Su Mo landed in the square. Right on cue, the eight serpent-headed pillars sprayed out eight different types of spiritual energy, all of which poured into the Sword-Sealing Platform at the center of the square.
The array was activated!
With the Sword-Sealing Platform and the Ame-no-Murakumo (Heavenly Cloud Sword) at its core, a small point suddenly expanded outward, enveloping the entire square. The 52 trial participants vanished into thin air.
The Chief Envoy’s gaze sharpened, and he muttered to himself, “So she really isn’t dead. That’s fine, though. This secret realm is Yamata-no-Orochi’s home turf after all.”
The attendant beside him asked, confused, “Chief Envoy, are you talking about that woman who showed up later?”
The Chief Envoy nodded. “Chiba Masaka… no, we should call her Ye Qingyi.”
The attendant was startled. “Ye Qingyu’s younger sister? She, she…”
The Chief Envoy flicked his sleeve and left, his aged voice echoing through the entire shrine: “Everyone, return to your posts and wait for Xiu’s good news!”
“Yes, sir!”
……
Sand and stones flew everywhere, and not a single blade of grass grew. The Gobi Desert stretched out like a giant mirror, reflecting the vast, hazy sky and the endless horizon. In this yellowish world, there was nothing but desolation, more desolation, and then some more desolation.
Su Mo trudged forward against the wind, stepping on sand and gravel, until he finally found some shelter.
“Phew… what the heck? They just tossed me straight into a barren wasteland? If I didn’t have a good stockpile of food and fresh water, I’d probably starve to death here,” Su Mo grumbled to himself.
Besides training, his main goal on this trip was to find medicine for his master that could restore her damaged foundation and recover her cultivation base. But looking around at this endless, empty expanse, it didn’t seem like the kind of place where medicine would just pop up.
He glanced left and right, carefully checking his surroundings. Once he was sure there was no danger, he sat down behind the shelter, planning to eat something, drink some water, and rest for a bit.
Suddenly, a “ding” rang out in his head. Su Mo’s first, instinctive thought was that he was about to awaken some kind of system. But instead, he heard a neutral voice… no, not heard. The information was delivered directly into his brain: “Quest issued: Within half a month, the one who finds the World Core wins. Everyone else is eliminated.”
“Quest reminder: The World Core is closely related to the characteristics of the world itself. Current world – Kun Realm.”
“Kun Realm?” Su Mo suddenly broke into a smile, looking quite confident.
Because he immediately thought of someone.
That person was his master, Qin Xun.
The things he had learned from her mainly focused on magic arrays, runes, and so on. The most powerful among them was the Eight Trigrams Array. And “Kun” was one of the eight trigrams.
So, he guessed that all the trial participants had been divided into eight groups, each placed in a different world, namely: the Qian Realm, Dui Realm, Li Realm, Zhen Realm, Xun Realm, Kan Realm, Gen Realm, and Kun Realm.
And Yamata-no-Orochi just so happened to have eight heads and eight tails, corresponding perfectly to the Eight Trigrams. Everything fit together perfectly.
Now, some people might be wondering: Aren’t the Eight Trigrams from China? What do they have to do with a Japanese monster?
Well, aside from the fact that the two cultures share the same roots, there’s also a popular legend that Japan’s Yamata-no-Orochi was originally Xiangliu, an ancient Chinese monster from antiquity.
From that perspective, it doesn’t seem too hard to understand the connection between Yamata-no-Orochi and the Eight Trigrams.
And thinking along the lines of the Eight Trigrams, Kun represents Earth. So it makes sense that the Kun Realm is primarily composed of sand and stone.
If he applied the knowledge he learned from the Eight Trigrams Array to the actual situation, he could even guess what he would face in the Kun Realm.
It would most likely be rule-based phenomena like increased gravity or geological disasters. The reason he hadn’t encountered any of that yet might simply be because it was currently daytime.
Kun, along with Dui, Li, and Xun, belong to the Yin category. Maybe these things really do happen after night falls.
Thinking this, he quickly finished the food in his hands in a couple of bites and gulped down a large amount of water.
Time to set off.
He needed to take advantage of the daylight to search for the so-called World Core.
Of course, the Kun Realm was huge, so finding it wouldn’t be easy.
Su Mo didn’t plan on just charging ahead recklessly. He decided to observe the terrain first.
