for Li Yuan.

These carvings weren’t some key to breaking through to the second rank.

They were

records

. Just that. Records of lives, of history. Or...perhaps they were a test. A trial to temper one’s soul. Only after strengthening the soul to a certain point could one take the next step.

But his soul was already strong enough.

And still, he saw no sign of the second rank.

None at all.