Chapter 48: The Three-Color Teleportation Array, The Deliberately Hidden Truth
Chapter 48 – The Three-Color Teleportation Array, The Deliberately Hidden Truth
Faced with such profound uncertainty, a heavy reluctance weighed upon Chen Changsheng’s heart.
Yet, unable to confirm Niansheng’s safety, his mind found no peace.
Ultimately, his gaze fell upon the Three-Color Teleportation Array within the ancient bronze hall, and a long sigh escaped his lips.
“Little girl, you truly know how to pull karma onto my shoulders.”
“The Dao patterns here have been deliberately sheared away, a clear sign that certain truths were meant to be buried.”
“If I am to find you now, I must first unearth which races guard the eighteen ancient bronze halls.”
“Pray to the Heavens you did not cross over to the domain of the ‘Giant Hand,’ or this matter will become endlessly complicated.”
Leaving his words to the empty air, Chen Changsheng devoted his mind to comprehending the Three-Color Teleportation Array.
The array patterns within this ancient bronze hall were fractured; specifically, two pivotal fragments of truth were missing.
These lost fragments held the identities of the eighteen races guarding the ancient bronze halls, and the ancestral origins of the “Giant Hand.”
Earlier, within the forbidden grounds of the Night Moon Country, he had already noticed the deliberate erasure of these eighteen races.
Initially, he assumed the Ascension True Immortal had sought to obscure the truth from mortal eyes.
Now, the waters ran far deeper.
An entity capable of treading into the Desolate Ancient Forbidden Land to wipe away Dao patterns must possess power beyond mortal reckoning.
Or perhaps, these cosmic scars upon the bronze were torn away by the Great Horror lurking within the Desolate Ancient Forbidden Land itself.
Furthermore, with the eighteen ancient bronze halls torn from their foundations, whatever ancient evils they suppressed should have broken free long ago.
Yet, peace remained; the ominous taint within the Boundless Secret Realm had already been purged.
This laid bare a chilling truth—some unseen entity walked in the shadows, silently extinguishing these calamities.
Whichever path the truth walked, the primeval forces maneuvering the board were not entities Chen Changsheng could presently dare to provoke.
…
The wheel of time turned. Two months bled away before Chen Changsheng finally grasped the profound laws governing the Three-Color Teleportation Array.
He achieved this swift comprehension primarily because his mastery in Formations had reached the level of an Expert.
Secondly, the act of mending the ancient bronze hall within the Boundless Secret Realm had already granted him a foundational understanding of the array’s essence.
Though that prior Three-Color Teleportation Array had been a ruined husk, it had still provided him with invaluable insight.
Extracting pure Heaven and Earth Aura from Spirit Stones, he channeled the essence directly into the heart of the Three-Color Teleportation Array.
Fed by the Spirit Stones, the ancient stone awakened, bleeding three colors of light into the gloom.
Relying on his comprehension, he bridged the minute fractures in the runes and forcibly realigned the shifted three-color Formation patterns.
The Three-Color Teleportation Array finally breathed with a stable, rhythmic resonance.
Staring into the churning void of the array, Chen Changsheng forced down a heavy breath and summoned the stone coffin of the Hundred Defeats Immortal Venerable.
Stepping into the cold embrace of the sarcophagus, he formed a rapid sequence of hand seals, instantly dragging the heavy lid shut over himself.
He had not fully pierced the mysteries of this Three-Color Teleportation Array; forcing it to awaken was already pushing against the limits of the Heavens.
Only the dead knew what chaotic turbulence his patched array might conjure; stepping into that spatial rift with only his flesh would be the pinnacle of foolishness.
“Hum!”
The Three-Color Teleportation Array roared to life, and the heavy stone coffin vanished into the void.
“Clang! Clang! Clang!”
A storm of apocalyptic strikes echoed through the stone coffin, forcing a cold sweat from Chen Changsheng’s pores as he clamped his hands over his ears.
Drawing upon his knowledge of Formations, the reality of the external chaos painted a vivid picture in his mind.
Beyond the thick stone walls, ten thousand spatial rifts were ruthlessly carving into the coffin’s exterior.
Such violent turbulence meant the receiving array was misaligned, tearing the very fabric of space and generating these murderous dimensional blades.
“Praise the Heavens for my caution. Had I crossed over in the flesh, not even my scattered ashes would remain.”