He wished he could fly. If he could just scan the area from a bird’s-eye view, he’d surely be able to figure out something from the layout of the land.
As he observed, he murmured to himself, “Qian, Dui, Li, Zhen, Xun, Kan, Gen, Kun. Kun is number eight. Eight might be a key number. The Kun trigram is made up of three Yin lines, and those three Yin lines are split into six segments, known as ‘Kun’s Six Breaks.’ Three and six might also be key numbers…”
Just as he was focusing intently on observing and thinking, the massive boulder he was using as shelter suddenly moved.
Like a startled cat, he leaped sideways on the spot, incredibly fast.
The giant boulder slowly stretched out, revealing itself to be a giant nearly five meters tall.
Before Su Mo could even figure out just how strong this stone giant was, the ground suddenly began to tremble.
“Hey, it’s not even nighttime yet. Why is this starting already?” Su Mo began to doubt whether his deduction had been wrong.
While struggling to keep his balance and not get knocked over, he dodged left and right, evading the stone giants emerging from underground.
Only when all the stone giants had completely surfaced did the ground stop shaking. But these stone giants didn’t seem inclined to move any further. They stood there quietly, as if asleep.
Su Mo patted his chest. “You scared me.”
Within less than a minute, the entire Gobi Desert was filled with standing stone giants. In the densest areas, the gaps between them were only about ten meters.
Su Mo took a closer look and saw that the stone giants had noses and eyes – they actually looked quite realistic. They just couldn’t move yet.
He then jumped onto a stone giant’s head and looked into the distance. Everywhere his eyes could see, there were stone giants.
Until he fully understood the rules here, Su Mo didn’t plan on letting his guard down.
First, he found a spot where the stone giants were relatively sparser. Then, he took out his phone and started a timer.
00:00:01
…
01:00:56
…
02:58:21
RUMBLE–
Accompanied by a violent tremor, all the stone giants simultaneously opened their pale red eyes.
They seemed to have woken up, and they all started charging toward Su Mo.
The closest one directly swung its fist to smash him. Those farther away formed layer upon layer of encirclement, like the rings of a tree trunk, one circle after another, sealing the inside so tightly that not even water could leak out.
Su Mo reacted quickly. He spotted the anomaly immediately, glanced at the time, and then swiftly entered combat mode.
He didn’t try to meet their force head-on. Not only did he not know their strength, but their sheer, terrifying numbers alone demanded caution.
Su Mo dodged nimbly. The stone giant’s fist slammed into the ground, leaving a crater – its power was nothing to scoff at.
Seeing the encirclement getting tighter and the space he could move in shrinking, Su Mo suddenly threw a punch, hitting a stone giant that weighed several thousand pounds.
With a “crack,” several cracks, as wide as a finger’s width, spread across the back of the stone giant he had struck.
Su Mo attacked again at lightning speed and realized that using only his raw physical strength, he could shatter one of these giants with two punches. Moreover, the second punch didn’t require much force.
He threw another punch at a different stone giant, but this time, he wrapped his fist in spiritual energy. With a single “boom,” that stone giant was blown apart in one punch.
Alright, that’s their defense. Now, let’s test their strength!
This time, he chose to meet force with force. He took one of their punches head-on. His body involuntarily took a step back. Looking at the stone giant, it was knocked back several meters before it could steady itself.
“Great. They’re weaker than me!” Su Mo’s lips curled up. He wrapped spiritual energy around both his fists and said with a contemptuous smile, “Perfect for some practice.”
Su Mo, standing at 1.7 meters, was surrounded by a horde of five-meter-tall stone giants. With every collision between them came the sound of bursting rock, yet he remained completely unscathed.
The stone giant’s lips parted slightly: “@$%#&*…”
Su Mo had no idea what they were saying, but he was one hundred percent sure they were cursing at him, and cursing pretty foully.
Su Mo aimed a fierce punch right at the stone giant’s face. Maybe his aim was slightly off, because the punch didn’t shatter its head. Instead, the round, boulder-like head spun rapidly 720 degrees on its neck before crashing to the ground with a “clang.”
Its mouth, now unable to produce sound, still opened and closed. If one were to interpret its lip movements in Chinese, it seemed to be repeatedly saying: “Ptui, ptui, ptui…”