Exhaling a breath heavy with lingering dread, Chen Changsheng settled into the dark, waiting in silent stillness.
…
“Hoo! Ha! Hey!”
Hundreds of towering, bronze-skinned men draped in beast pelts stamped their feet around a roaring bonfire, their movements echoing a primal, blood-soaked ritual.
A short distance from the flames stood a towering bronze altar, where a withered high priest knelt repeatedly, ancient syllables spilling from his cracked lips.
“Hum!”
Without warning, the long-dormant altar erupted, bleeding a blinding, three-colored radiance into the damp heat and thick canopy of the jungle night.
The sudden manifestation froze the chanting warriors mid-step and left the ancient high priest staring in slack-jawed disbelief.
The tribe: ???
This blood-rite was enacted once every ten winters; it was merely an ancestral formality meant to honor the dust!
Why had the dead stone suddenly answered?
Boom!
A massive stone coffin slammed violently onto the altar, instantly shattering the already faint three-colored Formation patterns into dust.
Suffocated by the sheer absurdity of the sight, a deathly silence gripped the tribal clearing.
“Creak…”
The heavy stone lid shifted, the grinding of rock against rock forcing the terrified worshippers to stumble backward.
The slab of stone was shoved aside, and a delicate, fair-skinned “entity” draped in bizarre foreign robes sat upright from within the tomb.
In the breath it took for this “entity” to rise, thousands of primal eyes locked onto his form.
Chen Changsheng: “…”
To descend into such a terrifying spectacle the moment my feet touch the earth… does the Dao leave no room to breathe?
Indeed, the figure rising from the ancient altar was none other than Chen Changsheng, who had ridden the Three-Color Teleportation Array out of the Desolate Ancient Forbidden Land.
He swept his gaze over the pulverized Three-Color Teleportation Array, then lifted his eyes to the suffocating wall of muscle and bone encircling him.
Requiring only a single breath of thought, Chen Changsheng decided a peaceful exchange of words was the only logical path forward.
“Where is this domain?”
He projected the question calmly. Meeting only blank, hostile stares, Chen Changsheng seamlessly shifted his tongue to another dialect.
Having devoured countless ancient scrolls, Chen Changsheng was an Expert in dozens of forgotten tongues.
The guttural grunts of these tribesmen were entirely disconnected from the refined speech of the Daqian Dynasty or the Xuanwu Kingdom.
To decipher his coordinates in this world, the barrier of language had to be broken.
And so, standing within his coffin, Chen Changsheng cycled through twenty-eight distinct languages.
Finally, when he shaped his tongue around a fractured, primitive dialect, the withered high priest flinched in recognition.
“This is the Hundred Thousand Mountains. What manner of being are you?”
With the bridge of communication established, a knot of tension loosened within Chen Changsheng’s chest.
“I am a wanderer from beyond the mist. This tongue is clumsy upon my lips; shall we commune through Divine Sense?”
The high priest gave a slow, rigid nod, then extended a wavering thread of Divine Sense toward Chen Changsheng.
A flicker of confusion passed through Chen Changsheng’s mind. While the elder’s physical Blood-Qi raged like a furnace, his Divine Sense was pitifully frail.
This mental fragility could not even rival a cultivator at the Golden Core stage.
Though the discrepancy was jarring, Chen Changsheng dismissed it.
His sole focus was mending the shattered Three-Color Teleportation Array and escaping this humid wilderness.
Yet, the very instant Chen Changsheng’s vast, ocean-like Divine Sense brushed against the high priest’s mind, the elder’s soul nearly fractured from the sheer terror, his knees buckling instantly.
The withered man collapsed onto the altar, kowtowing with a manic, tear-streaked fervor, screaming guttural commands for his tribe to prostrate themselves.
The elder’s frantic speech blurred into an incomprehensible frenzy, rendering even the fractured dialect useless to Chen Changsheng’s ears.
Still, through the sheer force of the elder’s wailing, Chen Changsheng managed to pluck a few comprehensible concepts from the chaos.
“Heavenly God… Boundless Gratitude… White Witch.”
Chen Changsheng: “…”
Have these primitives mistaken me for some ancient sovereign descending from the Heavens?
Looking at this sea of prostrating bodies… it seems I won’t be escaping this mountain range anytime soon.
…